Words Working Overtime: 'Endgame' and 'No Man's Land'

Abstract

Writers are front and centre in Endgame and No Man's Land, literally and figuratively. Hamm composes his chronicle onstage; his memory of the painter-engraver may be a fiction; he mentions dramatist's tools (aside, dialogue, soliloquy); he begins to weave Clov's last words into a story even before they are uttered. Hamm is the dominant member of a family whose males have the authorial itch; Nagg narrates what he calls a story, and Clov rages against the inadequacies of language: 'I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others', and 'I ask the words that remain sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say'(5 I: 44).1 In Pinter's play Hirst and Spooner invent spurious memories. Hirst, the successful man of letters, is haunted by poetic images but feels obliged to write a critical appraisal of a subject that has slipped his mind. In his family Briggs claims that Foster is a poet. Spooner has had a chequered career, but he affirms that he is young and a poet, who has penned terza rima and has been translated. He notices a clumsy construction, remarks on a metaphor, and affirms to Hirst: 'All we have left is the English language'. The English language is not all these poets and their creators have left, but it is a burden in both these plays about authors (though Endgame was originally composed in French). Beckett and Pinter shoulder this burden by making it look light; they strip down metaphor, unravel rhetoric, and spurn recondite vocabulary. Like Maddy Rooney of All That Fall, they 'use none but the simplest words'. Use and re-use and use yet again. They did not of course invent verbal repetition, and Gertrude Stein preceded them in exploiting it dramatically, but they alone display the dramatic opalescence of repetition. That opalescence is paradoxically bright in plays of deliberately dim light (Endgame (1956) and No Man's Land (I975)), four-character plays set in claustrophobic rooms.