A Look Anew at Beckett’s Other Peg

Preamble

The topic of this essay,¹ as the title suggests, is Endgame's "dramatis non-persona" Mother Pegg, and how this non-persona functions as the focal point not only of that play in particular (Endgame), but figuratively - or rather, figurelessly: that is, as a function (functionally) rather than a figure per se - more generally in Beckett's work. As early, indeed, as 1935 (when Beckett attended a lecture at Tavistock and thought that he had heard a comment about someone who had "never really been born"), Beckett, in his works, began to delve or dig ("claw," as he once put it [Disjecta 107]) deeper and deeper into his personae - and "the persona" more generically - in order to come into contact with (if not, in fact, to come to terms with) the non-persona obscured by the persona, the non-being "masked" or "covered over" by being itself (which, thanks to the work of Beckett's contemporary and fellow 'Parisian immigré' Émmanuel Lévinas, is, in this article, designated as the "illeity" - ill-seen, ill-said - beyond the individual persona qua "ipseity"). In Endgame, Mother Pegg is this ill-seen, ill-said illeity (non-person) displaced - replaced - by the "personae" present and presented in the play; personae who (as we come to learn in Endgame's diegesis) are presented - illuminated - onstage by dint of a denial: viz. the denying of any light to Mother Pegg. At a critical point in the play, indeed, we are told (by way of the character Clov) that the light which shines upon the stage shines by the grace of a prior disgrace: the death by darkness of an absent other, Mother Pegg (who "died . . . [o]f darkness" [75], which explains her nonappearance in the play - her "existence by proxy" as Samuel Beckett would say [qtd. in Harvey 247]). This absent other or "être manqué" (Harvey 247)² is, I argue, the focal point qua vanishing-point of the play itself and of Beckett's writerly gaze en générale (poetic and dramatic) from the late 1930s or 1940s onward.

A Look Anew At Beckett'S Other Peg

In the section of Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic that Lawrence Harvey describes as a transcription of comments Beckett had supplied in conversations held in 1961 and 1962, Beckett is said to have expressed his sense of life as "existence by proxy" (qtd. in Harvey 247). Very often (and here I am paraphrasing Harvey paraphrasing Beckett) one is unable to take a single step without feeling that someone else is taking the step - feeling that one is going through the motions, so to speak. This feeling of being absent, of that within us which is absent from being, is the intuition, according to Beckett, of "a presence - embryonic, undeveloped - of a self that might have been but never got born: an être manqué" (qtd. in Harvey 247).

In 1968, Beckett explained to Charles Juliet that "I have always had the feeling that there was within me un être assassiné [an assassinated being]. Assassinated before my birth. It behooved me to find this assassinated being once again. Try to give it life again" (qtd. in Juliet 14).³ At this, Beckett recalled a lecture he had attended thirty years previously at Tavistock. "I once went to hear a lecture by Jung," Beckett continued.

(H)e spoke about one of his patients, a very young girl. At the end, as people were leaving, Jung stood there silently. And as if speaking to himself, astonished by the discovery that he was making, he added: 'Fundamentally, she had never been born.' I have always sensed that of myself as well - that I too had never been born.

(14)⁴

This Jungian aside, which became the "keystone" for Beckett "of [Jung's] entire analysis" (Bair 209), also appears a decade prior to the Juliet interview, in Beckett's All That Fall. Here Mrs. Rooney makes mention of the Jungian remark:

I remember his telling us the story of a little girl, very strange and unhappy in her ways, and how he treated her unsuccessfully over a...