Becketts Endgame- Phenomenology of Nagg and Nell

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End of Body, End of Being?

The Phenomenology of Nagg and Nell

in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

This paper offers an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1957) with the main focus

on the characters of Nagg and Nell. Their impact on the audience is the starting point for a

reading of Endgame with a phenomenological focus. Theodor Adorno’s “Trying to

Understand Endgame” (1961) and Martin Heidegger’s “ Being and Time” (1927) are two of

the main sources that this analysis relies on. Whereas Adorno offers a lucid and dense close

reading of the text that also draws in socio-philosophical aspects, Heidegger’s ground-

breaking work predates Beckett’s play and is seen as a possible reference point for an

understanding of how “Being” is presented both visually and through language in the play.

The challenge of reading and understanding Beckett and offering any form of

interpretation is discussed in the opening paragraphs, drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s

phenomenological approach and on Adorno’s reading of Beckett. A passage on Endgame

follows that concentrates on the many signifiers of the text, starting with the world-view

seemingly displayed in the play. Following on from this, the stage characters of Nagg and

Nell are analysed through their visual and verbal appearance together with a focus on

echoing, pairing and cycles. It is argued that Nagg and Nell may be seen less as characters

and more as a phenomenon. This phenomenon, identified as deeply disturbing to the

audience, leads to a contemplation on the thoughts on “Being” and in Heidegger’s

philosophy.

In the conclusion, Endgame is analysed as a drama depicting the human condition as

one of confinement in both state of mind and interpersonal relationship in a non-specific

dystopian scenario of self-destruction. Nagg and Nell are seen as a reification of a reduced


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existence devoid of meaning that indirectly quotes and disputes Heidegger’s views on

“Being”.

When a writer through a number of texts subverts, abandons and mangles traditional concepts

of storytelling and textual constructs along with descriptions of character, setting and dialogue

it is fatal to apply traditional analytical readings to such texts because the critic runs the risk

of the text- or his reading of it - ridiculing him or her into a non-connection. Such an approach

might turn into an advanced comparison of apples to pears and leave very little connection

between text and reader. On the other hand, if this thought is applied to the extreme, that there

is no right way of approaching texts that abandon traditional pointers such as plot, symbols

and character development, one might end up not analyzing such texts at all, but taking their

defamiliarization at face value without reaching an interpretation. Beckett makes the basic

communication between message and receiver, the decoding, very difficult and any attempt at

analysis of Beckett’s writing will meet a lot of resistance from the text itself. However

difficult, the task of analysing Endgame is a rewarding one due to the play’s complexity, the

questions it raises and the emotional impact is has on the audience or reader.

Wolfgang Iser speaks of an essential hermeneutic process in the formation of meaning

through illusion that is especially true of modern texts. We need the illusion, he says, “that the

resistance itself is the consistent pattern underlying the text” (Iser 290).

The text provokes certain expectations which in turn we project unto the text in such a

way that we reduce the polysemantic possibilities to a single interpretation in keeping

with the expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning”

(ibid.)

The reader has a strong need to make sense of the text. This constructive tendency, however,

is constantly dismantled by Beckett, through visual aspects of the play and especially through

his use of language.


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In a letter written in 1937 to his German friend Axel Kaun, Beckett describes his approach to

language and his hope that literature will undergo as radical a transformation as modern art

and music:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal

English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to

tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar

and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit

or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come,

thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most

sufficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to

leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after

another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seepingthrough – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.(Beckett 1937, Letters 518)

This rather long quote will be frequently referred back to, as it contains several aspects

relevant to Endgame. The first of these to be mentioned is the challenge of reading a play that

has drilled a lot of holes into the conventional fabric of the language and style of plays. What

“seeps through” the holes in Endgame is the debris of civilization in both language and

content. Language seems to fail the speakers, relationships are dysfunctional, the past is seen

through irrelevant nostalgia, the present is presented as a prison of repetition and unsolved

agitation. Whether there is such a thing as future at all is highly uncertain.

The question arises whether it is even possible to apply conventional literary analysis

to a text that seems to defy the very reason for the existence of any theoretical framework?

Beckett’s writing can be seen as subversive as it does not offer alternative views or theses, but

displays fallacies and effectively erodes the very basis of thinking in theoretical patterns and

models in the analytical process. Theodor Adorno sees the only possible approach to an

understanding of Endgame as a fundamental understanding of its incomprehensibility or

“concretely recunstructing its meaning structure – that it has none”1. There is a paradox in the

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dass es keinen hat”


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fact that interpretation is derived at after all, the meaning that so to speak seeps through the

holes drilled. Though the frustration lies in never knowing exactly whether this arrived at

meaning is not a play with the process of sense-making as such. A brief reference to meaning

illustrates this point. Hamm and Clov in a metatextual comment use mock horror as a way of

ridiculing the process of seeking for meaning:

HAMM. We’re not beginning to…to…mean something?

CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief

laugh] Ah that’s a good one!

(CDW1082)

A phenomenological approach to reading Endgame will soon highlight the process of reading

what Iser calls the “gaps” in modern texts that are often

so fragmentary that one’s attention is almost exclusively occupied with the search of

connections between these fragments; the object of this is not to complicate the

“spectrum” of connections, so much as to make us aware of the nature of our own

capacity for providing links. (Iser 285)

Reading Beckett, one frequently has the uncanny feeling of the text laughing at the reader

who engages in gap-filling and connection-seeking, the very process of interpretation being

the punch line of the joke that the reader is the brunt of.

The phenomenological approach applied here may seem somewhat eclectic, as it

draws both on Iser’s use of the word and on Heidegger’s philosophy. The nature of

phenomenology as such however, of putting the phenomenon at the centre of an analysis

conducted with an open mind, seems to be an appropriate way of reading Beckett, as it does

not claim to speak for the writer, to reach a full understanding of the intended meaning, as it

were, but rather investigates how the text affects the reader/audience and of what is the

fundamental nature of the phenomenon purveyed.

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While this seems an essentially necessary approach, the focus on finding answers should

perhaps in some cases step aside for a focus on identifying the question or pinpointing the

provocation of thought. Identifying these may in some cases be as close as we can get to an

interpretation.

Nagg and Nell are good examples of this. We are continuously both repulsed and

drawn to them by feelings of watching their grotesque distortedness and simultaneously

experiencing recognition and empathy. The phenomenon is as much the strangeness of the

characters and their place in the constellation of the dramatis personae, as it is the reaction

that watching (or reading) them creates. One could go a step further and say that the analysis

of Nagg and Nell sooner or later becomes an analysis of the recognition, repulsion and

attraction that exists between the dramatis personae on-stage and the audience off-stage. The

echoing that takes place on the stage between the characters is mirrored in a perhaps more

vague but equally persistent echoing between the stage characters and the audience. The

audience recognizes and despises at the same time and is therefore having an unsettling and

essentially uncanny experience, that of alienation diffused with glimpses of the well known.

There are many examples of echoes: verbal ones, like the repetition of the word

”once” by Nell and Clov, conceptual ones like the constant reference to ”end” and “finish” in

one or another form, visual ones like the circles of the bins echoed in the reference to bicycle

wheels, and intertextual echoes from Beckett’s other writing or texts such as the Bible, by

Goethe or by Shakespeare.

Sjef Houppermans and Marius Buning describe the intertextuality in Beckett as

follows:

Between Beckett's text and the textual zones around it the border is essentially

transparent: Beckett's language is above all an instrument to dissect all forms of

discourse and to examine their inevitable emphasis on man (...) Criticism here is self-

reflexive and imitates Beckett's work in various ways. Beckett's work itself never

stops measuring its own identity against other texts, both historical and contemporary.(Houppermans and Buning, ix )


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Thus identifying the intertextual references is not a straightforward task. They too seem to

seep through the holes drilled into language. Adorno, for example, sees an unintentional

reference to Goethe’s “Das alte Wahre, faß es an! “ 3 in this dialogue:

HAMM: Do you remember your father.

CLOV: [wearily] Same answer. [ Pause] You’ve asked me these questions

millions of times.

Hamm: I love the old questions. [With fervour ] Ah the old questions, the

old answers, there is nothing like them.4

According to Adorno5, Beckett’s lines “pull a face at” Goethe’s depiction of eternal verities

that “degenerated into an arch-bourgeois sentiment”. Beckett, he continues “shrugs his

shoulders about the possibility of philosophy today, or theory in general” (ibid). Applying a

theoretical approach to Beckett’s texts in general is a precarious operation. The very phrases

used by Adorno seem very fitting: to shrug and to pull a face are means of ridiculing, of not

answering on the same-abstract-philosophical level. This “Fratzenschneiden” is always

potentially also directed at the reader or audience. These intertextual and intercultural

references are contained in the many examples of echoing in the play.

“The play’s dialogue is built on what Beckett later called the “echo principle”.

Repetition is thematic in Fin de partie: The old questions and the old answers keep

repeating themselves unto death, or at least unto dying. (Cohn 142)

Like an echo, the references are often faint, random allusions or even involuntary and seem

only half understood or misunderstood by the protagonists. Hamm’s reference to Richard III

in the line “My kingdom for a nightman” (CDW 127) mocks the kingdom and his king-dom,

it also mocks the meaning of knight/night through the use of the homophone. Does Hamm

wish for something more knightly or indeed for a man who empties privies? Is he deluded to

believe himself on a level with a king or is it a remarkably self-deprecating joke. An

3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von “Vermächtnis” http://meister.igl.uni-freiburg.de/gedichte/goe_jw09.html.

Official translations are somewhat liberal as they use the poetic form. The line could be loosely translated as:“the old verities, grasp them“. 4 CDW, p. 110/ Beckett 1981, 38:31

5 Adorno 1982 p. 121


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intercultural reference to this can be found in the central position of Hamm in this play as a

comment on the traditions of world-view. Man has re-gained, it seems, his central pre-

Copernican position in the universe. He has reverted to a pseudo-Ptolemaic world order, in

Adorno’s words a “ phantom of the anthropocentrically dominated world”,6 where everything

revolves around him. The unbearable irony lies in the fact that this centre stage position is all

there is. Hamm might be king of the universe, but this has shrunk to the size of a stage and he

is no longer the ruler of Nature, as he has destroyed it.7

Jonathan Boulter calls this critique of the idea that the human is in the centre of understanding

“Posthumanism”, defined as:

that strand of philosophy which radically critiques the idea that the individual subject

is the center of all things, the beginning and the end of all knowledge and experience:this is therefore a radical critique of Humanist philosophy which would posit the

human’s reason and rationality as being transparently available to the thinking subject

(Boulter 14)

Beckett might not have liked to be classified with philosophers of any school, but Boulter’s

point is that there are traces of what Posthuman philosophy focuses on in Beckett’s writing8.

Also, the reduction of the human body is linked to the fundamental awareness of the limits of

the human.

The magnitude of the destruction in Endgame is displayed by the inability to name it,

the “violence of the unspeakable is mimicked by the timidity to mention it” (Adorno 1981,

123). Strangely, in this pathetic depiction of man unable to voice the effects of destruction he

has brought about himself, there is a potential connection to the reader, a recognition of

weakness and fallacy. It is, however brought to an extreme in the concept of the endless end,

6 Adorno 1982, p. 148

7 Der im Stück gegebene Zustand aber ist kein anderer als der, in dem es »keine Natur mehr gibt«4.

Ununterscheidbar die Phase der vollendeten Verdinglichung der Welt, die nichts mehr übrig läßt, was nicht von

Menschen gemacht wäre, die permanente Katastrophe, und ein zusätzlich von Menschen eigens bewirkterKatastrophenvorgang, in dem Natur getilgt ward und nach dem nichts mehr wächst:

Adorno 1961, GS 11, p. 285-286)8 Boulter mentions Nietzsche, Freud and Marx


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the display of imprisonment: “Ontology arrives home as the pathogenesis of false life. It is

depicted as the state of negative eternity.” (Adorno 1982, 124).

There is another intertextual reference, to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Visible in the name

Hamm, the connection, according to Adorno, is a double turning upside down of “to be or not

to be “ into “Krepieren oder Krepieren, das ist hier die Frage.9 There is no “or not to” as it is

a matter of dying or dying, not of “being or not being”. Also, the troubled hero of

Shakespeare’s play in the famous soliloquies voices his on-going struggles with awareness

and achieving insight, whereas Hamm’s monologues display distraction and fragmentation,

there is no increase in awareness or depth of perception. Perception as such seems

unattainable, even though it was once achieved it is beyond meaning and relevance in this

world:

The name Hamm also holds associations to one of Noah’s sons and to a hammy actor,

as Adorno and Cohn10

point out. It certainly underlines the dominance of his character over

the others through its laden-ness with meaning. Compared to the other protagonists, Hamm

seems the least human. The particular sadism he exudes is one of deliberate slowness When

Hamm tells his story11, again, it is unbearable to watch or listen to as it is a deliberate display

of power over the people on stage and the audience, we cannot escape his perverted sadistic

self-mythologizing.12

The irrelevance of bourgeois pretences, the “Biedermeyer bathing suits” mentioned in

the Kaun letter seem to have been literally turned into their opposites in Endgame. At first

glance, nothing seems further removed from the concept of a gentleman than the characters of

Hamm, Clov and Nagg to a point where they may be seen as a set of opposites, as anti-

gentlemen. Yet, through the their outer uncouth appearances leftovers of genteel civilization

9 Adorno 1961: GS 11, p. 312

10 Cohn 1973, 144 ff.

11

CDW, p. 116 12 Adorno 1961:Das Bedächtige, das so unschuldig aussieht, ist Figur des Sadismus: das Bild dessen, der sich

Zeit nimmt, gleicht dem, der auf gräßliche Strafe warten läßt. GS 11, p. 295


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seep through, like Hamm’s use of language taken from Shakespeare or the Bible or Nagg’s

reminiscing of happier, pre-stubbed days. Often these are misunderstood or perverted,

digested and spat out, yet not in a way that suggests that the protagonist have received any

insight or wisdom from them. Sometimes the concept itself is being made fun of. An example

of this is the use of being “obliged” (CDW 132), Hamm and Clov nearly fight over who is

more obliged to the other just before Clov’s intended departure. Obligation as a polite

recognition of indebtedness or gratitude on a small scale becomes a fight over who has had

most power and inflicted most pain over the other. Endgame in that way seems to be a play

that holds up a mirror to bourgeois society and reveals its ugly unseemly sides kept under the

surface and ignored.

Beckett famously described Hamm in Endgame as “a king in this chess game lost

from the start” (Cohn 1973, 152). In the analogy of the chess game, Nagg and Nell- according

to Nic van der Toorn- call to mind two pawns, blocked and therefore useless , but

unmovable13

. The chess game is the obvious analogy, given the title. However, it is only one

possible way of viewing what goes on on stage and what the close confinement of the stage is

a picture of. The stage could be seen as a frame of mind- even a skull - with Nagg and Nell as

two peripheral embodiments of bad conscience, bad memories and dysfunctional relations to

the main person at centre stage, Hamm. It would not be a Beckett play if there were a straight

translatable set of symbols. It can be argued that what Beckett achieves is a visualization of a

grotesque version of life that despite its strangeness leaves a haunting imprint on the audience

and similarly, though perhaps less strikingly – for lack of the visual attack- on the reader.

Nagg and Nell once they have entered the reader’s/audience’s consciousness are fixed there,

unmovable and nagging as in the play.

This view of Nagg and Nell may be a personal perception, but it opens up the

investigation into the impact of the pair, mentioned above. How are they reasonably to be

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described? Dramatis personae? Characters? In the end they are perhaps less that and more of a

phenomenon or potentially all of these simultaneously. One of the points of a play is to show

rather than to describe and the visual side of the phenomenon is perhaps intended to render

language to a certain extent secondary, to let the horror seep through. Some aspect

surrounding this phenomenon can be more easily described than a somewhat trickier

depiction of meaning or message. There is the pairing and the echoing of the pairing in Hamm

and Clov and – outside this play – in Waiting for Godot’s14 Vladimir and Estragon and Lucky

and Pozzo- in both cases we even see a pair of pairs. In a chapter on Godot , Jonathan Boulter

says that “One of Beckett’s obsession is the notion of the inescapable relationship” (31). This

is certainly one of the key elements of Endgame as well as Godot.

In the French version of the play there is the homophone of “faim” and “fin”,

underlining the link between the two words. The end (fin) of hunger (faim) signifies the end

of the will to live (Nell) or a possible yet eventually unobserved end of life (ex. Hamm/Clov).

Houppermans and Buning see Beckett’s “go-ing and fro-ing” between his two languages as

a way of fully profiting from the discrepancies between the mother tongue and

the adopted language, and of picking up the crumbs of meaning wherever thetranslation scatters them about. This sort of intertextuality deserves to be made

clear before we indulge in speculations which might appear foolish.15

The placement of the two dustbins indicates the sign of infinity16: two circles or a lying down

number eight, !, to show the circularity perhaps of life, the inescapable cycle of birth and

death without which Hamm would have had no “cursed progenitor” (CDW 96) to swear at.

There is very little of the organic or harmonic in Beckett’s depiction of the cycle of life .

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At the beginning of the play, Hamm tells Clov that his eyes have gone all white,17 making a

strange analogy to the other pair of circles, Nagg and Nell’s bins, and to Nagg and Nell’s face

colour which according to the stage directions is white in contrast to Hamm and Clov’s red

face colouring18. This connection may not be noticed on first viewing and reading because

Nagg and Nell appear later, but it underlines the echoing effect and claustrophobia of the

scene. The white colour indicate decay in both eyes and parents and renders Nagg and Nell’s

lightless existence even more undignified. We are reminded of worms under a stone or plants

shooting sprouts, already under the earth but not destined to grow. The cruelty that seeps

through images like this is the blend of fear of ending like Nagg and Nell: undignified, cast

aside, treated like debris, and the bad conscience of treating our elders this way. Bad

conscience seems reified through Nagg and Nell in their bins “ front left, touching each other”

(CDW 92) reminiscent of the bad conscience we carry with us in our minds. When Nell dies,

she says the final words “So white” and “desert”. White seems to be the absence of life as it is

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, a finite nothingness.

A similar reference to the double circle appears at the beginning of the play in the

reference to the bicycle-wheels they have run out of (CDW 96). There is no explanation of

what these wheels are for. The absence underlines the absence of mobility and it echoes Nagg

and Nell’s tandem that is mentioned later. The circle also refers to the circle of life, or rather

the end of the cyclical process as everything in this play is permanently coming to an end –

with the exception of Nell who actually dies. The end of the cycle of life is underlined by the

seeds that do not sprout. Visually when Hamm and Clov discuss this, Nagg’s head comes out

of the bin and the different stages of the life cycle are presented: the dead seeds in the kitchen,

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the son20, the father and the father’s father. This image of the cycle having been halted and

stretched to something unfruitful and linear is visually striking (CDW 98, Beckett 1985

15:15-15:35).

The stage directions for Nagg and Nell are very clear: we have the masculine and

feminine, mother and father, the couple, the pair, statically together yet not within reach of

each other. The circle of the dustbins and their lids seen from above are mirrored in the story

of how the amputation happened: a cycling accident, cycle also referring to the cycle of life

and the cycle visually present in the infinity sign evoked by seeing the bins from above. Thus

infinity is also thematically present - if barely visible – as a contrast to the end, underlined

also by the infinite represented through repetition (of e.g. the tailor joke, the movement on

stage, the long and arbitrary story told by Hamm). Infinity as a theme may also point outside

the play: the themes touched upon in this play refer to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Hamm

and Clov echoing Prospero and Ariel) and Shakespeare in turn drew on a variety of classical

texts, such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Montaigne’s essay Of the Cannibals. Seen in this

light the play deals with the infinite return of topics that are of concern to us: to writers, and

readers, in the various cultures. It touches on the question of whether culture as a cyclical

phenomenon has come to an end in Endgame.

Nagg and Nell at the end of their days are discarded like waste, having half-bodies and no

mobility. They have regressed into old-age infants crying for their “pap” and losing teeth.

There is something particularly horrid and undignified in this dependency even though the

mere existence of two people in bins as such should far surpass this particular display of

indignity. The uncanny, by definition is that much more unsettling because it consists of

something recognizable together with something unknown.

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We recognize certain aspects of ageing in the phenomenon we watch on stage- it is

only that there is hardly anything redeeming around it, no possibility of children, no proud

father-to-son chat but the absence of the first and the hatred displayed of the latter. Adorno

speaks of the inhuman aspects, as the shell is not melted by crying, and of the animal-like

human, “der vertierte Mensch”21

There are many other aspects of Endgame that make it a very uncomfortable play to

watch, and the display of the basic idiocy of human existence is certainly one of them. Seeing

the two amputated bodies clutching at some last straws of humanity, like the sharing of a hard

biscuit or the futile attempt at sharing a kiss, bring to mind one German word for idiocy:

“Stumpfsinn”22. The phenomenon of Nagg and Nell is “Stumpfsinn” personified to a degree

that is almost unbearable. It is the completely alienated image of human existence and human

interaction with the recognizable seeping through the holes that makes it so.23

“But form”,

Adorno claims, “absorbs what is expressed and changes it”.24

The unsettling perception is

underlined by this overturning of conventions taking place before our eyes.

In Boulter’s reading of Beckett as “posthuman”, he focuses on the famous quote on

nothingness25. This is strongly linked to exploring the human condition at its most reduced.

The reduction of language and the gradually increasing reduction of the human body over

time (ending in beings in an urn in Play or human reduced to a moth in Not I ) are linked:

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“… Beckett eliminates the human at precisely the same time as he eliminates, denatures, and

deconstructs, narrative form itself(…) language must be eliminated in order for the truth of

the human to be known” (Boulter 14). In Endgame neither language nor the body is

eliminated, but we are watching the beginning of this process that Beckett continues, ending

with near-total absence in play such as Breath. “Near-total”, however, indicates that the body

is always still a concern and always there, no matter how reduced: “Beckett’s characters may

be posthuman but they are never postcorporeal” (Boulter 15).

We are caught in our bodies that in Beckett’s world are always in decay or failing and the

mind cannot conquer this. Thus reduction of the body draws attention to existence, to human

interaction, to the self and to human states of mind that we see before us on stage. There is, I

agree with Boulter, a

“dark compassion in Beckett for the compromised body, for the crippled and the ill:

there is a compassion for the suffering subject who can really only understand herself

and her world through the medium of a decaying, painful, body.”

However, there is also the excruciating witnessing of this and the constant reminders that

decay is inevitable. Compassion insists on our co-suffering to an extent and does not let us off

the hook. As audience we are like Nagg and Nell quite literally immobile and subjected to

Hamm’s cruel sadistic rhetoric. What is more, by watching Endgame we are facing our own

existence as imprisonment and decay.

The stumps of Nagg and Nell are echoed in their name-stumps, and also those of

Hamm and Clov. They are reduced even in their name-identity. Nell is the only real name,

the others are strange meaning-laden inventions. Nagg incorporates the nagging of his pure

existence, the feeling of nagging conscience. Hamm may refer to a hammy actor or to a

distortion of the name Hamlet, Clov seems like an amputated version of Clown. As Clov does

get most of the action that that has elements of slapstick (for example the alarm clock scene,

p. 115) and as his prerogative seems to be irony and sarcasm, the name is fitting, but sticks in


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your throat like a cruel joke. The humour, often abortive, in the play makes the rest of the

play seem even bleaker, for example Clov’s line p. 106/ 30:34: “Things are livening up!” In

other cases, it seems like Beckett needed to include a joke that the stage characters do not

even see as one, but which is Beckett’s comment to us: remember what I do is

“Fratzenschneiden” – the praying scene that ends with Hamm exclaiming “The bastard! He

doesn’t exist!” (CDW 119).

To Adorno comedy in Endgame is dead26, in the sense that humour in the play is not

the joking type. The humour we witness, as for example Nagg’s joke about the trousers27,

does not provide relief. On the contrary, it is a dead joke at which only Nagg himself laughs.

Beholding it is uncomfortable to an extent where it leaves a peculiar sense of overpowering

shamefulness with the listener, “life is merely the epitome of everything about which one

must be ashamed”28

. The disintegration of humour is another addition to the painfulness of

watching Endgame.

Ruby Cohn identifies another aspect to the name-symbolism that, whether it is in all

cases intended or not, is significant for reader (if not so much for the audience): all names,

even that of the off-stage mother Pegg (CDW 112, 129) have connotations to nails:

Nell puns on English nail as Clov puns on French clou. Nagg abbreviates German

Nagel as Hamm abbreviates Latin hamus. The only other person, an offstage MotherPegg, is also a four-letter word associated with nail.(Cohn, p. 141)

Cohn’s conclusion, that “nailhood seems to represent humanity”, however is debatable. The

many nails could also be an added unpleasantness on a par with the four-letter word s

association with swearing. That “Hamm is also hammer that drives the nails on the stage

board” (ibid) seems clear enough and might be extended to the view that this hammering of

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nails is another way for Beckett to drill holes in the fabric of language. In Beckett’s own

words,

My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no pun intended) made as fully as

possible and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have head-achesamong the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin29

There is always the danger of over-analysis due to the vast amount of signifiers that the reader

or audience finds in the text and feels the need to connect and interpret. Part of the

phenomenology, then, is to identify the impact on the reader/audience of the complexity of

the text and to have in mind the risk of reading into the text that stems from the desire to make

sense of signifiers and references. Thus, meaning as such is questioned in the act of reading

and trying to understand.

Another example of a signifier laden with meaning is the use of “tandem”. According

to van der Toorn (2002) it signifies the inseparable couple through its meaning of “double

bike” (l’archetype du vélo dédoublé, 287), but also in its derivation from Latin meaning “at

last”30. The tandem (bike) led to the accident that rendered the couple legless cripples, yet the

few glimpses of hope that the play offers are the care and tenderness displayed between Nagg

and Nell. The existence in couples and pairs is seemingly inescapable and fatal, yet also the

only hope of a little warmth in human interaction. Opposed to Nagg and Nell the other –

dominant – couple on stage are Hamm and Clov, who more clearly exist as two separate –

though not independent – individuals.

There is none of the grandeur of classical tragedy in Endgame. Human life is depicted as

small, confined, ridiculous and frail and there is no relief in a larger aim or heroic fight.

G.F. Lee describes the worldview of Endgame as grotesque: “devoid of absolutes and

undercutting even the smallest attempt at meaningful action, differs fundamentally from that

#* B2;C200 to Alan Schneider in a letter dated 12 August 1957, quoted from Raponi 2003$/ L52 E'0 08)&2E 270 &Q(6IQ &H 5806) 08)&2E, PH6 764)6


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of tragedy” (65). Tragedy, fundamentally, is meaning-laden because it exists in a world-

picture where order has to be re-established from chaos and evil fought even at the ultimate

price.

Whatever their fates, religious, social, and subversive man operate in a world order

and give meaning to themselves through their actions upon that order. But the

Endgame -man exists in a void, where the grotesque has reversed the order of creation,

where Chaos is victorious, and where meaning is impossible” (Lee, p. 66)

Dramatis personae? Character? Protagonists? At the end of an attempt to interpret Endgame,

the term that seems to get closest to describing Nagg and Nell and how they claw their way

into the reader/audience’s conscience is Adorno’s term “Urbilder”, archaic images31. Any

natural and harmonious perception of the circle of life is turned into a perversion, an

unbearable farce It is precisely in the plural form of “image” that the haunting uncanny

dimension lies and through which the nature of the pair-the acronym of which is NN and thus

potentially anybody- is revealed: Nagg and Nell are aged infants, extremely isolated, yet

coexisting, unable to cry, unable to express any real emotion yet emotionally needy,

incomplete remains of what was once an organic entity, a circularity of life, thrown away

already before dying, caught in a horrid nostalgia in which a incapacitating bicycle accident

seems glorious compared to their present existence.

Through witnessing this distortion, watching Endgame, unpleasant and oppressive as

it is, in a strange way also serves as a compassionate wake-up call to the audience by putting

the question out there, which world-view can you live with? How are we being here? What

type of Da-sein, there-being do you subscribe to?

Well aware of the danger of not paying respect to the complexity of Heidegger’s philosophy, I

may perhaps be permitted to end this paper with a suggestion that Beckett’s Endgame can be

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seen as a – perhaps involuntary- comment on Heidegger’s thoughts on Being, “Dasein”32.

Nagg and Nell are a residue, a destillate of Being gone wrong, a “Daseins-Destillat” that

reduces the comforting aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy to near non-existence. It is not a

negation of Heidegger, but a “Fratzenschneiden” at Heidegger’s complex concept:

Being-in-the-world is always already entangled. The average everydayness of Da-sein

can thus be determined as entangled-disclosed, thrown-projecting being-in-the-world

which is concerned with its ownmost potentiality in its being together with the

“world” and in being-with with the others. 33 (Heidegger, 1993,170)

While this entangledness of existence is certainly presented in Endgame, it projects little

hope. Endgame can be seen as a play on Being, in which the finitude of life does not release

purpose34 but becomes an endless end. Heidegger sees Being as Being-in-the World and

space and time as connected meaningfully35. In Endgame this essential meaningfulness

questioned: time is circular, ending is non-ending, space is confinement. Endgame is a

comment on the human condition that exists, as Heidegger points out, only in togetherness,

but the togetherness here is destructive and dysfunctional.

“The interpretation of Endgame”, Adorno claims, “cannot chase the chimera of expressing its

meaning with the help of philosophical mediation” and “the play shows an unmistakable

opposition to ontology” (Adorno 1982, 120-1). Yet, in this distancing from conventional

drama and traditional philosophy, through the play’s overthrowing and turning around of

conventions, it seems that questions concerning existence and the nature of Being are

constantly raised. One could also argue that Adorno contradicts himself: his method of

reading endgame may not refer to one philosophical school of thought but is still an act of

$# 6) 012


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"*

philosophy even as it draws strongly on sociology and cultural studies. The boundaries are not

all clear.

There is a valid concern that a philosophical reading reduces the play that Simon Critchley

points out:

The texts continually seem to pull the rug from under the feet of the philosopher by

showing themselves to be conscious of the possibility of such interpretations…or,

better still, such interpretations seem to lag behind their object by saying too much:something essential to Beckett's language is lost by overshooting the text and

ascending into the stratosphere of metalanguage. (Critchley 1997, 141)

Indeed, Beckett’s reference to philosophy in the play itself. Hamm’s first speech (CDW 93),

for example brings up the issue of time (“grain by grain”) and the end of time through the

preceding allusion to the Biblical “It is finished”. It seems to be a comment on the futility of

both philosophy and religion as a means to grasp the world. At the same time it puts the

question out there, what do we do if religion and philosophy do not help us? Juxtaposing

Beckett to philosophy can be fruitful as it may serve to illuminate the phenomenology of both

some key thoughts in Beckett’s writing, or more precisely: thoughts provoked by it, and the

reading or viewing experience. Even if “Beckett’s work seems to offer itself generously to

interpretation only to withdraw this offer by parodically reducing such interpretation to

ridicule” (Critchley, 143) it does not mean that it does not provoke the philosophical thought-

process.

The rug is certainly pulled from under Heidegger’s concept of “Geworfenheit”36

(the

Being-thrown-into the World): Nagg and Nell are thrown in a bin, a reversed womb in which

$D Geworfenheit nennt Heidegger die Art, wie das ich zu seinem eigenen In-der-Welt-sein gekommen ist. Die

Geworfenheit ist nicht die faktische Geburt, sondern die konstitutive Form jedes menschlichen Lebens. Der von

Heidegger gewählte Ausdruck deutet an, dass wir ungefragt und ohne persönliche Zustimmung in die Welt

gekommen sind. Diese Geworfenheit, dieses ungefragte In-die-Welt-gekommen-sein, ist die Form, die die

Faktizität des Daseins in Sein und Zeit annimmt. (Being thrown is what Heiddegger calls the way the “I“ arrives

at its being-in-the-world. Being thrown is not actual birth but the constituted form of any human existence. This

choice of expression by Heidegger indicates that we arrived in the world without being asked and withoutagreeing. S167 F26)4 01('=), 012 )'0 87C2&


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#/

they regress to quasi infantile states before dying- though in the course of the play this

completion is only granted Nell. Heidegger’s Being-thrown-into a life that is always a life

with others becomes being thrown away separately. The possibility of company is there, but it

is either destructive (as Hamm’s relationship to his parents) or its fruition of compassion and

comfort is hindered: Geworfenheit becomes Weggeworfenheit.

For Heidegger the self can achieve authenticity by making sense of the finitude of

existence. Beckett shows not only beings that do not recognise this capacity but also negates

the finitude itself. The horror lies not in the inescapable finitude but in the on-going ending,

the lack of closure. The play, it can be argued, is a temporal image, it stops at one particular

point and the beings on stage could well be said to reach an end outside the play, as we all

must. But the play does not show this and displays the lack of awareness of anything

authentic or empowering in the realisation of mortality and of life as living towards death.

Heidegger analyses Being as defined by finite temporality, as a given that has decidedly

positive aspects: “the human is not confined to the present but always projects toward the

future”, in a paraphrase by Simon Critchley (2009) . In Endgame the human is locked in an

unbearable repetitious present. “Dasein” becomes “Gefangensein”, imprisonment. Critchley

describes Heidegger’s Sein and in-der-Welt-Sein as follows “If the human being is really

being-in-the-world, then this entails that the world itself is part of the fundamental

constitution of what it means to be human“. In Endgame the second part of the equasion is

lost, seemingly destroyed by humans who have thereby cut themselves off from an essential

part of their Dasein and have reduced themselves to mere and barren existence.

In the Kaun-letter, Beckett professes his wish to let “nothing” seep through the holes drilled

into language. In his depiction of the weight of nothingness, Beckett seems very close to

Heidegger, who says that we are defined by nothingness, existence is prominence (“Hinaus-


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#"

Stehen”), a being held into nothingness (“Hineingehaltensein ins Nichts”)37. The big

difference of course lies in the fact that Beckett aims at drilling holes in the fabric of language

to let the experience of nothingness seep through, whereas to Heidegger nothingness serves to

understand how our existence is contained.

Despite Beckett’s claim to a distance to contemporary philosophy, there is a familiarity that

allows for a comparison:

What is more true than anything else? To swim is true, and to sink is true. One is not

more true than the other. One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of

the mess. When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence,

they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me. I am

not a philosopher. 38

Heidegger’s definition of Being and Time offers a philosophy outside religion that identifies a

fundamental meaningfulness to life39. Beckett’s Endgame questions this and by raising the

question confronts the audience with meaninglessness. By the experience of simultaneous

alienation, contradiction and recognition the reader/audience is encouraged to contemplate the

question for themselves. Not in any didactic way, but by depicting meaning, through its

negation, through meaninglessness, that just as cultural residues seep through the fabric of

language. Based on an understanding that the reader or audience is included, the phenomenon

of Nagg and Nell can be seen as a reification of a questioning of the nature of Being.

$K '))'( #//*, -. 9J $* S167 67, 6);6&2)0855G,


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##

Bibliography:

Adorno, Theodor W. Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen. Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften Band 11. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1961.

Adorno, Theodor W. Transl. Michael T. Jones. Trying to Understand Endgame./ Versuch,

das Endspiel zu verstehen. New German Critique No. 26, Critical Theory and

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Gontarski, S. E.. The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theatre. Samuel Beckett Today /

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Documents

Becketts Endgame- Phenomenology of Nagg and Nell