The Comic Apocalypse of King Hamm

SINGULARS THE COMIC APOCALYPSE OF KING HAMM ITS OUTRAGEOUS BUFFOONERY AND WIT sustained in a context of apocalyptic implication, Samuel Beckett's Endgame achieves a disturbing synthesis. Presenting a stark vision of the consequences of those old, relentlessly renewed acts for which every man must claim some responsibility, the play swiftly becomes an oracle of man's doom: a reading in savage debaucheries and elegant ratiocinations of the silence ahead. Any laugher at Endgame laughs at his own wounds. In a hollow-brick shelter in a dead land beside a dead sea, four splintered humans in different extremities of pain and degradation await death. Blind and paralyzed Hamm, master of the domain, bleeding from his mouth, nostrils, and eyes, helpless in a throne-like chair, depends upon the obedience of Clov for survival. Hamm's father and mother, Nagg and Nell, legless and toothless, their sight and minds almost gone, are confined to ashbins; their stumps rest in the sand that Clov fetches from the shore of the dead sea. Clov, son of Hamm and servant to all, cannot sit, moves with a "stiff, staggering walk," has "visions," and stinks; although he can see, his eyes are "bad." Outside the shelter, Clov reports, all is "zero"; nothing stirs or sprouts. The earth turns very slowly: the scorching sun at last has sunk; in this twilight season the light is gray and the air chill. The characters complain that they are "cold," "perished," "freezing"; in time the freezing night will come. Witnessing this end, Beckett's audiences must suffer an apocalyptic laughter, a nearly unendurable participation in the last laughs of man. The fusion of the comic and the apocalyptic can be observed in the play's smallest parts. The simplest pun forces a smile at a smashed world of exploded meaning: "You're a bit of all right, aren't you?" Hamm says. "A smithereen," Clov replies. By the end of the play, such repeated references accumulate into an indisputable weight. More importantly, perhaps, they reveal a pattern of complicating implication ; and it is as a part of this pattern that any single reference begins to assume more significance than one can account for. For example, Hamm asks Clov what he does in his kitchen. CLOY. I look at the wall. HAMM. The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene? Naked bodies? CLOV. I see my light dying, 310 1966 COMIC ApOCALYPSE OF KING HAMM 311 "Mene, mene" was part of the message written by disembodied fingers on the wall of King Belshazzar's palace. Asked by the frightened king for an interpretation, Daniel, in whom there was "light and understanding and wisdom,· like the wisdom of the gods," replied that because the king had praised false, material gods and had not glorified "the God in whose hand thy breath is, ... the part of the hand was sent from him; ... This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it." "Mene, mene" thus suggests why Hamm's kingdom is in smithereens. But if only for a moment Hamm is regarded as Belshazzar, last king of Babylon, and Clov as the prophet Daniel, the ironies are more somber. Trapped in Hamm's darkening kingdom, Clov's light is of little possible use and can only be what it is-crooked and dying. King Hamm's contempt is understandable. In the "old shelter" the writing has long been everywhere on the wall and he needs no interpretation : "Naked bodies" would name just as well "what all is," "this ... this ... thing." By any name it is still an obscenity; Clov later says· it in a single word: "Corpsed." God has finished the kingdom , and all that is left to do here, as in Babylon, is to finish that which is finis'hed. The terse closing of the biblical narrative prefigures the end of Beckett's play: "In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain." "Mene, mene" is only one among many such allusions. The pursuit of its implications, however, even in this incomplete analysis, leads persistently toward the whole play. And it is finally a sense of wholeness-a total...