Negative Definition in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days

Abstract

If one all-pervading technique can be said to be operating in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, it is technique of negative definition. Beckett presents his vision of modernity not by showing us what life is but rather by showing us what it is not. As play begins, we find a man and a woman acting out their drama in a modified Edenistic setting. Instead of original garden, bountiful and teeming with life, we find a landscape which exhibits a of simplicity and symmetry.' A blazing sun beats down mercilessly on a scorched earth. Winnie is shocked when she discovers animal life in form of an emmet: Looks like life of some kind! she cries (p. 29). This Eden stands at very end of Becketonian time cycle--at that point where an originally energy-charged creation has atrophied to a state of maximum sterility as man and his civilization come to a physical and spiritual dead end. Winnie, who is half buried in a mound of earth, and her husband, Willie, who lives in a hole on other side of mound, are aware of fact that gravity isn't what it used to be (p. 33) and that the earth has lost its atmosphere (p. 51). In order to develop a flexible and all-inclusive myth of past, Beckett makes frequent use of phrase the old style, using it as a foil by means of which he develops his vision of comment c'est. This suggestion of what we might call the new style is achieved as much through implicit reference to an ideal past as it is through explicit use of phrase the old style. The use of phrase itself can usually be placed within one or more of following categories: 1. literary and social. 2. concepts of time. 3. form and content. 4. death. Ruby Cohn has noted that the old style is a reference to Dante's phrase, dolce stil nuovo (sweet new style), which ushered in vigorous literature of Rennaissance,2 and, indeed, at one point Winnie modifies phrase to the sweet old style (p. 22). Winnie is almost as good an anthology as Palgrave; she is full of quotations -bits and snatches from Shakespeare, Milton, and Gray. What Beckett emphasizes, however, is fact that these poets exist only in fragments and that it is very difficult for Winnie to remember more than a few words or