Liminality and Identity in Beckett’s Endgame

Precariously Sheltered

Liminality and Identity in Beckett’s Endgame

 By Nur Ferrante Morales

Painting by Samuel Bak, Across

1.Introduction

                After the end of WWII, many modern artists and philosophers in Europe as well as the United States expressed their despair towards their social milieu in their creations. The project of the Enlightenment had proven a great failure, and was regarded as the forefather of the holocaust. The downfall of this structural base, which had centered the meaning of life on humanity, crushed all social values leaving the world in shock. To see ourselves capable of such levels of destruction was a hard thing to digest, and trying to search for sense elsewhere seemed out of the question. If our humanity had collapsed, where could we turn to for meaning? This inability to make sense of what had happened was reflected in many artistic pieces of the time that could only convey the pervading devastation and distress. Joseph Beuys’ installations, Otto Dix’s paintings, the writings of the Frankfurt School, Marcel Duchamp’s sculptures, Samuel Beckett’s plays, or the art and music of the New York School[1], to name a few, were created and thought at the limit, at a moment when the ideals of society had sunk and no sense for the future could be constructed. The Western world had become a place devoid of significance and, in this sense, Beckett’s Endgame represents a paradigmatic example of this historical moment, a devastation in which human emotions are expressed through their bareness, in their nakedness, and without purpose, remaining only the impressions of emptiness, alienation, and death at the end of all things. The relevance of this piece resonates in our present times. We are still in the wave raised by the holocaust and from where we haven’t really been able to stand up and create a satisfactory meaning for society. Besides, our present status of globalization, overpopulation and exhaustion of natural resources, as well as our multilateral wars and conflicts, expose the fact that we are far from finding a solution, and are not proving Beckett wrong in his pessimistic mood. Endgame forces a peer where no one wants to look, and in this looking, arises a reflection, an invitation to think, and not to avoid.  A possible first step for political action would be social self-criticism, and theatre, as a social ritual, provides the means for it. In this particular play, we witness a state of complete dissolution of identity as well as of the collective sense, generating a powerful feeling of dismemberment, and reminding us for a time, while the play lasts, that we are very precariously sheltered.

In the following pages, I will introduce the concepts of liminality and liminoid, and explain their relation to the performing arts. I will then proceed with the application of the notion of liminality to the particular case of Beckett’s Endgame. For this task I have chosen five different sets of representations of the liminal which have sprang after a close reading and viewing of the play. Anomie, alienation and angst, will compose the first cluster; what I have called the underworld representation, the second one; and timelessness, nature and emptiness, the third, fourth and fifth. After this survey, I continue reflecting upon the ideas of composition and silence, which I relate to Beckett’s technique in Endgame, in order to show how this sense of liminality is already present within the structure of the compositional process itself. Finally I will shift the focus towards the notion of identity, exploring it through the play’s characters as well as in relation to us as audience, considering the difficulty of forming an identity in a liminal state like that of Endgame, as well as in our contradictory society of today.

2.Liminality

The notion of limen applied to dramatic theory was developed in anthropological terms by Victor Turner. He explains that liminality is the breaking up of order, a concept which is opposed to that of social order or structure, that is, the ordinary activities of political life. It involves a situation of disease, despair, suicide, death, or any moment of breakdown without the possibility of being replaced or compensated by delimited and well defined social bonds. In modern myths appears as anomie[2](Durkheim 257) (which describes the tearing of ties between an individual and his community), alienation and angst. (Turner 46)

In La Queja Enamorada: Sobre el Juego del Duende de Federico García Lorca, philosopher Óscar E. Muñoz, elaborates this notion of liminality further. He argues that it represents a ‘threshold’, an in-betweenness, a place where nothing is defined, neither this nor that, and that this limit is the site of change, of the encounter with the numen, the psychological radical other. There, the ordinary relations of space and time are suspended, and neither pleasure nor pain has a precise term anymore. Referring to artistic creation in particular, he explains that through the creative process, the poet focuses and amplifies in himself the liminal situation of his community, reconfiguring social reality in his work and establishing new relations between its members, and them with nature. The artist at the limen opens an incurable wound within the community’s center which shakes its values and foundations allowing a later development and evolution: The social limits expand and the encountered ‘radical other’ found at the threshold is assimilated. (104-105)

In performing arts, in contrast to the ritual situation of the archaic communities in which the experience of the limit is directly encountered[3], the artist places this liminal space in front of the audience within a controlled framework.  Theatrical action involves a simulation, a differing of liminality where its disruptive capacities are minimized. The control of anomie is done, in the ritual context, by a strict repetition of its contents, which are liminal. Control that transforms the ritual in a theatrical performance: the liminal turns into what is called the liminoid. The step from the liminal to the liminoid, simply occurs by interrupting the ‘ceremony’ and giving it a complete theatrical content, it happens when we include consciously in the center, the new and that which is at the margins (105). The unexpected and surprising in the representation is now anticipated, although devoid of its anomic content because a precise space and time for its occurrence has been given.

Theatre can imply a form of contained psychological experiment, in which the liminal is experienced from a certain distance helping in the psychological development of the community. The word ‘theatre’ has its roots in the Greek theorein (to look at) and theasthai (to watch), but the etymology of theorein also refers to the word ‘theory’. This common root can allow us to put in relation the process of theatrical representation and the process of empirical research. Any experiment involves the enclosing of an experience (chemical reaction, physical motion, biological incubation, etc.) within a frame of controlled reference, reproducible at will, in a similar manner to the performance of a theatrical play. In the process of creating a piece of drama the playwright performs an action of determination, s/he chooses a space-time scenario, a number of character types and main actions for them to perform, and once this is set, s/he lets the story grow in the telling. By themselves, the characters will construct relations and the different situations they’ll face will force them to build a persona for those actions that will act in accordance with its own character. So defined, by pushing the settings to the extreme, the experiment will begin to expose some data, and we will observe (depending on the focus of the experiment) for example, some of the psychological possibilities of human interaction, like flaws, achievements, or horrors. This act of ‘looking at’ or ‘watching’ the liminal, forces through our human empathic and mimetic abilities a similar experience in the audience, and the subsequent shaking of values and psychological transformation.

In Endgame, Beckett shows the devastation brought about in the 20^th Century by reason, in the form of a possible nuclear cataclysmic war with nothing after it. Theodor Adorno in Versuch, das Endspiel su verstehen, explains how “after the Second World War everything is destroyed, even resurrected culture, without knowing it; humanity vegetates along, crawling, after events which even survivors cannot really survive, on a pile of ruins which even renders futile self-reflection of one’s own battered state.”(301) As spectators of liminal actions within the containment field of the theatrical liminoid, we experience the catharsis produced by this ruin, an end in which there is only inertia, apathy and emptiness left, represented by the refuge where the four characters are sheltered and which illustrates this ‘tragic feeling’.

The concept of liminality is already implicit in the form of the title of the play as a symbolic representation. The end part of the Endgame compound already refers to a limit, a finishing line. However, the concept of the liminoid is represented in the title as well, through its second part, that of a game. As we have seen when comparing theatre with an experiment, that which is similar in both cases is the notion of enclosing an experience within a frame of controlled reference, which can be reproducible at will. This description can easily fit into the idea of game, adding a liminoid characteristic to the compound. The title of the original French version, Fin de Partie, evokes the situation of a metaphorical game of chess that the characters are playing but which has fallen into a prolonged and indefinite stalemate[4]. Black king Hamm, two pawns, Nagg and Nell, and black knightman CLOV moving all over (curiously, Clov’s movements on scene, his measured steps, follow the L pattern of the chess knight) play against an indefinite opponent. We could speculate on who or what this opponent may be -a hypostatized time, extinction, some cosmic player, or human madness- nonetheless, it is up to us as audience and co-creators of the piece of art to imagine. An alarm clock indicates the time for the next move which no one is able to make, neither chess pieces nor players, who being the same, are playing and being played in the cosmic board-game of existence[5].  Hamm says in several occasions referring to the game, “Me to play”, and at another instance, ‘my kingdom for a knightman’ evoking Shakespeare’s Richard III, and achieving an analogy between the knightman and Clov, and the king with himself. Nearly at the end of the theatrical representation Clove implores Hamm saying: ‘Let’s stop playing!’, and Hamm answers: ‘Never!’ declaring a liminal situation in an endless game.

2.1.Representations of liminality

The first cluster of liminal representations includes Turner’s notions of anomie, alienation and angst. An anomic situation implies the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and his community, resulting in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values. Alienation, on the other hand, is the sense of not being part of a society or group, and angst refers to emotions of anguish, torment or anxiety towards life, future, or some action to be done.  These are expressed through scenography and action in Endgame’s opening, as well as in many other moments ahead. When the representation starts, we see a nearly empty room, with no light, a ladder, a sofa at the center and two ashbins at the back, all covered with white sheets, and someone (Clov) limping from one window to the other symmetrically and disjointedly, removing the sheets form the ashbins, raising their lids, laughing, putting them back down, removing the sheet of the sofa and discovering a body sitting with a ‘snatcher’ over his head. The emotion of angst (anxiety, restlessness, indecision or anguish) is communicated through Clov’s motions and later throughout the words that open the play’s dialogue:

CLOV: [Fixed gaze, tonelessly.] Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause.] (Abrams 2473)

As the play continues, we become aware that Clov cannot stop moving, “I can’t sit down” he says, and this restlessness, continuously maintains the liminal state. The tragedy of the situation is that these emotions could never be appeased because there is no one left, no society, and so, anomie and alienation as well as angst, will never be gone. The liminal state cannot be ended:

HAMM: […] Can there be misery-[he yawns.]- loftier that mine? No doubt. Formerly. But now?[pause.][...] Oh I am willing to believe they suffer as much as such creatures can suffer. But does that mean their sufferings equals mine? No doubt [pause.][…] Enough, it’s time it ended, in the shelter too. And yet I hesitate to…end.” (Abrams 2473)

[…]

“HAMM: There’s no one else.

CLOV: There’s nowhere else. [Pause.] (Abrams 2474)

The second cluster is composed of what I call the underworld representation. Under this notion the characters seem to appear more like specters in a Greek hades, in a state of limbo, than alive or dead, representing an in-betweenness that marks the threshold of liminality. Hamm, in his central throne, seems the ruler of dismembered shadows. A parody of the god of the Greek underworld, Hades, accompanied by his dog Cerberus, a toy of three legs instead of three heads, and equipped with the Cap of invisibility, Hamm’s ‘snatcher’. As the old god, he gets very angry when anyone of his companions wants to leave him as Clov constantly intents to do without success. The space of the room represents this hades, where Hamm is also the caricature of the blinded Tiresias who prophesizes like the Homerian of Oddissey’s book XI, and relates stories paralyzed within his chair.

HAMM: In my house. [Pause with prophetic relish.] One day you’ll be blind like me. You’ll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark, forever, like me […] (Abrams 2484)

He is also a parody of Shakespeare’s Prospero, the sorcerer who controls others with his spell. Using a gaff[6], as Prospero does, Hamm acts as if he were on a boat crossing a section of water. And his ‘cell’, where there are two windows, the earth and the sea one, places the refuge on the seashore, in the manner of the Shakespearian wizard.   

Hesitation is always present, the impossibility to decide, to do, to live or to die. Like a punishment of one of Dante’s Infernos, he cannot move, and Clov cannot stop moving nor sit or lay down. Nagg and Nell within their ashbins talk with each other and with Hamm as the voice of the ancestors from their ash urns, as the ghosts of ‘old man’ and ‘old woman’, specters in a limbo. This notion of the shelter as the underworld is clearly stated when Hamm, asking Clov to take him for a little turn ‘Right round the world’, directs him towards one of the walls of the room saying:

HAMM: […] Old wall! [Pause.] Beyond is the…other hell. (Abrams 2481)

In this ‘hell’, Hamm has the power over life and death because he controls through his ‘magic’, the only source of energy left, food. With it reassures his power over Clov and his parents who eat hard cookies that cannot chew and like children ask for candy. Their starving situation is the result of Hamm’s supposed compassion to help them finish:

HAMM: I’ll give you nothing more to eat.

CLOV: Then we’ll die.

HAMM: I’ll give you just enough to keep you from dying. You’ll be hungry all the time.

CLOV: Then we won’t die… (Abrams 2474)

The only possible resolution would be dying, and yet, they won’t end it:

HAMM: Why don’t you kill me?

CLOV: I don’t know the combination of the cupboard. [Pause.]

[…]

CLOV: I see my light dying. (Abrams 2477)

Thirdly, we can observe the representation of liminality as timelessness. The old Nagg and Nell, who living inside the ashcans, cannot come out, they hardly see and hear, and mostly divagate. They are ‘trash’ or ‘ash’, the leftovers of the civilization that once was and that has brought the end of all things for itself. Nagg asks Nell to scratch him in the back, in the hollow, where she had done it ‘yesterday’, and with an elegiac tone she says: ‘Ah yesterday!’ and starts to remember when they were young in Lake Como one April afternoon, when she was happy. These memories of life and nature contrast with their present situation and as light against a shadow, serve to enhance even more the black on the empty canvas. The past is the only time of ‘existence’. Memories and stories of particular events remove for a while the pain of the present and the fear of an imminent end. ‘Is it not time for my pain-killer?’ asks repeatedly Hamm, getting always a negative answer from Clov. The time for the end of pain never comes, and when it does, there are no more ‘pain-killers’. The remaining time in pain cannot be killed, yet; although ‘something is taking its course’. Such recurrences and others alike (time for my story, time for dying, etc.) create circularity all through the play that evokes an obsessive-compulsive mood, hence, heightening the liminal representation of angst to the audience. Symbolically, the stress and anxiety towards the future take the form of an alarm clock that will ring when death comes, signaling the end of life’s game. When Hamm asks, “What time is it?” Clov answers, “The same as usual”. Time is suspended it doesn’t seem to be perceived as linear but like an undetermined duration produces the impression of a lack of motion, this distortion increases the feelings of dislocation:  

HAMM: […] The end is in the beginning and yet you go on. [Pause.] Perhaps I could go on with my story, end it and begin another. […] It will be the end and there I’ll be, wondering what can have brought it on and wondering what can have… [He hesitates.]… why it was so long coming.[…] Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of … [He hesitates.] … that old Greek, and all lifelong you wait for that to mount up to a life. […] (Abrams 2495)

The ‘old Greek’ refers to Zeno of Elea and his paradoxes.[7] The idea of the paradox is constantly pervading the play and its puzzling effect adds to the difficulty of trying to make any sense of it all. A paradox or aporia, means perplexity, an uncertainty, an unsolvable problem or a problem with an unfeasible solution. This situation of absurdity shows the characters’ incongruous and unsolvable conundrum and acts as a liminal mirror for us. The notion of the Theatre of the Absurd to describe Beckett’s drama reflects pretty well our contradictory society, being therefore in a synchronic relation with our times. But this state of paradox also projects the idea of the stalemate situation in which the players are involved with the game of chess, therefore, reminding us the nature of the whole setting as a game, and pulling the liminal climax achieved back to the liminoid.

Following the above intervention, Clov enters with an alarm clock, and after a while hangs it up on the wall in substitution for a picture. Afterwards the clock ends up on the lid of Nagg’s bin, producing a resonating and loud sound with each clock strike. This musical effect against the silence of the characters, added to the tragic situation, produces an even grimmer and devastating result.

The fourth representation of the liminal is that of nature. As the expression of our basic emotions and unconscious tendencies, nature brings dismemberment if it is repressed or ignored. In Euripides’ Bacchae (Euripides 15-16), Tiresias and Cadmus advice Pentheus not to reject the coming of Dionysus’ rituals at Thebes, but Pentheus, representing the Apollinian sense of individuation and order of the city, denies the God of wine, being thus mutilated by his mother Agave who is possessed by Bacchus’ madness.

Life is the great absentee in the play, there is no nature anymore but in the memories of the characters, no sea, no sun, only ‘GREY’. Devastation has won this battle of city against landscape:[8]

HAMM: Nature has forgotten us.

CLOV: There’s no more nature. (Abrams 2476)

Spring as the epitome of life is several times evoked in the minds of Nell and Hamm. Mostly through the month of April, by way of an invocation to the Greco-Roman fertility goddesses, Flora, Pomona, and Ceres, and by the image of Clov’s seeds:

HAMM: Did your seeds come up?

CLOV: No.

[…]

ClOV: […] They’ll never sprout! (Abrams 2477)

But it is nothing more than a shadow, because desolation and death are the only things that remain. In his story of the crawling man who ends up being his gardener, Hamm says:

HAMM: […] But what in God’s name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in spring? That the rivers and seas will run with fish and grain? That there is manna in heaven still for imbeciles like you? […] (Abrams 2490)

And yet, against all this devastation, the hope for human life and future seems to spring with a flea:

CLOV: […] I have a flea!

HAMM: A flea! Are there still fleas?

CLOV: On me there’s one. [Scratching.] Unless it’s a crablouse.

HAMM: [Very perturbed.]But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!               (Abrams 2484)

And later in the vision of a boy:

CLOV: [Dismayed.] Looks like a small boy!

HAMM: [Sarcastic.] A small… boy!

CLOV: I’ll go and see. [He gets down, drops the telescope, goes towards door, turns.] I’ll take the gaff. [He looks for the gaff, sees it, picks it up, hastens towards the door.]

HAMM: No! [CLOV halts.]

CLOV: No? A potential procreator?

HAMM: If he exists he’ll die there or he’ll come here. And if he doesn’t… [Pause.] (Abrams 2498)

But instead of representing life, it represents a threat, something that must be prevented from happening. Adorno argues that the violence of the unspeakable is mimicked by the timidity to mention it, and to him, Beckett keeps it nebulous. He explains that one can only speak euphemistically about what is incommensurate with all experience, just as one speaks in Germany of the murder of the Jews, and if catastrophe amounted to a partial end of the world that would be a bad joke: then nature, from where the imprisoned figures are cut off, would be as good as non-existent; what remains it would only prolong the torment (286).

The fifth and last cluster of liminality’s representation is that of emptiness.  As countless times before, Hamm orders Clov to use the telescope and look out of the window to tell him what he sees, and Clov responds ‘zero’. At this point Hamm exercises his authoritative power over Clov and hampers his ability to speak, becoming a situation of a zero in the outside world and a zero as Clov:

CLOV: …zero… [He looks] …and zero.

HAMM: Nothing stirs. All is-

CLOV: Zer-

HAMM: [Violently.] Wait till you’re spoken to! [Normal voice.] All is… all is… all is what? [Violently.] All is what?

CLOV: What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment [He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns towards HAMM.] Corpsed. [Pause.] Well? Content?

HAMM: Look at the sea.

CLOV: It’s the same. (Abrams 2482)

‘All is corpsed’ is Clov’s answer, a carcass, hollowed, and so at this point the image of complete death and holocaust becomes unavoidable to the audience. In one of his prophetic discourses, Hamm-Tiresias states this nothingness aloud:

HAMM: […] Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all ages wouldn’t fit in, and there you’ll be like a bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. […] (Abrams 2485)

There is nothing left, and the possibility of an afterlife is out of the question because God doesn’t exist. They pray to him and of course nothing happens, the whole point is a mockery. These profound feelings of alienation and loneliness make them sink deeper into the ‘threshold’ towards the side of the unknown, indefinite ápeiron.

When Nell doesn’t respond anymore after Nagg nocks at the ashcan lid, and hides within his own crying; Hamm says using Prospero’s words: ‘Our revels are now ended’, making them resonate in the audience as a reminder of The Tempest:

PROSPERO: […] Our revels are now ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and melted into air, into thin air: and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. […] (Shakespeare 21)

The liminal moment of dismemberment comes clearly forth through this nothingness, sleep and extinction:

CLOV: […] I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit. [Pause.] […] (Abrams 1499)

2.2.Composition and silence

To Muñoz, the modern poet of the Dionysian or the liminal only performs the part of the voyage of the hero or shaman that descends to the underworld, incapable of building a ladder that may take him, together with his community, to the utopian heavens of existence (Queja  147). The poet cannot bring anything back from his creative ecstasy, he can only limit himself to show the continuous dismembering in the liminal zone, its dispersion and dissolution in the different representations of liminality that cross the threshold, torn apart by a violent mimetic impulse to be everything but lacking the necessary determination to recover and coagulate into a definite proposal of human project, horrified with the idea of assuming any historical identity (Queja 147).

Looking more closely at Beckett’s style of composition, we can appreciate this intense life on the edge, resembling the feeling expressed by Federico Garcia Lorca when he said that in our times, the poet has to cut his veins open for others (Muñoz Queja 141). In a letter to Gorges Duthuit, Beckett affirms the following in relation to his creative process employing a metaphor from painting:

“If you ask me why the canvas doesn’t remain blank, I can only invoke this clear need, forever innocent, to fuck it with color, if need be through vomiting one’s being” (Gontarski 20)

There is a sense of nakedness in these words, of wanting to express without further interpretation, which uncover the liminal impulse of a Dionysian poet. However, there is also a liminoid implication in that image, that of the canvas. For instead of ‘fucking with color’ over let’s say, a streaming water current, or some rocks in the forest, which would render the metaphor extremely liminal -due to its sense of openness to the unpredictability of vital life-, he chooses a frame in order to satisfy the need for ‘vomiting one’s being’. In this sense, we have a Dionysian poet who has limited his intensity by accepting formal artistic conventions. Notions of ‘the death of art’ or ‘the ideology of not having an ideology’, were at the center of the Minimalist art aesthetics in which Beckett was involved. In this sense, John Cage’s musical piece 4’ 33’’[9]is quite illustrative of the idea of endless ways of saying nothing, and of the purpose of creating music without purpose (Griffiths 96). In Cage, the liminal is also present at the level of artistic performance, questioning its conventions and thus, minimizing the liminoid factor. Beckett’s ‘pieces’ on stage seem to appear as a Duchamp’s found object, just placed there. This Minimalist attitude is widely reflected in Endgame and contributes to the sense of alienation as representation of liminality that pervades in the piece.

In his work, Beckett constantly uses silence and repetition as a performance agent. The indication of ‘[Pause.]’ along the characters’ discourse is widely repeated, 379 times precisely, counterpointing with the sound of their words. In a letter to Alan Schneider commenting on Endgame’s musicality he said:

“My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin. Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te [neither with you nor without you], in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could.” (Bryden 45)

Leaving minimum sound and maintaining an instant-by-instant unfolding, he approaches Morton Feldman’s musical composition techniques. As friends and colleagues, they composed together the opera Neither in 1977 (a monodrama for soprano and orchestra), and a choral piece called Elemental Procedures. Concerning the opera, Feldman said in a lecture at Darmstadt in 1984:

“…The subject of the Beckett opera is that our life is framed in shadow all around us, we cannot see into the shadow. Being that we cannot see into the shadows, our life is framed in shadow all around us, we cannot see into the shadow. Being that we cannot see into the shadows, our existence is only this much…There is a good non-idea, isn’t it?” (4)

And in relation to its language and method he further explains:

“…He would write something in English, translate it into French and then translate that thought back in the English that conveys that thought… He wrote something for me in 1977, and I got it. I’m reading it. There’s something peculiar. Finally I see that every line is really the same thought said in another way. And yet the continuity acts as if something else is happening. Nothing else is happening. What you’re doing in an almost Proustian way is getting deeper and deeper saturated into the thought…” (5)

In his chamber orchestra piece For Samuel Beckett, Feldman seems to have musicalized Beckett’s own writing process. In the text accompanying the work, Alan Rich explains that if a parallel to Beckett needs to be drawn, the best analogy would be to the play Endgame, and its last chess moves in a cleared board. In Feldman’s music too, he argues, the board is ‘cleared’, the sound panorama is that of single players operating in emptiness, forced to repeat a move over and over for lack of alternative, and if there is any variation it appears in the minutest shift of feature. Chronological time disappears, and in this expanse, this paucity of detail, concepts of beginning, middle and end become irrelevant. As Feldman said, it is best heard as a process of deeper and deeper saturation (5).   

In the play, we can see these compositional ideas at work. The speechlessness of the characters and repetition provide a type of voice devoid of content, a corpse that speaks without saying, and if it tries to say, only ‘babbles’ in the dark:

HAMM: One! Silence! [Pause.] Where was I? [Pause. Gloomily.] It’s finished, we’re finished. [Pause.] Nearly finished. [Pause.] There’ll be no more speech. [Pause.] […] Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark. [Pause.] […] (Abrams 2489)

They are not only faced with silence, but are unable to say anything meaningful, and this muteness, strangles and drowns them into their own emptiness, and us with them:

HAMM: […] There I’ll be, in the old shelter alone against the silence and … [He hesitates.] the stillness. If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and motion, all over and done with. [Pause.] (Abrams 2495)

Hamm’s metanarratives and poor attempts at telling a story, as well as his attack upon Clov for not being able to have ‘an idea’, to say ‘a few words from his heart’, and his imperative to make Clov ‘Articulate!’, contribute to this effect of muteness even more:

CLOV: […] I use the words that you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent. (Abrams 2487)

 Words seem like noise instead of coherent strings of significance. When Clov attempts to articulate something he is unable to communicate but speaks to himself:

CLOV: I say to myself- sometimes, Clov […]  I don’t understand, it dies, or it’s me, I don’t understand, that either. I ask the words that remain- sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say. […] (Abrams 2499)

The words themselves have nothing to say, they seem to have been hollowed from their semantic content. At one time, Hamm using the vocative calls Clov and when he responds Hamm says back to him, ‘nothing’, but then calls Clov again. Really, there is nothing to say, Hamm has been controlling and dominating the other character’s possibility to speak either by inhibiting it, constraining it, by mocking it, or by commanding it at will. This attitude of ‘terrible father’ that annihilates expression and hampers the possibility of the formation of an identity through self-narration is a symbol of the Dionysian state of dissolution and liminality in which the characters are immersed. At the end of the play Hamm concludes with a ‘speak no more’, only the old ‘snatcher’ remains.

Concerning composition, we made a relation already between the structure of a theatrical representation and the game of chess when we talked about the paradoxical features of Engame. At this point I want to introduce a distinctive feature among the two, in order to specify more clearly their liminoid property. Roger Callois, in Man, Play and Games, classifies games into four categories (14-19). One of these corresponds to what he calls mimetic games, in which theatre is included, and the other one to that of agonic games, or games of action, in which chess is included. In this view, the formal result of the composition, if we describe it in relation to this concepts of liminality and liminoid, would be that of a circular and embedded structure in which the liminal situation of the character’s whole setting -illustrated by the five representations of liminality that we have explored, that ‘vomit of one’s being’- would be placed at the center, constituting the inner circle. This center is embedded within the liminoid structure of the agonic game which is itself embedded inside another liminoid structure, that of the theatrical performance or mimetic game. To put it in other words: the play of an endless game.

3.Identity

The characters, as pieces of the game, seem to be trapped within an agonic square of security, in a shelter at the center of an empty chess board, paused in an endgame situation, at drift, silent, and deeply immersed in the tragic state of ‘the end of the world’ and their personae with it.

As we have seen by the exploration of the concept of liminality throughout the play, a liminal encounter produces a fragmentation, a state of complete dissolution of identity and social sense. This state of annihilation hampers any possibility of forming a persona as long as it lasts, be it individual or social, because the process of self-narration is distorted.

In his the preparatory writing of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche explains that:

“The Greeks, who through their gods, say and at the same time silence the secret doctrine of their world vision, erected two divinities, Apollo and Dionysus, as a double source for their art. In artistic spheres, these names represent stylistic antithesis that change one together with the other, almost always fighting  against one another, and who only once appear fused together, that is, at the instant of the blooming of Hellenic will forming the work of art of Attic tragedy.”  (230)

As understood by Muñoz in Poética Musical: Reflexión histórica sobre el concepto de mímesis en el ámbito de las artes musicales, Attic tragedy is a mimetic musical form which integrates the three rhythmizomena referred to in Aristoxenus’ Elementa rhythmica: speech, melody and corporeal movement. This sophisticated blending, where all the arts flow together, is the result of the religious synthesis made by Athenian society between the 6^th and 4^th Centuries B.C. in which the Hellenic musical religion finds through this rite the vehicle for their world’s beliefs (Poética 57). Nietzsche’s antithetic pair, Muñoz argues, is not so much an antithesis as a difference in goals that the religious experience has to achieve. The synthesis that tragedy represents, as a religious festivity honoring Dionysus, is a profound development of the mimetic double dimension found in the Lord of the Maenads:

“There are two principles, equally present in both divinities: a principle of individuation and activity […] and a principle of passive ecstasy with regenerative psychological abilities due the loss of consciousness […]. The first aspect is mostly associated with Apollo (although is not the only one), while the second is the Dionysian. However, the shamanic divinity must be understood in its double aspect.” (Poética 61-62)

In Endgame, we assist to the liminoid spectacle and participate in the modern rite of theatre through our cathartic experience. As we have seen, this contact with the liminal or Dionysian, renews our values as a community, and so, our social identity. According to Muñoz, the specific effect of tragedy is that Dionysus should be able to bring bliss with his suffering and liberate by means of his possession. (Poética 22-23)  In this sense, even though Beckett’s play is labeled as a Comedy of the Absurd, this description doesn’t exclude its tragic characteristics, and therefore, its ability to evoke a liminal effect within a liminoid performance. As earlier stated when exploring the different representations of liminality, the setting of the drama is that of a desolate place where the four characters are possibly the only survivors. In this sense, having no community to return to, they are not able to maintain any social identity, except for the most basic ones. All they have left are fragmented memories and what they can manage to construct through their present actions between each other. The psychological effect of dissolution, transformation and renewal by way of a new creation of identity which tragedy permits the viewer, is impossible to the characters because the Apollinian principle of individuation cannot express itself in a stable manner. They are caught in this phase of disintegration and endless nothingness, the Dionysian passive ecstasy, because the situation of humanity’s extinction is the ‘endgame’ of all possible personhood. It could never get any harder for a human being to bear, and is precisely this state of devastation what is so relevant for us to peer and realize.

But despite all this, as long as the characters continue to act, trying to narrate themselves, some form of individuation keeps fighting to survive.  In Endgame, as it occurred in Attic tragedy, Apollo’s part of the bi-horned Dionysus will take many shapes and act as multiple persons while Dionysus remains underneath the mask. As the principle of individuation, Apollo will surface and determine.

The first obvious identity that is defined in the four characters is that of sex: three men and a woman. Then that of age: an old man, a very mature man, a middle aged man, and an old woman. Kinship relations come next: all of them are sons and daughter of someone, Nell is mother, Nagg is father, and they are wife and husband respectively. Hamm has been also a father and husband sometime, and Clov appears to be an orphan. In the next circle of persons we could refer to the relationships of dominance and submission: Hamm is the master-employer, the dominant figure, and Clov is the slave-servant. Concerning other social personae in relation to the actions they perform, Nagg and Nell are barely anything more, although Nagg is a storyteller for a while when he tells the tale of the tailor. Hamm is also a wish-to-be poet that springs forth when trying to tell a story as well as in his metanarrative comments. But Hamm has more Apollinian masks, which can be interpreted through the meta-theatrical and mythical allusions in the play. He evokes a distorted mask of Tiresias, Prospero, and Hades. Exemplified earlier, the figure of Hades is relevant to our discussion because it was put in relation to Diosysus by Heraclitus (298). Through Hamm’s discourse, multiple Apollos change and in some instances of his transformations, the nakedness of Dionysus is exposed, making us face the limen, although veiled by his erratic dialog.

In Versuch, das Endspiel su verstehen, Adorno proposes the idea that the figure of Hamm is an anti-hero, a shadow caricature of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (310) which has descended to the underworld. However, for there to be a hero, or an anti-hero, the need for a community, a group to return to from the voyage and to which transform, is indispensable. According to Campbell’s rendering of Rudolf Otto’s Monomyth, the typology of the myth of the hero has four stages: departure, initiation, accomplishment and return (30) . But all of them have a meaning in relation to a community, the missing factor in Beckett’s play. Besides, the characters of Endgame are no heroic or anti-heroic visitors of hell, but permanent residents, and being their abode, they are immersed in a perpetual state of dismemberment.  

We observe in Clov’s discourse and actions what could be called Apollinian madness, some sort of neurotic obsession with number and order:

CLOV: […] I’ll go to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. [Pause.] Nice dimensions, nice proportions, […] (Abrams 2473)

This obsessive compulsive servant cannot stop moving, constantly trying unsuccessfully to turn disorder into order, to transform the Dionysian into the Apollinian, although in its maniac aspect:

HAMM: […] What are you doing?

CLOV: Putting things in order [He straitens up. Fervently.] I’m going to clear everything away! [He starts picking up again.]

HAMM: Order!

CLOV: [Straightening up.] I love order. It’s my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its place, under the last dust. [He starts picking up again.] (Abrams 2491)

Another instance is evidenced in one of his multiple compulsive actions in relation to the ladder and the windows, which state his struggle between madness and sanity:

CLOV: […] [He goes toward window left.] Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes over and I’m as lucid as before. [He gets up on ladder, looks out of window.] […] Ah what a fool am I! I’m on the wrong side! [He gets down, takes a few steps towards window right.] Under water! [He goes back for ladder] What a fool am I! [He carries ladder toward window right.] Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right senses. Then it passes off and I’m as intelligent as ever. […] (Abrams 1496)

The self-narration that Clov fights to produce, reflected by these examples, shows a state of contradiction which can only generate a pathological identity, an alienated subject who cannot escape from the liminal state. Madness and devastation are at the ‘center of the world’. The tragedy of these characters is that, despite the situation of extinction they are in, they still maintain the same relationships of power and submission, and it is this interaction what gives them a minimum sense of identity, even though, as Beckett himself told us earlier, is a ‘neither with you neither without you’ state of affairs. Although paralyzing and dismembering, it is necessary because it’s all they have, because ‘there’s no one else’; an in-betweenness condition in which liminality and non-identity are represented.

               

4.Conclusion

The interpretation of the different representations of liminality that we have projected over the play, as well as Beckett’s compositional techniques and use of silence as a performance agent, have shown that Endgame mainly tries to represent this threshold, the numen or radical other, in order to make us sense this open and incurable wound, and allow us to feel the shacking of our social values and foundations. However, liminality is restricted by two obvious liminoid elements at work in Endgame. The first one is the theatrical representation itself, the mimetic game of masks and simulacra, which in this work depicts an impossible stage of empty personae, automatic masks performing a mechanical final action. Even though things change during the play –we can observe a simulation of time’s arrow flying through the scene in, for instance, the deaths of Nagg and Nell- the meaningless actions of the whole set carry the spectator continuously back to the liminoid representation, that of an endless mimetic game, thus decreasing the intensity of the liminal experience.

The absence of verisimilitude is further emphasized by the second liminoid element present, the agonic game. Implying a framed, controlled and delimited scenario, the chess like nature of the action, that is, of the agonic final stages of a game against an invisible opponent - human Apollinian madness- drowns the play into an oneiric realm which renders relative the devastation of the nowhere land and no-when time of contemporary culture.

These two liminoid restrictions produce a contrary effect to the critical one presented -in impossible terms- by the script’s continuous call to the destruction of any identity. The final overall experience is then nihilistic, a gigantic castration of speech and action, a morbid indulgence in the emptiness of modern culture, the acceptance of the stage as the only place to speak the unspeakable dimension of human societies, the taming of artists under the whip of traditional art forms.

The end of World War II proved quite well that our Apollinian mania, that is, scientific thought without self-criticism, reason ‘creates monsters’, and the newly placed human center exploded in our faces. Since then we seem to have been drifting without being able to generate neither meaning nor the possibility of a coherent social identity that could absorb our diversity without imposing relations of power and exploitation. In face of this situation, we either tend to fall back to the axis of the old religions, in order to find some psychological ‘pain-killer’ against despair, or we simply deny the idea of sense altogether and declare the nihilistic meaninglessness of existence. In both cases, we end up letting postmodern capitalist narrations and industry to construct a paranoid and schizophrenic sense for us, whether we like it or not. In this sense, as this critical exploration of Endgame has shown, we are indeed, very precariously sheltered.

5.Bibliography

Abrams M. H. et al, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol.2. 7^th ed. London-New York.

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000. Print.

Adorno, Theodor W. “Versuch, das Endspiel su verstehen“. Noten zur Literatur II. Frankfurt am

Main: Bibliothek Suhrkamp Verlang, 1961. 281-324. Print.

Bryden, Mary. “Samuel Beckett and the Sound of Silence.” Bryden, Mary, ed. Samuel Beckett

 and Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, 21-46. Print.

Callois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Print.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New Jersey: 2^nd ed. Bollingen Series.

 Princeton University Press, 1968. Print.

Durkheim, Emile. Suicide. A Study in Sociology. New York: The Free Press, 1951. Print.

Euripides. Die Bakchen. Übersetzt von J.A. Hartung. Kindle-Edition, 2011. E-book.

Gontarski, S.E. and Uhlmann, Anthony, eds. Beckett After Beckett. Gainesville: University Press

 of Florida, 2006. Print.

Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music and After. Directions since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

 1995. Print.

Heráclito. Fr. 15. Clemente, Protréptico 43. In Los Filósofos Presocráticos by G.S. Kirk & J.E.

 Raven. Madrid: Gredos, 1981. Print.

Muñoz, Óscar E. La Queja Enamorada. Sobre el juego del duende de Federico García Lorca.

                Madrid: 2nd Ed. Mandala Ediciones, 2009. Print.

---. Poética Musical. Reflexión histórica sobre el concepto de mímesis en el ámbito

 de las artes musicales. Tesis Doctoral. Madrid: Facultad de Filosofía. UNED, 1996. Print.

Feldman, Morton. For Samuel Beckett. Newport Classic, 1991. Print. Audio CD.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. La visión dionisiaca del mundo. Barcelona: Alianza Editorial, 1991. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. London: Collins, 1951. Print.

Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre. New York: P.A.J. Publications, 1992. Print.

Wythoff, Grant. “The Impossible Object of Endgame”. New Jersey: Princeton University, (2006). n. pag.Web. 16 May 2006.

                     

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[1] For instance: Rauschenberg, Pollock and Rothko’s paintings, and John Cage and Morton Feldman’s compositions.

[2] As defined by Durkheim

[3] Strictly liminal phenomena tend to belong to tribal and agrarian societies where there is a closer relationship between communitas and liminality due to a more ‘collective representation’ and participation in the rite, instead of having a specific individual creator apart from a reception group. (Turner 43)

[4] Samuel Beckett was a chess player and a friend of Marcel Duchamp. It is told that they played chess regularly in the mid 30´s and Beckett acknowledged the influence of Duchamp and Halberstadt´s book "Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled" on Endgame. (Hugill 1992). See the study in: http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~ahugill/writings/chess.htm

[5] “Beckett compares, in an interview with the Australian writer and actor Lawrence Held, Endgame with a chess  match, with no winner. Lawrence Held recalls having asked Beckett, during a rehearsal in West Berlin, what Endgame was about. After a moment's pained look, Beckett recovered and, referring to a chess tournament under way at the time, responded, "Well, it's like the last game between Karpov and Korchnoi. After the third move both knew that neither could win, but they kept on playing.” Ibid.

[6] Barbed fishing spear. (Abrams 2487)

[7] In this case, the paradox referred to: “If a grain of millet falling makes no sound, how can a bushel of grains make any sound?” (Abrams 2495)

[8] Muñoz explains in relation to Lorca’s “Poet in New York”, that it proclaims the secret of every modern city, which is that it is based on the alienation and destruction of its builders and maintainers, a notion that confronts the official moral values of the normative community. The modern citizen although knowing it, forgets and represses this knowledge by putting a make-up of multiple norms over it. But this suppressed violence constantly springs forth in the common experience of the city. Lorca takes us to the nucleus of that ‘hell’ showing us the place where the foundations of those towers are melted with the most ancient rocks and ‘rotting corpses’. His verses undress the city, and all that remains under the metropolitan domes recover the natural dimension that the building development project had denied. (Queja. 146)

[9] 4’ 33’’ expressed the impossibility of silence, or silence as noise. He wanted to dissolve as much as possible the liminoid aspect of the concert hall and the notion of art itself, and produce a more participative rite where the liminal could be experienced more directly.  John Cage was directing, and all musicians were placed on stage, the audience were sit and still, and the piece began, although none of the musicians moved a muscle, neither the director. Time flew, and people began to cough, rearrange their legs, yawn, move the program’s magazine,  some left the hall, others even started to insult the musicians  and yell; once the 4’33’’ minutes had elapsed, the musicians stood up and left the stage. That was the piece, the silent noise, improvised and created by the audience as a musical instrument.