Deleuze and Beckett: Disguising
Repetitions in Endgame
Thomas Cousineau
IN BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE, SIGMUND FREUD MAINTAINED THAT
we repeat because we have repressed a traumatic experience which then
returns in symptomatic form. Gilles Deleuze, on the contrary, insisted in
Différence et répétition that we do not repeat because we repress; rather, we
repress in order to repeat. In a reformulation of this same point, he
contended that we do not disguise because we have repressed; rather, we
repress so that we may disguise. Along with arguing for the primacy of
repetition over an earlier traumatic event that has been repressed, Deleuze
further suggested that the highest function of art is to put into play all the
various forms of repetition, ranging from the most clichéd to the most
creative.
Différence et répétition was followed several years later by the publication of a
volume entitled Création et répétition which offered a collection of essays
exploring the applications of Deleuze’s central idea to a great variety of
THOMAS COUSINEAU is Professor of English at Washington College in Maryland where he teaches
courses on modernism. The author of four books, including two on Beckett, he also edited “Beckett in
France” a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies and served for several years as the editor of the
newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society. He is currently working on two book-projects: one, under
contract with the Dalkey Archive Press, on Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and the other to be
entitled The Séance of Reading: Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing.
Cousineau | Deleuze and Beckett
artistic domains, including painting, sculpture, music, theater, and film.
Among these early explorations of the paradoxical relationship between
repetition and creativity, Pierre Chabert’s contribution, entitled
“Problématique de la répétition dans le théâtre contemporain,” is especially
intriguing. After pointing out that, in Beckett’s plays, repetition is a dynamic
principle and that, as such, it replaces plot and story as the source of forward
movement, Chabert reiterated Deleuze’s basic contention:
We must take into account two opposing forms of repetition. . . .On
the one hand, we find a pure, geometrical form in which repetition
occurs without any accompanying differences; this is its most visible
manifestation and, for this reason, the one that we generally notice.
It involves a static situation which is repeated mechanically and
incessantly. This pure form of repetition occurs mainly on the level
of the larger theatrical units (the strict repetition from one act to
another in Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, for example) or elements
of the stage action (the repetition of entrances and exits and of
presence and absence of characters, as in Godot). In contrast, the
differences produced by the play of repetition are found in the myriad
actions or theatrical elements played out within smaller units that
subvert the ostensible situation or theme; these elements, which
incorporate difference, are repeated to virtual infinity. (167-8)
Deleuze’s revision of Freud helps us to see more clearly the two divergent
forms of repetition that occur in Endgame: in the “Freudian” case of Hamm,
it is a psychological compulsion aimed at both repeating and reversing
(unsuccessfully, to be sure) an involuntarily repressed trauma from his personal
past; for Beckett on the other hand, it involves a “Deleuzian” form of artistic
activity that voluntarily “represses” the cultural past, which he then subjects to
repetitions whose effect depends upon our hearing – or seeing – in them the
traces of their origin. In other words, Hamm needs to forget the originary
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demonstration of his helplessness that he struggles to replace – via a
dialectical reversal – with a commanding stage presence. Beckett, as well as
his audience, on the other hand, need to at least partially remember the
remnants of our collective cultural past – especially those biblical and
literary references that he called “bits of pipe” – which he constantly repeats,
neither routinely nor dialectically, but, rather, in innovative and always
surprising ways in Endgame.
That Hamm’s words and gestures are intended to serve as a dialectical
reversal of a past trauma is made especially clear when his father brings to
the surface the repressed infantile memory that Beckett called “Nagg’s
admonition”:
Whom did you call when you were a tiny boy, and were
frightened, in the dark? Your mother? No. Me. We let you cry.
Then we moved you out of earshot, so that we might sleep in peace.
I was asleep, and happy as a king, and you woke me up to have me
listen to you. It wasn’t indispensable, you didn’t really need to have
me listen to you.
I hope the day will come when you’ll really need to have me listen
to you, and need to hear my voice, any voice.
Yes, I hope I’ll live to then, to hear you calling me like when you
were a tiny boy, and were frightened , in the dark, and I was your
only hope. (56)
The situation that Nagg evokes here closely resembles the discovery of
dependency and helplessness that Freud analyzed in the celebrated
“fort/da” section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As you will remember,
Freud’s godson was able to transform real helplessness into imaginary
mastery by displacing his mother’s comings and goings (over which he had
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Cousineau | Deleuze and Beckett
no actual control) onto a spool, which, unlike his mother, was unfailingly
responsive to his commands. The godson, in effect, returns in Endgame as
Hamm, who gives orders to a substitute mother figure played by Clov with
the intended aim of reversing the roles of the powerful and the helpless in a
way that would make Hamm the “happy king” that his father remembers
himself as having been. The narrator of Beckett’s novel Murphy memorably
expressed the principle of dialectical reversal which is at work here when, in
explaining the distinction between the kick in res and the kick in intellectu, he
noted that “the kick that the physical Murphy received, the mental Murphy
gave. It was the same kick, but corrected as to direction” (111).
In contrast to this, Beckett’s voluntary repressions, which produce
disguised repetitions are generated, as Stan Gontarski points out in The Intent
of Undoing, by three principles, in contrast to the single principle of dialectical
reversal that governs Hamm’s repetitions. They include: creating absences
by deleting details, explanations, and connections; consciously (we could say
“voluntarily”) destroying the systems of chronology and causality; and
creating internal relationships that emphasize pattern if not order. The
“Deleuzian” precedence of repetition over repression that is generated by
Beckett’s application of these principles may be observed at a variety of
levels in Endgame. The most obvious of these is the game of chess itself,
which, having given to the play its title, is then repressed so that it can return
in the disguised form of a dramatic situation in which, as Beckett himself
suggested, Hamm is playing against a superior player; chess is also obscurely
present in the gradual disappearance, not of pawns, bishops, knights, and so
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forth, but of bicycle-wheels, pap, nature, sugar plums, tide, navigators, rugs,
pain-killer, and coffins.
Other disguised repetitions draw upon earlier works, both published and
unpublished. Among these, Gontarski calls attention to Beckett’s original
plan for the setting of Endgame, which was to have been Picardie in the
aftermath of WWI. Having repressed this original idea, Beckett then staged
its return in the form of a timeless and placeless, yet still devastated, setting.
Gontarski also mentions certain minor works that Beckett discarded,
including a mime play written in the early 1950s entitled “Mime de reveur
A”; although Beckett had no conscious recollection of having written it, he
did nonetheless acknowledge its affinities with Endgame. In another, a text
entitled “Avant Fin de partie,” the role eventually given to Clov is played,
not surprisingly, by the central character’s mother.
A far more intriguing example of Beckett’s repression of his earlier work
has to do with the structure of Endgame, which has the same two-part
division, but in a highly disguised way, as Waiting for Godot. We know that
Beckett planned Endgame as a two-act play at some point in its composition,
but eventually dismissed this idea because it repeated Godot in too obvious a
way. While in its final version, Endgame is a one-act play (Gontarski suggests
that this may actually have been Beckett’s original plan) close attention to
the arrangement of its successive units reveals a rigorously chiastic structure:
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Cousineau | Deleuze and Beckett
STRUCTURE OF ENDGAME
Prologue: Pantomimes and soliloquies
A.
Dialogue between Hamm and Clov (pp. 3-8)
B. Nagg’s first appearance (pp. 9-10)
A. Dialogue between Hamm and Clov (pp. 10-14)
Interlude: Nagg and Nell (pp. 14-23)
A. Dialogue between Hamm and Clov (pp. 23-54)
B. Nagg’s second appearance (pp. 49-56)
A. Dialogue between Hamm and Clov (pp. 56-81)
Epilogue: Pantomimes and soliloquies (pp. 80-84)
As we reflect on the contrast between the disguised presence of this
chiastic structure in Endgame and the explicit two-act division of Waiting for
Godot, we see that the symmetry revealed by this schema is countered by
several asymmetrical elements that tend to obscure, or mask, its presence.
These include the imbalance between the thirteen pages that precede the
“Interlude” and the sixty-one pages that follow it, the significantly different
lengths of Nagg’s first and second appearances, the further weakening effect
created by Hamm’s narration of the story of the man asking for “bread for
his brat,” and the progressively worsening predicament of the protagonists.
We notice as well the contrast between Beckett’s creative use of the chiasm,
which focuses attention on the “off-center” structural center of Endgame, and
the psychological compulsion revealed by Hamm’s determination, not only
that he be moved to the precise center of the stage (25-27), but that he and
his personal predicament be the center of the play itself.
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Another form of disguised repetition comes to mind when we remember
Alan Schneider’s well-known comment that Beckett’s principal innovation
was to be found in his having brought painting and music to the stage.
Music and painting do not, to be sure, appear, in Endgame in their “original”
forms but their disguised presence is nevertheless felt throughout via the
powerful visual image that
Beckett has so meticulously
constructed as well as the
musical “form in
movement” that he created
through the equally
meticulous attention that he
paid, in particular, to Clov’s
movements. A powerful
visual reminder of Beckett’s
having “disguised” himself
as both a painter and an
orchestral conductor when
he directed his plays may
perhaps be found in the
photo of him directing
Warten auf Godot in Berlin in
1975 in which his raised hand could be imagined as holding either a paint
brush or a baton; that he is actually directing a play in this photo will by no
means be obvious to the uninitiated.
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Cousineau | Deleuze and Beckett
Another kind of repetition in which Beckett’s disguises parallel while
subverting Hamm’s dialectical reversals is to be found in the many literary
and biblical sources of the play. The most obvious of these are Shakespeare’s
The Tempest in which the roles played by Hamm and Clov revisit the
Prospero/Ariel couple, and the crucifixion of Christ in which (on Beckett’s
own authority) the names of all three characters who share the stage with
Hamm – Clov, Nagg, and Nell – allude to “nails” in French, German, and
English, respectively. The clear implication that Hamm is a perverse Christ
– one who advises “Lick your neighbor as yourself” (68) and who inflicts
suffering rather than bearing it – may lead us to wonder further if Beckett
may also have been thinking, as he fashioned the character of Hamm, of
canto 34 of the Inferno in which Christ “reappears” in the perverse form of a
Satan who re-enacts the Last Supper by eating notorious traitors (Brutus,
Cassius, and Judas) rather than offering his body and blood to his followers.
This pattern whereby Hamm repeats in a maleficent – and, hence,
dialectical – way a figure whose actions are beneficent in the source to which
Beckett alludes also relates to other biblical echoes, including the journey to
the Promised Land (recalled by Hamm’s derisive allusion to “manna in
heaven?”), the Joseph story (Hamm’s mention of the corn that he has in his
granaries), and the many gospel accounts of Christ curing the sick and
feeding the hungry, which are all compressed into Hamm’s account of the
man who begged him for “bread for his brat.”
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The difference between creative disguises and dialectical reversals also
corresponds to the distinction that Deleuze makes between the “will to
power” and the “desire for power” in Nietzsche et la philosophie. The will to
power – for Deleuze, as for Nietzsche – is a source of affirmation, whereas
the desire for power is a slavish, reactive and negative desire. The desire for
power, according to Deleuze, is nothing more than the image which the
impotent fashion of the will to power. A useful illustration of this distinction
appears in the photograph of Beckett directing Pozzo during rehearsals of
Warten auf Godot in 1975.
What I find especially intriguing in this photo is the close resemblance
between the gestures of Pozzo and Beckett, which amounts to a repetition into
which—in Deleuzian terms—has slipped a crucial difference. Pozzo, like
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Cousineau | Deleuze and Beckett
Hamm in Endgame, is motivated by a desire for power that will repeatedly
meet with frustration. Beckett, in contrast, is motivated by the will to power,
which, according to Deleuze is essentially creative and giving; it neither
aspires, nor seeks, nor does it desire power.
However, as the photo may also suggest, the will to power and the desire
for power, as well as the distinct forms of repetition to which they give rise,
are not entirely distinguishable from each other. We may even observe in
this photo something akin to Freud’s Ich-Spaltung – a splitting of the ego in
which the artist, as he obeys the promptings of the creative demon that
inspires and guides his aesthetic activity both uses and distances himself from
the part of his own personality that is in thrall to a destructive demon who
lures him into an impasse. It may also be worth remembering, in this
respect, Nietzsche’s idea that the will to power is always inhabited or
contaminated by reactive forces. The question then becomes how can one
overcome this contamination and give untrammelled expression to the
affirmative will to power. Beckett’s strategy, in Endgame as elsewhere, is to
project compulsive, or “involuntary,” repetitions upon an alter-ego –
perhaps we could even say a scapegoat – who is both like and unlike
himself.
This process is obviously at work in Beckett’s major novels, in which the
protagonists are writers who confront an apparently insurmountable
stumbling block that Beckett himself circumvents through the act of writing.
This explicit resemblance between Beckett and his creatures applies in a less
obvious, but no less fundamental way, to many of his plays in which we
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notice not only the proliferation of storytellers, whose art resembles that of
their creator, but of “protagonist/directors” whose exercise of power in their
directorial guise is every bit as meticulous – perhaps one could even say as
“dictatorial” – as Beckett’s.
Once we have understood that Hamm is struggling to repress the trauma
of parental indifference by refashioning himself as a powerful and “happy”
king who, in his turn, is indifferent to the suffering of others, the strategies
that contribute to this dialectical reversal become reasonably transparent: he
wears a “crown,” sits on a “throne,” issues “commands,” confiscates the
material goods of his kingdom, and even “quotes” Shakespeare’s Richard III
(“My kingdom for a nightman.”). When, on the contrary, we see that Beckett
is creatively imitating for his own theatrical purposes the diverse models
offered to him by the tyrant, the visual artist, and the orchestral conductor,
we see in this innovative self-fashioning something entirely different from an
endlessly repeated and ultimately futile cliché.
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Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957.
---. Endgame. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1962.
---. Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Norton, 1975.
Gontarski, S. E. The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
Passeron, René, ed. Création et répétition. Paris: Editions Clancier-Guénaud,
1982.
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