Cliché and Voice in Samuel
Beckett’s Happy Days
Llewellyn Brown
HAPPY DAYS IS ESSENTIALLY A MONOLOGUE WHERE WINNIE
speaks alone, from time to time engaging a semblance of dialogue with
Willie. The flow of her speech is constant: Winnie passes time with words.
However the text indicates that her bodily agitation is equally as constant:
we note not only movements, but also pauses indicating interruptions, that
reveal the presence of fractures in her speech. We also observe that in this
play, speech appears to be situated on the same plane as the manipulation of
objects: the proximity of these two dimensions brings to the fore the
predominance of linguistic automatisms, clichés, in Winnie’s speech.
The predominance of cliché in Winnie’s speech has already been noticed.
Paul Lawley remarks: “The famous words of others constitute her greatest
bulwark; she is an inveterate alluder” (Lawley 95). It has also been noticed
LLEWELLYN BROWN is a teacher of literature at the Lycée international of Saint-Germain-en-Laye
and a tutor at the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense. His research, oriented by Lacanian
psychoanalysis, is centred on 20th Century French literature. His published works include Figures du
mensonge littéraire : essais sur l’écriture au XXe siècle (chapters dealing with the work of: Giono, Genet,
Proust, Duras, Aragon, Jabès, Sarraute. L’Harmattan, 2005); L’Esthétique du pli dans l’œuvre de Henri
Michaux (Lettres modernes Minard, 2007); Beckett, les fictions brèves : voir et dire (Lettres modernes
Minard, 2008); Étrange amour, portrait en énigme (Éditions D. Reinharc, 2009). He is the founding director
of the Samuel Beckett Series Lettres modernes Minard) : Samuel Beckett 1 : “L’Ascèse du sujet” (2011) ;
Samuel Beckett 2 : “Enjeux d’esthétique” (publication programmed for 2011).
Limit{e} Beckett 2 | Spring 2011
that the use of cliché is marked by the broken and incoherent nature of
Winnie’s speech. Jean-Claude Larrat points out that if her expression of
marvelling “is applied randomly to all and anything” (Larrat 64; our
translation), her words are not related to her context, and are not motivated
by a desire to communicate. What is more, the “already there” that
characterises the cliché “has neither order, nor consistency, nor coherence”
(Larrat 117; our translation). Elizabeth Barry sees in Winnie’s clichés an
expression of nostalgia for a “lost world of commonality” (Barry 118).
For our part, we shall aim to define the linguistic structure of clichés in
Happy Days, in order to show how their dominance tends to manifest an
effacing of any subjective or personal dimension of the character. This
obliteration is linked to the rigid and “full” nature of clichés, which shows
them to be real – that is to say, absolutely non-negotiable – and impossible to
dissociate from their inexpressible reverse side. It is in this way that clichés
contribute to create a scenic presence of a strange beauty.
Multiple forms of cliché
The term cliché unites several strata of meaning. In French, the initial
meaning dates from 1809: “A plaque bearing in relief the reproduction of a
page of composition […] and allowing the printing of a number of copies
without deteriorating the original” (Rey; our translation). The idea of the
cliché thus includes both a material dimension and the notion of serial
reproduction, detached from the original creation. Ruth Amossy and
Elisheva Rosen point out that the cliché does not exist by itself, as a purely
objective phenomenon, but is “always perceived as borrowed” (Amossy and
Rosen 17; our translation), and Elizabeth Barry observes that, contrary to
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idiom, “it is felt to have fallen” (Barry 2006, 4). In their definition, Amossy
and Rosen add that cliché “renders manifest the discourse of the Other:
diffuse and anonymous speech that belongs to all and bears the mark of
society” (Amossy and Rosen 17; our translation). If this analysis of cliché
accentuates – and rightly so – the cliché’s social aspect, its presence in Happy
Days will not constitute the main thrust of our study. If the cliché requires to
be studied in context (Amossy and Rosen, 22), a literary work creates a
construction that testifies to a specific form and usage of cliché: the latter will
be revelatory of an original approach to creation.
The categories of cliché in Happy Days are multiple. What characterises
them as a whole is the fact that they are utterances originating in common
discourse. Somewhat paradoxically, we will also classify as clichés utterances
of a literary origin. Of course, they were originally singular creations that
took form (according to the French or English versions of the play) under the
pens of Milton, Shakespeare (Hamlet, Cymbeline), Yeats, Racine, Verlaine,
Thomas Gray. However their inclusion in Winnie’s speech reduces these
elements to their status as part of a common cultural reserve, to the point of
annulling their specificity. For example, no allusion is made to their literary
source, and they are often placed on the same level as the character’s other
phrases. Certainly, Winnie often indicates their citational character, but she
does so by means of a sentence that, itself, constitutes a stereotyped formula:
“That is what I find so wonderful, a part remains, of one’s classics, to help
one through the day” (164). The expression “one’s classics” denotes a distant
appreciation, designating a category of works that remain cut off from living
speech, from their creative dimension. This fits in with Amossy and Rosen’s
distinction between literary allusion and cliché: whereas the former
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maintains a precise link to a precise text, the cliché effaces this connection
(Amossy and Rosen 16).
The recourse to pre-formatted speech is manifest in the moments when
the two characters read various texts aloud. Winnie reads labels, such as the
one describing the product intended to remedy a lack of energy – “Loss of
spirits… lack of keenness… want of appetite…” (141) – or that of the
toothbrush (153). For his part, Willie supplies the dictionary definition of the
word hog (159). He also reads passages from the newspaper, giving a picture
of the traditional Ireland, whose narrow-mindedness Beckett denounced
(142, 159). In these readings the character’s speech is reduced to the
repetition of existing utterances.
We also find sentences from everyday language, betraying an absence of
invention, but whose source is not always identifiable. These are reified
expressions. A number of Winnie’s sentences are manifestly ready-made
phrases. Such are the following, among others: “poor Willie […] no zest
[…] for anything […] no interest […] in life” (139).
This overview of the diverse forms of cliché present in Happy Days suggests
the necessity of postulating a degree of continuity between these different
levels. What characterises the cliché is, through its repetition, its formulaic
nature: the Latin etymon formula signifying “frame, rule, system”. If the
cliché is generally reproved, in any somewhat refined discourse – and, a
fortiori, in the context of creation – it is because it is reputed to denote an
absence of care and reflection, on the speaker’s behalf, a negligence resulting
from his refusal to seek originality and personal authenticity. However, if
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Brown | Cliché and Voice in Happy Days
this conception remains valid on the imaginary level – where one evaluates
others –, in Beckett’s creation it touches on a dimension we can qualify – in
Lacanian terms – as real. In order to grasp this aspect of the cliché, it is
important to first establish the structure that is at work.
Forclosure
It is instructive to approach the cliché in the light of the structuring of
language, taking into account the retroactive mechanism of the signifier,
which unfolds in two stages. Since discourse is deployed on a diachronic axis
– following a progressive movement – meaning can only appear as a result of a
punctuation that brings this movement to an end. Such punctuation is
situated in the place of the Other, as Jacques Lacan points out: “Meaning
always goes towards something, towards another signification, towards the
closing of the signification, it always refers to something that is before or that
turns back on itself” (Lacan 1981, 155; our translation). As Beckett declares
very explicitly in Texts for Nothing: “it’s for ever the same murmur, flowing
unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the
end gives the meaning to words” (Beckett 1995, 131). Carried along by his
enunciation, this particular narrator is unable to achieve the closure necessary
to form an utterance capable of producing meaning. Through the phrasal
closure, however, the utterance – that is inaugurated in a movement of
anticipation – returns to the subject from the place of the Other.
A subject who is, ab initio, inscribed in such a dynamic, will have access to
a dialectic1 owing to which, subsequently, any new experience will be
assimilated by means of this same mechanism. As Alain Vaissermann
explains: “For the neurotic [what one would call a “normal” subject], any
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appearance of a signifier coming from the Other, arriving out of the
unknown, will be referred back to a signifier known previously: this
mechanism is intended to integrate the new into the old, to relate the
unknown to what was previously known, that is to say to symbolise it by
integrating it into his story” (Vaissermann 4). Such a subject is thus, to a
large extent, armed in advance against the sudden appearance of unknown
events, whose brutal force is thus attenuated.
The specificity of the Beckettian subject, however, consists in not “being
born.”2 The latter expression, which is fundamental to Beckett’s work,
demands not to be understood as an anecdotal reference to the state of a
large number of characters – such as Malone’s death being the inversion of
birth, or the inability of the narrator of The Unnamable to “get born” (Beckett
376) – but on a structural level, where the subject has not been instituted,
once and for all, in language. Consequently, he has not had access to a
dialectic that would allow him to situate himself in relation to new events.
He is thus confronted with a dimension that is excluded from representation,
and for which he is not armed. This part of language that exceeds the
utterance and meaning – and that never ceases to inhabit the speech of any
subject – is called the voice: “the voice is firstly present in the place of the
Other, designating the subject precisely where he cannot respond, but at a
point where he is nevertheless summoned to respond” (Vaissermann 54).
What the subject encounters here is a breach that it is impossible to
negotiate, an abyss that he finds himself brutally referred back to.3 He in no
way disposes of the means to respond to this call. It is this precise experience
that the narrator of The Unnamable describes in the following sentence: “there
is nothing to be done, nothing special to be done, nothing doable to be
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done” (Beckett 2009b, 378). Only a “symbolic” Other can, by instituting the
subject within a dialectical framework, open up the “domain of the feasible”
(Beckett 1983, 141), or have the subject “restored to the feasible” (Beckett
1995, 116). Failing this, as Lacan explains for the schizophrenic subject, “all
the symbolic is real” (Lacan 1966, 392; our translation): no dialectic is
available for him to deal with the abyss.
We can thus perceive what distinguishes the use of clichés in everyday
language, from what we observe in Beckett. If, in the first case, it is a matter
of a simple renunciation of any intellectual effort, in the second, the subject
finds himself at grips with an impossibility. If the subject thus appears to be
radically dispossessed, it is because everything in language is henceforth
situated on the side of the Other. Thus, when Elizabeth Barry notes, in
relation to the notion of authority, that “Beckett’s work explores the notion
of an origin that one cannot find” (Barry 7), we would add that what takes
the place of this “origin” is what Beckett called the “absolute absence of the
Absolute” (Beckett 1983, 33).
Thus it is that, in Happy Days, the cliché takes the form of a massive
borrowing of utterances that are entirely situated – in a manifest manner –
in the domain of the Other: whether it be the dictionary – words that
condition everyone’s speech – or literary utterances, they are all rigorously
placed on the same level, they all manifest the same degree of reality. The
recourse to pre-existing elements characterises the subjects that, following
Hélène Deutsche’s analysis, act “as if” it imposes the necessity of borrowing
attributes (words, attitudes, gestures) from the Other, but also reveals the
subject’s powerlessness to bind them within a dialectic.4
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In this study, we will therefore understand the word cliché as the
preponderant weight of the language seen as belonging overwhelmingly to
the Other – both in the phrases she utters and in her interruptions – to the
exclusion of any subjective expression; the latter being accessible only by
means of an enunciation that, as such, engenders a division between the
manifest meaning and a hidden or involuntary one.5
Monologue
To call Winnie a “character” is problematic, since her speech is marked by a
radical absence of any subjectivity: the latter can only manifest itself as a
result of retroaction. With Winnie, we find no trace of an effect of truth,
capable of testifying to the subject’s singularity: “There is so little one can
say, one says it all. [Pause.] All one can. [Pause.] And no truth in it anywhere”
(161). “Truth” here does not denote a correlation between an utterance and
the world; it is of a specifically subjective nature. Winnie however does not
make a series of statements in order to attain a truth of this kind. She simply
speaks in order to say.
In doing so, she situates herself resolutely on the side of utterances, to the
exclusion of enunciation. Her discourse is a monologue because the words she
flings in Willie’s direction are only the simulacrum of an exchange. Once
again, Beckett radically annuls the idea of “communication,” as Lacan does
in the same way: “Communication as such is not primitive since originally S
[the subject at the stage of its mythical origin, before being marked by
language] has nothing to communicate, for the reason that all the
instruments of communication are on the other side, in the field of the
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Brown | Cliché and Voice in Happy Days
Other, and he has to receive them from the latter” (Lacan 2004, 314-5).
Regarding communication, Lacan speaks of fictional interlocution (Lacan 1981,
131): it is a purely imaginary language, a semblance of communication,
nourished by clichés. What Lacan points out here regarding our everyday
conception of linguistic exchanges acquires specific importance in Happy
Days.
In this play, the appearance of communication does not allow for the
instituting of “true semblances” (vrais-semblants), as may often be the case, in
our everyday life: it is real, non-negotiable. Thus Winnie resorts to repeating
her utterances, inserting the words “I say,” in an effort to latch on to the
utterance per se, to the exclusion of any hidden or equivocal dimension. It is
striking to notice that Lacan comments on precisely this form of speech,
pointing out first that the free association practiced in psychoanalysis is
intended to open up the space of enunciation. In this way, the subject no
longer tries to observe the conformity of his expression with received
criteria, endowed with general validity, but accepts the risk of revealing the
(usually unpleasant or “unacceptable”) signifiers that determine his
existence: “The subject is dispensed from supporting his discourse with an I
say. Speaking is quite a different matter from stating I say what I have just
stated. [In doing so] I say what is written here, and I can even repeat it,
which is essential, in the form in which, by repeating it, in order to vary, I
add that I have written it.” (Lacan 2006, 19). In the same way, since she has
at her disposal no subjective foundation capable of giving her access to
enunciation, Winnie feels the need to give her discourse a new start by
means of the same phrase: “I used to think… [pause]… I say I used to think”
(162).6 By these repeated starts, Winnie asserts that she hears herself.
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However, we notice a gap here between the French and the English. Where
Oh les beaux jours has Winnie hearing herself – “Mais je me l’entends dire
[…]” (1995, 39); “Je m’entends dire, Tais-toi maintenant, Winnie” (48) – the
English expresses the voice in its strangeness and its exteriority, by use of the
indefinite pronoun “something”: “But something tells me […]” (2006, 151);
“Something says, Stop talking now Winnie” (155). In the French version,
Winnie attempts to maintain a grip on herself by latching onto the utterance
in an attempt to avoid the unspeakable abyss which she encounters in the
place of enunciation.
Winnie’s repetitions compose a mosaic of self-quotations, as she fabricates
clichés from her own utterances. In the same way as Winnie must reinforce
her statements with an “I say,” she indicates the importance of habit by
expressions such as these: “that’s what I always say” (156); “Ah yes, things
have their life, that is what I always say, things have a life” (162). Once she
has pronounced a sentence, it is as if it belonged to a repertoire of
utterances, comparable to her bag, of which she asks herself: “Could I
enumerate its contents?” (151).
A subject who thus loses all autonomy in speech shows himself to be
spoken by the Other. As Daniel Katz observes: “A cliché demonstrates the
otherness speaking through us, speaking us like a language […] to the extent
that it is an automatic response.” (Katz 130). However, it is important to
measure the shift wrought by Beckett. If we are all “spoken by the Other” –
by the very fact that language is imposed on us in the form of an absolute
and unmoveable environment, by the fact of being conditioned by the desire
and the subjective inertia of our parents – we often succeed in dissimulating
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Brown | Cliché and Voice in Happy Days
this fundamental alienation behind a mask of individuality. But in Beckett’s
work, this dimension comes immediately to the fore, excluding all
appearance of individuality.7 Being “spoken by the Other” should be
understood, in Beckett, in a sense that is immediately and integrally real.
Thus it is that Winnie is led to address her exhortations to herself: “Sing
your song, Winnie” (159); “Pray your prayer, Winnie” (159).8 In these
sentences, Winnie is the bearer of the voice of the Other, in the sense that
her words ostensibly appear as those of a parent addressing his child: “How
often I have said, Put on your hat now Winnie, […] like a good girl, it will
do you good” (146). The stage indications repeat this idea, emphasising the
manner in which Winnie speaks to herself: “Sharply, as to one not paying
attention” (145). In these passages, the dimension of addressing – such as we
defined it at the beginning of our demonstration – is totally lacking: it is not
a subject who speaks to himself – in the usual sense of the expression – but,
to be exact, it is the Other of language who makes himself heard in the words
pronounced by the character. Winnie can only act, accomplish movements,
under the effect of the injunctive force of language, not as an expression of a
personal decision. Thus, for example, we find a form of prosopopoeia where
“reason” appears to be personified, in an adaptation of the stereotyped
expression: “Reason says […]” (153).9
Contrary to what happens ordinarily – in the learning process, for
example – the words Winnie pronounces never end up belonging to her,
and everything that comes from the Other remains revocable: “Words fail,
there are times when even they fail” (147). For this reason, she seeks a link to
words that endure, such as those of “classics.” But, ironically, she forgets the
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very phrases she qualifies as “unforgettable”: “What is that unforgettable
line?” (160); “What are those exquisite lines? […] One loses one’s classics”
(164); “There is my story, of course, when all else fails” (163). The common
or shared domain that pervades Winnie’s discourse – into which she
tirelessly delves – remains definitively on the side of the Other of language.
Winnie can in no way appropriate language in an inalienable manner: an
abyss lies between her and her utterances. It is precisely the borrowed
nature of her language – language that has never been integrated into a
form of subjectivity – that makes her speech impervious to the radical
inflexion that subjectivity habitually imposes on our utterances.
Absence of meaning
Winnie’s words are clichés in that they clearly reveal their autonomous
nature. Detached from any enunciation likely to endow them with an
anchoring and give them meaning, they represent only a ready-made
meaning, without the inscription of the slightest breach that could mark a
subjective position. Her utterances embody the frozen, sedimented
meanings that are conserved by collective existence.
As a result of being enclosed within their pre-constituted meaning,
Winnie’s utterances become empty, being repeated in the form of the
ritornello. The latter, as Lacan emphasises, is “the form signification assumes
when it no longer refers to anything. It is what we could call, as opposed to
the word, the ritornello” (Lacan 1981, 44; our translation).10 The ritornello
thus testifies to an emptying of meaning. Winnie’s entire discourse is
punctuated by refrains and ritornelli such as the following: “great mercy”
(161); “Oh yes, great mercies, great mercies” (161); “The old style!” (162);
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Brown | Cliché and Voice in Happy Days
“That is what I find so wonderful” (164). These refrains are often composed
of terms expressing a resolutely optimistic vision: “Marvellous gift […] wish
I had it” (140); “Oh this is going to be another happy day!” (142).
Such optimism does not express a “world view” – nothing authorises us to
ascribe a “will” or a “vision” to Winnie as a “character” – but an imperative
emanating from language, enjoining Winnie to postulate the existence of a
guarantor of meanings. It is not a matter of an authority capable of ensuring
the consistency of shared reality, but one that would allow her to continue to
turn her back on the threatening void. Such is the sense of Winnie’s reading
aloud the label on the toothbrush: “Fully guaranteed… [head up]… what’s
this it was ? […] Genuine pure … fully guaranteed […] genuine pure… ah !
hog’s setae” (158-9). The irony here, that a simple commercial label claims
to offer such a guarantee, is ferocious. Moreover, the latter concerns a
product derived from a hog, that is to say, an animal deprived of its virile
attributes: “Castrated male swine. […] Reared for slaughter” (159). It also
guarantees to preserve “keenness” (141), in accordance with advertising
slogans, that is to say a promise emanating from the domain of
institutionalised dupery. Of course, such guarantees refer to an environment
totally foreign to the world evoked in the play: they are without any real or
verifiable relevance. We can interpret in the same way the speech expressing
belief in Providence, as in Winnie’s payers. The assurance of an agent
guaranteeing the reliability of language and meanings remains, of course,
totally vain. In Winnie’s speech, significations are reduced to themselves:
superfluous, redundant, for want of being articulated with a dimension of
subjective truth; without any purchase on a reality that exceeds them, and in
which they could find an anchorage.
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Words as things
Winnie’s utterances compose a discourse intended to give substance to
speech, in order to fill up her day. Words thus appear to be things,11 insofar
as they are not subordinated to any subjective dialectic.12 Treated like
objects, Winnie’s clichés are closed utterances, endowed with their content
of meaning and devoid of any possibility of providing an opening to the
unknown.
Thus, Winnie’s words only exist in a limited quantity, and she uses them
to give content to her day: “they help me… through the day” (162). She
warns herself against the possible risk of prematurely using up her supply of
words: “don’t squander all your words for the day” (155). The same
principle applies to the alternation between words and gestures, as we see,
for example, in the following sentence: “what are those wonderful lines –
[wipes one eye] – woe woe is me [wipes the other] – to see what I see – [looks for
spectacles] – ah yes” (140). The evocation of the “wonderful lines” from
Hamlet is interrupted by the search for her spectacles, while entering in
resonance with this searching (“I see”, leading to “spectacles”). In the same
way, Winnie speaks of enumerating the content of her bag (151): the latter
constitutes a collection of objects, like the repertoire of words and sentences.
Winnie’s speech expresses her fear of finding herself faced with a stretch of
time that she would be powerless to fill with utterances: “what could I do, all
day long, I mean between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep?” (145);
“Sometimes all is over, for the day […] and the day not over” (157). When
speech is conditioned by a dialectical structure, it never ceases to renew
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itself, showing the effects of a desire that obeys the laws of negative entropy:
it allows for linguistic creation, the discovery of new unsuspected
perspectives. However, in the absence of the dimension of linguistic
retroaction, Winnie has no means of orienting herself in a temporality
productive of newness. For her, everything remains a question of routine, of
repetition and filling up. Her universe is congruent with that of the famous
incipit of Murphy: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing
new” (Beckett 2009a, 3). As with the effect of truth, orientation in a
temporal framework is above all of a subjective nature; it has nothing to do
with a simple conformity with a timeline. Consequently, Winnie proves to
be incapable of localising the appropriate moment to accomplish an action
or pronounce a phrase. Thus, she says of the song: “It bubbles up, for some
unknown reason, the time is ill chosen, one chokes it back” (164). Winnie’s
anxiety is born from the consciousness of an abyss within herself, to such a
point that if speech were to come to a halt, nothing would afford a barrier to
impede her fatal fall.
The Past
Insofar as it remains subordinated to the address towards the Other and to
enunciation, speech is marked by the logics of anticipation. The creation of
a signified results from a looping that closes this progression, by means of a
movement of retroaction. By contrast, the use of the cliché crushes
enunciation, enclosing it within a past that is definitively consumed. We
recognise here the preponderance of “the old style”: an expression that in no
way refers to a chronological past. In this text, the world of the past –
indicated by the words “that day” (161, 162) – has no tangible existence
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outside of Winnie’s speech. It has no existence on a historical or realistic
level: this world that no longer exists cannot be situated.13 As Elizabeth
Barry observes, “it might be Winnie’s ideas themselves rather than their
linguistic expression that are superannuated. They have, perhaps, lost their
currency in a universe impervious to human description or understanding”
(Barry 119). The past evoked in this play is basically of a logical nature,
instating an impassable distance between the subject and common
representations. Winnie’s clichés are so many elements borrowed from the
petrified “traversable space” (Beckett 1995, 111). In the same sense, the
directions indicate the stage set: “Very pompier trompe-l’œil backcloth” (138).
The notion of the past affects the play’s very temporality: for the
characters, there is no longer any “natural” day/night rhythm. Winnie and
Willie are cut off from any reference to a chronological flow that
characterises realistic representations. Everything follows the arbitrary
interventions of the bell. James Knowlson notes that according to Beckett,
time “is quite simply incomprehensible to her. She feels that everything will
remain the same and cannot understand how past events can have any
relationship to the present” (Knowlson 1985, 151). The past is not situated
in continuity with the present; it only represents a vague “elsewhere.” As
Beckett explained to Alan Schneider:
‘Old style’ and smile always provoked by word ‘day’ and
derivatives of similar. There is no more day in the old sense
because there is no more night, i.e. nothing but day. It is in a
way an apologetic smile for speaking in a style no longer
valid. ‘Old style’ suggests also of course old calendar before
revision. (Letter of 3 September 1961, Harmon102)
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The expression “nothing but the day” expresses here the preponderance not
only of the dazzling light (“blaze of hellish light,” 140) – that allows for no
shade, no nuance – but also the exclusive existence of meanings fixed once
and for all,14 and that admit no breach for a subjective existence: in this
universe, the Other remains oppressing, refusing the possibility for the
subject to construct his own meaning.15
The cliché and its reverse side
If the cliché constitutes the manifest side of discourse – a discourse that, in
Winnie’s case is desperately rectilinear, without a fault – it is because its
reverse side remains omnipresent. This “reverse side” cannot be conceived
as a simple “unconscious” that manifests itself through Freudian slips,
through undertones. On the contrary: we notice rather the radical absence
of any discursive hinterland. Nothing is hidden, everything is manifest.
The omnipresence of a discourse that is entirely made up of clichés, of
utterances devoid of enunciation – corresponding to the blinding light that
inundates the stage – makes the abyss even more present. Thus, whereas
clichés are usually utterances closed on themselves, marking a (redundant)
fullness of meaning, it is the abolition of meaning and interruption that
dominate. Beckett qualifies Winnie as an “interrupted being.”16 We notice,
for example, the reversals where Winnie systematically alternates between
the smile expressing a calm closure, and the opening up to anxiety: “all
comes back. [Pause.] All ? [Pause.] No, not all. [Smile.] No no. [Smile off.] Not
quite” (144). Ordinarily, dialectical speech, having its anchorage in the
dimension of the real, allows a subject to face the unknown, to find ways to
bypass the impossible and reduce its incidence. With Winnie, however, the
succession of clichés is doubled by her fundamental powerlessness, to which
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we can ascribe no visible cause: “To think there are times one cannot take
off one’s hat, not even if one’s life were at stake. […] How often I have said,
Put on your hat now Winnie, there is nothing else for it, take off your hat
now Winnie, like a good girl, it will do you good, and did not. [Pause.] Could
not” (146). Both sides – the full meaning of the utterance (the exhortation to
put her hat on) and the absolute void (unexplainable paralysis) – relay each
other here, like the two sides of a Möbius strip: nothing ensures their
mediation or attenuates their implacable alternation.
We can see cliché as determined, to a certain degree, by habit, as Beckett
defines it in Proust: “Habit is a compromise effected between the individual
and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic
eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability” (1987, 18-9). However,
the reverse side of habit is not personal singularity and expression – which
cliché is designed to efface – but is defined by Beckett in terms of suffering:
“perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful,
mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced
by the suffering of being” (19). It is this abrupt, antithetical structure that the
cliché brings into play in Happy Days.
If the cliché is an emanation of the voice of the Other, in its imperative
force, we can consider the bell that “rings piercingly” (Beckett 2006, 138) as the
cliché reduced to its simplest expression. Words are things, for Winnie; and
the bell appears as the essence of the thing beyond all meaning, beyond any
image.17 The bell does not fill up the day, it institutes it, following the
unpredictable logic of caprice. Thus, if it rings twice at the beginning of the
first act (insisting, in order to wake Winnie up), all semblance of control is
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Brown | Cliché and Voice in Happy Days
lost in the second (160, 161, 162, 164, 168). The bell’s particularity is to be
entirely situated on the side of the Other – it is not even part of the discourse
that traverses Winnie – and it intervenes like a violent blow that subjugates
the body.18 It presents an aspect that escapes meaning – it is a ritornello taken
to its most acute intensity – but, for this very reason, it is characterised by its
efficiency, just like the tormenting sun. Winnie emphasises this unbearable
and physical nature of the bell: “It hurts like a knife. [Pause.] A gouge.
[Pause.] One cannot ignore it” (162). The bell thus represents a real distress;
it tortures Winnie.
The bell’s intensity leads us to investigate the reverse side of the cliché: no
longer in its tautological nature (the utterance closed in on its own signifier)
but in its exclusion from representation. This reverse side is situated in the
tormenting voice. Thus, whereas Winnie appears to dispose freely of clichés
and objects, she is in reality subjected to the voice. The latter infiltrates
Winnie’s speech, in the second act: “… I say I used to think they were in my
head. [Smile.] But no. [Smile broader.] No no. [Smile off.] That was just logic.
[Pause.] Reason. I have not lost my reason. [Pause.] Not yet. [Pause.] Not all”
(162); “No no my head was always full of cries” (164); “I hear cries. [Pause.]
Do you ever hear cries, Willie?” (167). These cries are manifestations of the
voice, if we consider the latter as a logical category. It is what exceeds the
looping formed by enunciation, what insists insofar as Winnie’s utterances
are closed in on themselves, revealing the void that words, for lack of a
dialectical mechanism, are unable to breach. This tension is suggested in the
expression: “Beauty is a gasp between clichés” (Beckett 1983, 78). We can
associate this voice – “Like little… sunderings, little falls… apart” (162) –
with the Beckettian motifs of the “cyclone of electrons” (Beckett 1992, 113),
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or the “insurrection des molécules” (“insurrection of molecules”; our
translation), where “tout bouge, nage, fuit, revient, se défait, se refait. Tout
cesse, sans cesse” (“everything moves, swims, flees, returns, is undone and
reforms. All ceases, ceaselessly”; our translation) (Beckett 1990, 35).
Consequently this voice – which embodies Winnie’s anxiety19 – is the image
of that which is not shown, and which represents the reverse side of the stage
set: we can mention the ants that threaten to devour Winnie, while she is
completely immobilised in the mound; the darkness, the night, the earth that
is absorbing her slowly, surely.20 Winnie’s clichés thus appear as a register of
language that expresses her powerlessness to resist the mortal decline: once
again, like the Möbius strip, where nothing can stop the reverse side from
appearing in the same place as the “front” side.21 This dimension of the
voice is precisely evoked by Beckett when he describes to Brenda Bruce the
horror of Winnie’s situation, and adds: “And I thought who would cope
with that and go down singing, only a woman” (qtd. in Knowlson 1997,
501). The clichés’ platitude, their noisy and incessant chattering is mingled
with impenetrable silence, finally turning into a song.
Conclusion
In Happy Days, the cliché is the form assumed by signifiers that are closed in
on the signified, with the consequence that words appear as objects. Words
and things relay each other, occupying and organising Winnie’s space on
stage. The preponderance of the cliché, in this play, testifies to the insistence
of utterances that exclude any dimension of address. In her monologue,
Winnie shows to what extent she is foreign to the logic of anticipation that is
inherent in enunciation. We thus find created a strange musicality – in a
structure that Beckett renders manifest – where the static quality is
20
Brown | Cliché and Voice in Happy Days
conjugated with an increasing degradation.22 Paradoxically, Winnie’s forced
optimism is infinitely moving, because she knows no subjectivity: through
her, a human presence persists in the midst of a situation that appears
hostile to any humanity.
1
Of the psychotic, Lacan notes: “he is inaccessible, inert, stagnant as regards any dialectic”
(Lacan 1981, 31; our translation).
2 “The trouble with her was she had never really been born!” (All that Fall in Beckett 2006,
196). See also Juliet, 15.
3 “At the point where […] the Name-of-the-Father is called upon, can thus respond in the
Other a pure and simple hole” (Lacan 1966, 558).
4 An association made by Évelyne Grossman (Grossman 77).
5 The hidden or involuntary meaning would, in this, case, be considered as the “discourse
of the Other.” in the sense that the subject addresses himself to the latter and can, in the
event of “Freudian slips,” for example, recognize the disquieting presence of this
strangeness in the words he thought he controlled completely.
6 See also pp. 25, 28, 29.
7 Which gives an answer to Katz: “it is striking that in an ostensible commentary on Joyce,
Lacan evokes none other than the most typical Beckettian enunciative situation” (Katz 132).
In both cases, the same subjective structure is at work.
8 The grammatical construction that makes use of the internal object underscores the
clichéd nature of these sentences.
9 James Knowlson notes that in the Schiller production, Winnie “adopted the ‘imaginary
voice of reason’” (Knowlson 1985, 128). We also find the “voice of reason” in Texts for
Nothing (Beckett 1995, 118).
10 Years later, Deleuze and Guattari made the term ritornello famous (Deleuze and Guattari,
381-433: chapter “1837: de la ritournelle”). Deleuze read Lacan early on, following Lacan’s
seminar “Logique du fantasme” (1966-67), as is evidenced by references in Logique du sens
(1969). In his seminar, Lacan praised this book very highly (Lacan 2006, 218, 225, 227).
11 Hanna Segal has spoken of the difficulty for schizophrenics to attain symbolic thinking,
and their experience of objects as real. She evokes the “symbolic equation” where, “The
symbol does not represent the object, but is treated as though it was the object” (Segal 43).
However, in the light of Lacanian developments regarding the object as determined by a
lack, the fact that any recognizable object is already constructed by the signifier, and
particularly the tripartite distribution of the categories Real, Symbolic and Imaginary,
Segal’s observations do little to deepen our understanding of the way in which words can
come to be considered as “things.”
12 This aspect needs to be distinguished from a purely imaginary conception we find, for
example in Giono, who praises the power of creative language: “au lieu des mots, c’étaient
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Limit{e} Beckett 2 | Spring 2011
les choses elles-mêmes qu’il vous jetait dessus” / “instead of words, he threw the things
themselves at you” (Giono 285-6).
13 “That day. […] What day?” (147).
14 We develop this structural question in our book (Brown, 2008, 103 sqq.).
15 We are no longer in the symmetrically inverse situation: that of The Unnamable, where the
obscurity of pure enunciation dominates (the imperative to continue, on), and which knows
no punctuation capable of instituting meaning.
16 Beckett declares to Billie Whitelaw: ‘One of the clues of the play is interruption […].
Something begins ; something else begins. She begins but doesn’t carry through with it.
She’s constantly being interrupted or interrupting herself. She’s an interrupted being’
(Knowlson 1985, 16).
17 Cf., according to their varying modalities: the chime in Footfalls/Pas, the goad in Acts
without words II/Actes sans paroles II, knocks on the table in Ohio impromptu/Impromptu d’Ohio. In
Happy Days, however, Beckett insisted on the inhuman quality of the bell, to the detriment of
any picturesque or reassuring aspect: “I’m after a searing, cutting quality. It [the bell]
should be brief and cut off suddenly, clean cut like a blow or a knife on metal” (Knowlson
1985, 141).
18 It is worth noticing, by way of contrast, that Beckett replaced the alarm clock, that was
present in the original drafts, with this unbearable bell (Gontarski 77). Besides having a
much gentler sound, the alarm clock allows the character to have some control over the
way she experiences her day.
19 Not forgetting however that sounds also help Winnie to get through her day: “They are a
boon, sounds are a boon, they help me… through the day” (162).
20 The progressive disappearance of her body corresponds to death: “Does she feel her
legs ? he says. [Pause.] Is there any life in her legs ? he says” (165). Cf. “I am being given, if I
may venture the expression, birth into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear
already, of the great cunt of existence” (Beckett 2009b, 276)
21 Hwa-Soon Kim notes the relationship between the stage set and the question of
language: “The mound, which gets higher, can also imply the heap of Winnie’s failed
words. In this respect, Winnie’s mound is her visual resistance against the discourse of the
Other” (70). However she does not mention what we could also call the “bootstrap”
structure, whereby Winnie’s discourse is powerless to impede her continual decline, for lack
of a third term capable of introducing a salutary separation.
22 “Everything is wearing out or running out. At the start of Act I she takes the last swig of
her tonic before throwing away the bottle, her toothbrush has hardly any hairs left and the
lipstick, to use Beckett’s expression, is ‘visibly zu ende,’ the parasol is faded with a ‘mangy
fringe’ and even her pearl necklace is ‘more thread than pearls’” (Reading University
Library MS 1396/4/10, pp 80-83. Quoted in Pountney, 185).
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Brown | Cliché and Voice in Happy Days
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