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Today / Aujourd'hui
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CRITIQUE AND FORM:
Adorno on Godot and Endgame
Chris Conti
(Adorno, 1997, 6)
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well with the loss of meaning implied by the play's absence of con
tent. No other play - with the possible exception of its successor,
Endgame - has been so puzzled over as to what it means. Doubt con
cerning the play's content (or lack of it) led many to believe the play a
hoax, and like all hoaxes, the more one searched for a meaningful
structure the more one was taken in by the hoax: "Waitingfor Godot
is not a real carrot; it is a patiently painted, painstakingly formed plas
tic job for the intellectual fruit bowl [...] asking for a thousand read
ings [it] has none of its own to give" (Kerr, 20).
But the devastated landscape suggested by Godofs emptied
stage reawakened traumatic wartime memories, and many audiences
felt they had glimpsed in the play the catastrophic outcome of western
civilisation. Articulating this relation to historical reality proved diffi
cult, because while the play seemed to be about occupied France, the
holocaust, postwar devastation, the catastrophic fate of civilisation, it
did not refer directly to any of these. The growing conviction in the
universal importance of the play resisted articulation, as if Godot had
divested itself of any connection to history beyond testifying to its
catastrophic barbarism. But how could a play drained of content relate
to the actual social dramas of the day? The absence of this direct rela
tion encouraged the idea of the play as an allegory of the lamentable
human condition, "a modern morality play, on permanent Christian
themes" (Fraser, 84). Allegory established Godot's universality but at
the risk of imposing redemptive religious meanings. So as well as a
play about nothing, Godot became known as a play about anything
and everything, meaning whatever you wanted it to mean because its
symbols were pliable enough to meet the needs of theoretical or re
ligious consolation.
Godot's sheer variety of interpretations suddenly seemed suspi
cious. Indeed the more critics enthused about the profundity of the
play the more hollow it sounded. Uncertainty about the meaning of
the play gathered around the absent character of Godot, as if the titular
character might justify the dearth of stage action and confer at least
symbolic unity on the disorder of the play. Alain Robbe-Grillet chafed
at such attempts to dignify the poverty of Beckett's tramps and
blocked the path to such affirmative criticism by asserting the play
was not 'about' anything at all. It was about itself; the physical pres
ence of the tramps on stage:
278
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Explanations flow in from all quarters, each more pointless
than the last. Godot is God [...] Godot [...] is the earthly
ideal of a better social order [...] Or else Godot is death [...]
Godot is silence [...] Godot is the inaccessible self [...] But
these suggestions are merely attempts to limit the damage,
and even the most ridiculous of them cannot efface in any
one's mind the reality of the play itself, that part of it which
is at once most profound and quite superficial, and of which
one can only say: Godot is the person two tramps are wait
ing for at the side of the road, and who does not come.
(110)
This anti-criticism reduced the play to the barest of plot descriptions
and aped Beckett's own refusal to say what the play meant or who
Godot represented: "Those who are perplexed by the play's 'meaning'
may draw at least some comfort from the author's assurance that it
means what it says, neither more nor less" (Fletcher, 68). The sense of
the play was to be found by feeling it in a performance, not by hunting
down symbols in the text: "So the play is not 'about': it is itself; it is a
play" (Kenner, 31). If the play was devoid of content, it was because
the form was the content. What this meant was unclear, because it
restated the problem: while everyone agreed there was an excessive
use of form in the play, few agreed as to what this meant.
If symbolic criticism made too much of the play this anti
criticism made too little, confirming sceptics in their view of the play
as a pretentious hoax. But as Robbe-Grillet suggests, Godot seemed to
include the various perspectives of criticism and deflect each as in
adequate to it. That an artwork is not exhausted by its interpretations
is one of its definitions, but Godot offered shelter to grand interpreta
tions precisely to scuttle them, defeating its symbolic accounts be
cause it already contained a critique of the symbol. Theodor Adorno
understood this negative moment as essential to the modernist artwork
and its new critical function.
279
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2. Difficulty and disintegration
Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their
will, to the extent that they negate meaning.
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Kafka's and Beckett's unheroic narratives was bad faith. The crisis of
subjectivity was an objective situation; the categories conferring spe
cious order on social development the real solipsism.
The logic of disintegration thus describes the objective condi
tions of modernity and how they affect subjective life. The authority
of narrative recollection to order human experience into integral uni
ties and meaningful wholes has been undermined by the success of
science as a cognitive paradigm and the success of capital as an socio
economic one. This undermining of the structure of experience has
profound consequences for critique and aesthetic form. "The explo
sion of metaphysical meaning" (1992, 242), as Adorno refers to Max
Weber's disenchantment thesis, renders the older aesthetic unity
which relied on it unavailable. To persist with conventional forms that
implied the coherence of subjective life meant artistic ignorance (ex
istentialist theatre), complicity in barbarism (culture industry) or both
(socialist realism). The integral unity that once characterised art per
sisted now as a forgery. Only a discordant aesthetic unity was equal to
the extremities of the age: "Beckett's plays are absurd not because of
the absence of any meaning, for then they would simply be irrelevant,
but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history" (1997,
153). This history was the central concern of Adorno's aesthetic the
ory and, if we are to believe Adorno, of Beckett's theatre. The diffi
culty of understanding Godot and Endgame, Adorno contends, finds a
counterpart in the difficulty of understanding the irrationality of con
temporary society. The temptation to dispel the darkness of either play
with the clarity of meaning must therefore be resisted (1997, 27).
Once again, the onus is reversed: criticism must measure up to the
plays, not the plays to criticism; it is not the plays that must yield in
telligibility in conceptual terms, but conceptual terms that must yield
before the irrationality of contemporary life. Reconstructing this un
intelligibility brings the plays' content into view: the critique of the
instrumentalisation of modern life.
The difficulty facing an artist who accepted that the logic of
disintegration did not stop at the door of the arts was to incorporate
the fragmentation of meaning in forms that enacted the integral unity
of meaning. It was not enough to write a play about absurdity (like
Sartre's Huis Clos), as if art could take the measure of social rationali
sation simply by making it a topic. Treating absurdity as a theme or
making it a category imparted to it a coherency it did not possess,
281
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thereby escaping the very experience it purported to treat. The mean
ing lost from social life is in this way won back in art, reducing art to
consolation. The integral unity of the pre-modernist artwork articu
lated meanings positively and implied the unity of the social. The
modernist artwork, alternatively, no longer represents the unity of the
social because the social no longer constituted a unity (1992, 244).
As the experience of the disintegration of experience evaded di
rect presentation, it had to find expression at the level of form, in the
logic of the material itself and not simply in the content. A new aes
thetic unity would bear the wounds inflicted by the historical crisis of
subjectivity, gathering up critique into the details of form by giving
expression to the powerlessness of the subject. The materials com
bined to produce the eviscerated reality of Godot and Endgame there
fore carried an implicit critique. Becket's method was able to admit a
negativity of meaning into the details of form, implicating the means
of presentation in the negativity it sought to express, and in the proc
ess revealed the shortcomings of the existentialism with which it is
still often confused. Conventional dramatic categories are not rejected
in this process, they are subjected to the experience of disintegration.
The result is not chaos of form, but the search for a new unity capable
of bearing this antinomy. A disrupted unity, bearing the wounds of the
destruction of experience, defined a task demanding the same rigour
that defined the integral unity of traditional artworks. For Adorno, the
crisis of subjectivity was not a situation art could avoid; it had rather
to bear it, and would be judged on its ability to do so.
In Beckett's plainer terms, the task was "to find a form that ac
commodates the mess" (Driver, 23). The mess, however, encompassed
art as well, recoiling on the forms that sought to present it. Beckett
understood the artist's implication in this task, this time in more para
doxical terms that Adorno would have recognised, when 'B.' in
"Three Dialogues" speaks of "the expression that there is nothing to
express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to ex
press, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the
obligation to express" (17). The goal of a new aesthetic unity implied
immersion in the material, for only here could the expression of the
subject deprived of expression occur. Adorno and Beckett reinsert the
question of commitment into the immanent dialectic of form. Critique
in Go dot and Endgame proceeds via determinate negation of meaning
- testing traditional categories against contemporary experience - not
282
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its abstract negation. In this process, old and forgotten forms emerge
as new possibilities. Music-hall gags and panto, stichomythia, the
Greek messenger and medieval angel, the Japanese Noh play make up
the materials of this new unity, just as the conversational games and
rituals of the tramps, which seemed so strange to Godot's first audi
ences, are some of its fruits. This formal experimentation is the means
by which both plays put 'meaning on trial', and is the reason why
Adorno saw in them the retrospective vision of the catastrophe of
history that Walter Benjamin saw in Klee's Angelus Novus.
3. Damaged life
Even the jokes of those who have been damaged are dam
aged.
283
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God be with the days!
the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real
fate lies. It is as if the reified, hardened plaster cast of events
takes the place of events themselves. Men are reduced to
walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no
spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on screen.
(1978, 55)
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to play", said Robbe-Grillet (113). Like the mime Act without Words
that followed the first London production of Endgame, the tramps are
trapped in a hellish repetition. As well as the source of comedy and
the reinvention of old forms, then, the word-play and rituals represent
attempts to cope with the 'withering of experience'. Even the play's
darker remarks are framed as conversational diversions. Pozzo's pero
ration, "That's how it is on this bitch of an earth", is delivered with an
eye on his audience: "How did you find me? Good? Fair? Middling?"
(38). Lucky's fragmented speech, also delivered as an entertainment
for the other players, is the play's celebrated instance of the withering
of experience.
Though trapped in a present cut off from the past and future, the
tramps constantly take their bearings, arguing over whether or not
they are in the same spot as the day before, whether the tree has grown
a leaf or two, whether Estragon remembers anything of the day before.
Pozzo and Lucky provide a new set of diversions, and later on (in
their absence) the subject of a game (72-73). The prospect of suicide
or parting from each other also become games. Indeed anything can
and does becomes the subject of a game, because the withering of
experience encompasses everything. The games are designed to pass
the time, and perhaps an entire life, but threaten to fail when needed
most:
285
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ESTRAGON: I'm trying.
Silence.
(63-64)
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It is not just the jokes and one-liners that testify to damaged
life; joke-telling itself becomes another coping technique, though
hardly a successful one:
287
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the culture built after Auschwitz" (1992, 267). The peculiar concrete
ness of Beckett's objects - armchair, gaff, stepladder, bloody hand
kerchief - possess something of the disenchanted character of modern
life generally that calls for conceptual articulation, even as it evades it.
The task facing criticism is to explore this tension between disen
chanted particulars and the concept without releasing it altogether.
This means resisting the temptation to construct a philosophy of the
remainder out of Beckett's remains - a reduction Adorno risks when
he reads Endgame as the deconstruction of the subject1 - for the more
difficult task of articulating Beckett's method in connection with the
eviscerated reality of postwar life, which unfolds with the logic of
catastrophe.
Godot proved Beckett's method adequate to the destruction of
experience, the ne plus ultra of which is the inescapable prospect of
nuclear annihilation. Reference to contemporary reality is once again
withheld, giving the play the appearance of "an allegory whose inten
tion has fizzled out" (1992, 269). Endgame is no more 'about' nuclear
Armageddon than Godot is 'about' occupied France. A drama about
nuclear catastrophe would only reveal the inadequacy of its constitu
ents, "solely because its plot would comfortingly falsify the historical
horror of anonymity by displacing it onto human characters and ac
tions" (1992, 245). The bomb is never referred to - this would render
it more amenable to the concept and to understanding itself - but the
nihilism of technical reason represented by the bomb suffuses the
linguistic and dramaturgical infrastructure of the play.
The absurd dialogue and rehearsed patter, for example, is a re
sponse to a collapsed world and not in itself absurd. Vladimir's cajol
ery, "Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can't you, once in a way?" (12),
becomes Hamm's shrill command, "Keep going, can't you, keep go
ing!" (40). The word games this time possess a logic that cannot be
mistaken for stoic endurance:
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CLOV: No.
HAMM: [Violently.] Then open it!
(43)
This inverted logic seeps into the object-world of the play:
(34)
What does the reason for anything matter at this stage? The idea that
this form of life could "mean something" provokes Clov's strangled
laughter; a "rational being" returning to earth might make sense of
this mockery (27), though not enough to enjoy "a good guffaw" (41).
While everything has to be explained to the creatures (32), no expla
nation could possibly suffice (47).
This logic is turned against life itself, as if Hamm and Clov
were the last men and given the task of overseeing the extinction of
the species. Both take an ironic pleasure executing this duty:
(27)
Not even the kitchen rat can escape (37). Clov powders his groin with
insecticide aimed at the flea, though the earth went sterile long before
he did. The play's drive to sterility, or ironic solidarity with the tech
nical reason that culminates in lead waves (25) and stinking corpses
289
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(33), justifies Hamm's denial of help to the interlocutor of his chroni
cle, who wants food for his son ("as if the sex mattered"):
The last sentence might be the refrain of the play. When Clov spies a
boy through the window he prepares to exterminate him as he had the
flea:
The boy, like the flea, the rat, and Hamm's interlocutor, may be in
vented for the purpose of distraction, especially when Hamm's appar
ent direction of the action is considered: "It's the end Clov, we've
come to the end" (50). The interruptions and rehearsed narrative tone
of Hamm's story suggest not its unreality, however, but the narrative
scenery required to relate the moral vacuum at the centre of it. In Go
dot this could still be done in the slapstick antics of Vladimir and Es
tragon's long-winded responses to Pozzo's cries for help, but End
game's theatricality is a darker reminder of the fafade required to
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conceal the broken social bond. Hamm and Clov live on, or play out
their lives, with no wish for self-preservation but only to ensure the
end is not miscarried, lest the agony start all over again. That a design,
any design, may be at work in this is a hope that can only be whis
pered: "Something is taking its course" (17, 26).
The missing ends in Endgame are moral as well as narrative, for
characters in search of an ending find their counterpart in lives with
out ethical and meaningful ends. Just as the bomb exceeds all con
ceivable ends, so Beckett's endlessness is our own.
Note
Works Cited
291
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Fletcher, John, and John Spurling, Beckett: A Study of His Plays (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1972).
Fraser, G.S., The Times Literary Supplement (10 Feb. 1956), 84.
Kenner, Hugh, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1973).
Kerr, Walter, in Eric Bentley, New Republic (14 May 1956), 20-21.
Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York:
Simon &Schuster, 1996).
Mercier, Vivian, "The Mathematical Limit", The Nation 188 (14 Feb. 1959),
144-45.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, "Samuel Beckett, or 'Presence' in the Theatre", in
Martin Esslin, 108-116.
Winer, Robert, "The Whole Story", in The World of Samuel Beckett, ed.
Joseph J. Smith (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP,
1991), 73-85.
292
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