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Life Goes On: Endgame as Anti-Pastoral Elegy GEOFF HAMILTO N The woods of Arcady are dead, And over istheir antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Grey Truth is now her painted lOY; Yet still she turns her restless head: But 0, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked lunc that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good. - Yeats, "The Song of lh.e Happy Shepherd" Pastoral poetry is said to have begun more than two millennia ago with Theocritus , the subdivision called the pastoral elegy born along with it in that poet's first Idyll, where Thyrsis laments the death of Daphnis. The representation of shepherds in a Golden Age, humble but empowered by song, was thus linked with death and mourning from the start.' Other subjects and devices associated with pastoral, including the life of dignified ease known as otium, the singing match between shepherds, and the allegorical representation of eminent figures, were employed by Theocritus and taken up by generations of poets, dramatists, and prose writers in a tradition that includes, at its most sublime heights in English, the work of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley . Yeats may have written of the death of the "woods of Arcady" in the late nineteenth century (relying upon the genre itself, of course, to announce its obsolescence), but the pastoral has lived on, even when, as in T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," Ted Hughes's The Hawk ill the Rain, or certain of the novels of Don DeLillo, it is an inverted, mock, or anti-pastoral. The imaginative Modern Drama, 45:4 (Winter 2002) 6 11 6.2 GEOFF HAMILTON connection of human suffering, perceptions of loss, and songs of hope and consolation with natural cycles of creation and destruction is, apparently, fecund enough to prolong the elegiac strand of the tradition for another few millennia, even if, as poets of the wasteland have demonstrated, nature is degraded far enough in our real and imaginary worlds to make savage irony the last keynote of pastoral themes. Commentators have tended to overlook the relevance of the pastoral tradition to Samuel Beckett's work, and in the case of Endgame the oversight has been nearly complete.' This is rather odd, since elegiac concerns are front and centre in the play, and nature's destruction one of the principal subjects of Hamm and Clov's well-harrowed conversation. As in so much of Beckett, the inner and the outer are confounded here: the ruined landscape, or what we hear about what is left of it, suggests the projection of melllal desolation, and the stage set itself which contains Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell, has been likened to the inside of a skull (Kenner 41). The pathetic fallacy, or nature's response to human feelings, is conventional in pastoral elegies and arguably present here in extreme form, although the priority of the human over the natural , or our sense that the human fall precedes nature's, is never made explicit, while hopes about eventual reversals or rejuvenations are only laughable. This is obviously no Arcadia, but Arcadian (or near-Arcadian) subjects haunt each character's speech, while appeals to God to account for suffering - corresponding to invocations of pagan deities in pastoral poetry - are a definitive obsession. Beckett's characters are physically indoors - and except for Clov, who can walk but not sit down, immobile - but their narratives continually direct them back and out, toward uncanny and unspoiled vistas conceived as existing before or beyond the infernal here and now. Endgame's use of the pastoral tradition is, needless to say, fiercely parodic, an ironic stance also adopted. as commentators routinely note. towards the Bible and Shakespeare. Just as, for instance, Richard III is lampooned in the line "My kingdom for a nightman!" (Beckett 23), or Christ in the blasphemous "Lick your neighbor as yourself!" (68), themes associated with pastoral repeatedly appear in bathetic synecdoche. The process is opportunistic rather than systematic, but it is insistent enough to place all literary (and indeed all spiritual) authority in question. Pastoral elegies, like elegies of any kind...

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