Beckett's Endgame, or what talk can do

Beckett's Endgame,I or what talk: can do DINA SHERZER Je crois que Beckett est un grand revolutionnaire de la forme dialoguee. Roger Blin "RATHER DIFFICULT, ELLIPTIC, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than Godot" commented Beckett about Endgame.2 The play presents four characters locked up in a room; two of them, Nagg and Nell, are in trash-cans; Hamm, their blind and paralyzed son, sits in a wheelchair and is taken care of by Clov, a servant. These characters are not doing anything in particular: they are not waiting for somebody to come or for something to happen. They are just there, living in solitude, old age, and sickness. Like all Beckett 's characters, Nagg, Nell, Hamm, and Clov talk to each other; and talking is their main activity. Much critical work has been devoted to Endgame. Adorno shows that Beckett confronts the despair of Being, that he portrays the angst of a post-atomic age, and that he exposes the bankrupt assumptions of rationality. Esslin discusses the possible significance of the symbiotic couple Hamm and Clov (mind and body, Beckett and Joyce); Cohn is concerned with the symbolism of the characters' names (hammer and nail) and with the Shakespearian and biblical allusions.' Other scholars have focused on the language of Endgame. Easthope , for example, describes the unusual rhetorical techniques and the paradoxical dialogues created by the interplay of verbal connection and logical non sequitur. Whereas Kennedy notes the sense of "run291 292 DINA SHERZER down" emerging from the dialogues, Jacquart attracts our attention to the counterpoint technique and the use of slang and vulgar expressions . Rotjman emphasizes the feeling of inertia and immobility, and the tensions brought about by the dialogues; Weales points to Beckett 's ability to hear the exact clichts of social intercourse and to produce the wit and fun of gag exchanges' My contribution to this line of Beckett scholarship is to study systematically and precisely the different aspects of the dialogic exchanges. A close description of the ways in which the characters use language and speech is in order to show how the text has the power to claw. I intend to observe how the characters talk, how they talk to each other, and the effects and results that talk produces. My title derives from a book entitled How to do things with words' by the British philosopher of language J. L. Austin. Austin uses "words" metaphorically or generically, and he studies not the properties of lexical items but rather those of certain utterances in ideal contexts. He is concerned with types of speech acts that he calls performatives. such as: ~'I promise you to come to town," "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth," "I bet you sixpence that it will rain tomorrow." Such utterances perform something in the language itself. They are performances that occur in the act of saying them. Austin opposes such utterances with other utterances which he calls constatives , which are statements, that is, acts of saying something. His general point is that in the context of use, a sentence or utterance may contain more information than is overtly explicit. Thus "It is cold here," said by someone looking at an open window, can be understood to be a request or an order to close the window. The utterance "it is cold here" in Austin's terms does something apart from its overt semantic content. In this paper, inspired by Austin, I am concerned not with peiformatives per se, but with what talk does in the context of Endgame. Cavell wrote about Endgame: "Beckett has discovered how clowns would talk if they were given the power of speech, if they couldn't be slapped any more (nobody has the strength), or trip (they can't walk), or do pratfalls (they can't sit). Their words take the falls for them since they have to fall.'" But if it is true that words take falls, they also hit in particular ways. In fact, the play is a space in which three levels of meaning are generated from a single text through the characters ' talk: I. the referential level of the play, that...