If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin. Hamm as stated, Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te [with you or without you], in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could. (Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, NY: Grove 1984, p.109.)

(In 1969 Alec Reid borrowed the phrase “all I could manage” for the title of his brilliant study of Beckett as playwright.) And when, finally, in Worstward Ho! - a prose piece of 1983 - Beckett appeared to pass judgement on his own career, “failure” was again the key term he

On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for be missaid. Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be Mi. Move in. Out of Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

But the failure - if there is one - does not so much serve to typify Beckett as an artist as to indicate the informing idea behind all the plots, characters, and the literary procedures of virtually all his works. And if those satirically-drawn bourgeois gentilhommes Moran (in Molloy) and Pozzo (in Godot) are patent exceptions, it is also true that these are satirised precisely because they fail to understand their own essential inauthenticity until it is forced upon them in the form of physical reduction when they find themselves lame, blind, impecunious, loveless, hungry and abandoned like those other characters whom they initially despise.

This opens the clear possibility that they are, in fact, mirror-images of the others and there is, in this and other respects, much evidence of a social concern in Beckett that places him on the side of the oppressed - masters, capitalists, colonists, &c.; yet his work does not readily give itself to political interpretations, least of all the revolutionary clichés of the Marxist since the empowerment of the masses has no place in his thinking. By early as 1931, when his idiosyncratic and ultimately self-reflexive essay on Marcel Proust appeared, Beckett had decided that the purpose of literary art was to explore the inner world of human consciousness, together with the suffering that seems inseparable from it, by means of what he called an ‘excavatory’ art:

The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contract of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn to the core of the eddy. He cannot practise friendship, because friendship is the centrifugal force of self-fear, self-negation. (Proust and Three Dialogues, pp.65-66.)

In retrospect it is easy to see the ideas developed in this essay as a programme for all the work that comes after. However true this may be in general terms - which is to say, however far his actual development gave substance to this single strand rather than another in his earlier critical thinking - there remains the danger of overlook a major shift in sensibility which seems to have overtaken him as a result of his experiences in wartime Europe. (‘Better Europe at war than Ireland at peace’, he once facetiously said.)

In Proust, the young Beckett laid out his deck of philosophical cards on the table, most of them derived from Schopenhauer - the great German pessimism who represented life as a constant upsurge and self-defeat of the human Will in a series of Representations which are the ages of history and the days of life itself. (In this view, history is an externalisation of an internal spiritual development and only intellect or spirit, finally, has any reality at all.)

Marcel Proust, author of La Recherche du Temps Perdu/The Remembrance of Past Things was obsessed with the phenomenon of human recall in memory which gives back to things past an existence momentarily more vivid than their original occurrence. He had no interest in Schopenhauer and can not be said to stand in the line of descent from the existentialist writers including Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Camus where Beckett himself is so with some justification so often placed by critics. Hence, when Beckett explains Proust in these terms -

Tragedy is the statement of an expiation [...] the expiation of an original sin [...] The sin of having been born. (Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duhuit, London: John Calder 1965; quoted in David Pattie, Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, London: Routledge, 2000, p.15.)

- he offers an explanation which reflects Schopenhauer better than the novelist in question and reflect, perhaps, the mind of Samuel Beckett better than that of either of the others. In truth, Marcel Proust could not have written that sentence with its echo of Schopenhauer’s conviction that life resembles a lost Eden more than anything else (though without actually being anything so biblically normative as that).

Proust’ s characters - like all characters in novels - are the bearers of specific moral defects as well as the emotional and sexual vices by which they impose cruelty upon each another. So far from being a philosophical thesis in disguise, his great work is arguably a society novel - even a “silver-fork” novel (having to do with the upper-classes) - rather that the vehicle of fatalistic generalisations of the kind that the young Beckett relished writing of:

Proust’s creature are victims, then, of this predominating condition and circumstance - Time; victims as lower organisms, conscious only of two dimensions and suddenly confronted with the mystery of height, are victims, victims and prisoners. There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither tomorrow nor yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday was not a milestone that has passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. A calamitous day, but calamitous not necessarily in content. The good and evil disposition of the object has neither reality nor significance. The immediate joys and sorrows of the body and the intelligence are so many superfoetations. Such as it was, it has been assimilated to the only world that has reality and significance, the world of our latent consciousness, and its cosmography has suffered a dislocation. (Proust [1931]; Grove Press Edn., 1957, p.13.)

The entity that undergoes definition here is life itself, of course; but the critic does not stop at description only: he adds a very precise measure of analysis which will provide him with the central motif of his own writings in prose and drama, the two-fold theme of suffering and habit.

The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectivation of the individual’s will, as Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitutes the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adapt[at]ions (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave sheets serve as swaddling clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being. (Ibid., p.19.)

It falls to Vladimir - the tramp (one of two) in Waiting for Godot who sustains the more intellectual and reflective part of the clownish dialogue that makes up the fabric of this terrifying play - to give climactic expression to those ideas on the Beckettian stage:

Was I sleeping, which the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? He’ll [Estragon] know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts [90] on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. I can’t go on! What have I said? (pp.90-91; Collected Dramatic Works, pp.84-85; my italics.)

These are depressing thoughts and Samuel Beckett is, indeed, the laureate of depression. His characters are depressed and, arguably, depressing; his vision of the world is essentially without hope, though not actively despairing. Indeed, one of the touchstones of his thinking, recurring in the form of a joke told in both Godot and Molloy about the two thieves crucified with Christ, one of whom was saved and the other damned: ‘Not a bad percentage’. From this irreverent parody of the agony on the cross we may take it that Beckett could not entirely dispense with the idea of some possible form of salvation, redeeming the world from the verdict of pure unrelieved tragedy and waste.

Here the relationship between imagination and belief is roughly equivalent to that in Schopenhauer where the idea of a lost Eden embedded in the Book of Genesis is accepted as an objective correlative of experience without being doctrinally true for all that. Or, to put it another way, there can be found in Samuel Beckett something of the anger of the agnostic at a God who has absconded [deus absconditus] as distinct from the equable temper of an atheist who simply knows (or thinks he knows) that God does not exist.

That Beckett himself was born on Good Friday seems especially appropriate since the life of his characters is invariably a form of slow crucifixion while his own young manhood was deeply troubled with such afflictions as depression, boils and other psychosomatic ailments. Suffering was, so to speak, his mission from the start, though not be be compared with the actual traumas of death by torture, warfare or starvation which were so much a part of the world in which he lived.

When asked directly about his attitude towards religion, Beckett was only willing to say, ‘Christianity is a mythology with which [he was] perfectly familiar, and so I use it’; and, when asked about its place in Waiting for Godot, he added, ‘[b]ut not in this case!’ (Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury 1978, p.327.) It is hard to believe this, so pervasive are the traces of Christianity in the play, whether we consider the crucifixion motif or the ‘map of the Holy Land’ which crops up in the first exchanges; yet these do not add up to a Christian message in the end, and that is presumably what he meant.

Beckett felt he had some evidence to go on when he disowned a positive interest in religion:

My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died. At the moment of crisis it had no more depth than an old school-tie. Irish Catholicism is not attractive, but it is deeper. (Quoted in Anthony Cronin, The Last Modernist, 1997, p.21.)

That sentence may remind us of the attraction that some other Anglo-Irishmen felt towards the religion of the majority, or at least a suspicion that their own religion was ultimately a hollow matter of political lip-service. both Shaw and Wilde owned versions of this outlook, though both are also capable of sheer agnosticism arising from a strong conviction that the religious idea is simply wrong for the sound theological reason that is no God.

With no God to look over us, it is natural that life should be depressing. Yet there is also an unmistakably secular meta-narrative behind the Chaplinesque array of broken shoes and hats: these are tokens of economic depression on the one hand - the Wall Street Crash of 1929 heavily marked the world in which Beckett came to maturity - but also symbols of a radical impoverishment of the spirit. That kind of impoverishment adds up to the belief that life is about nothing, for nothing, and on account of nothing at all. Just how characteristic of Beckett this despondent notion is can be judged by looking at the signal role of the word “nothing” in the early plays as well as in the novels.

Waiting for Godot is, in its absolute elements, a play in which nothing happens twice - as Vivian Mercier wittily remarked. Seen from this standpoint, it reads like a fugue on the theme of nothingness (nihil, nada), the utter lack of meaningfulness in the world of men:‘Nothing to be done’; ‘Nothing... there’s nothing to show’; ‘Nothing to be done’; ‘Nothing is certain when you’re about’ - arguably, an ambiguous statement; and, finally, ‘Nothing to be done’ (Faber Edn., p.11-21; italics mine). This perpetual litany serves to drive out any faith in the possibility of change or rescue: ‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!’ (Ibid., p.41.)

In Endgame (1957) comparably, the plot itself takes an even more starkly negative form as the characters awaits a catastrophe that will spell the end of the human life - either their own personal existences or that of the human species. Hamm and Clov apparently inhabit a devastated landscape since, outside the windows there is ‘[n]o more nature!’, as the latter tells the former (Faber Edn., p.16). Not surprisingly, contemporary audiences leapt to the idea that the playwright was referring to a nuclear holocaust, the dominant anxiety of their age. But the plot of Endgame is more ambiguous than that, more polyvalent.

Certainly it concerns some process whose last term is annihilation and that process itself has almost the status of a character, or at least a pervasive presence in the play. As Clov says repeatedly: ‘Something is taking its course’ (p.17; vide pp.26, 31). This may be taken as an allusion to some a morbid aetiology that might be history or cancer or the play itself; if not simply the process of time, that destructive element from which there is no escape as Beckett told us in his essay on Marcel Proust. It is the idea of time that explains the evocation of the sands of the hour glass when Clove says:

Finished, it must be finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. (Pause). Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. (Pause). I can’t be punished anymore. (Pause.) (Faber Edn., p.12.)

Yet there are other kinds of endgame to consider before reaching an adequate interpretation. Firstly, and semantically closest to the title, there is the game of chess from which the term is obviously borrowed. (An elaborately game of chess features in the novel Murphy.) Secondly, there is the end of a play such as the actors and the audience experience each night in the theatre. Not surprising, therefore, that Nell and Nag are shut up in their bins while the furniture covers descend on the central character before the house lights are turned off.

Self-reflexive elements of this kind are the life-blood of the play and the source of a good deal of its humour, as when Hamm explains his actions in conventionally theatrical terms: ‘An aside, ape! Did you never hear an aside before?’ (Faber Edn., p.49.) - and: ‘I’m warming up for my last soliloquy’ (Idem.) Another further convention is at work when the main characters, who have been ruthlessly pitted against each other from the start - the one a hammer (Hamm) beating on the other’s nail (Fr. clou) - finally bring down the curtain with a series of polite bows to each other like weary actors retiring from a life in the theatre:

HAMM: I am obliged to you, Clov, for your services. CLOV (turning sharply): Ah, pardon, it’s I am obliged to you. HAMM: Its we who are obliged to each other.

(Ibid., p.51)

This self-reflexive element invites us to consider the nature of art as a medium of expression, and to consider, what is more, the underlying medium of language which makes expression possible. Here we encounter the radical idea that, as language users, we inhabit a prison-house of words. And this leads to a contradiction: language is supposedly the tool by which we achieve expression yet, at the same time what it expresses is inevitably itself. Hence, in his dialogue with George Duhuit, Beckett spoke about the artist’s dilemma and his his own as ‘the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, together with the obligation to express' (Proust [... &c.], London: Calder, p.103.)

A specifically Beckettian refinement of this predicament house is the idea that our language is less the tool we use to negotiate our way in life than the source of the illusion that we possess an autonomous existence. This idea assumes the shape of a schizophrenic nightmare when the minds of Beckett’s characters fall under the influence of a ‘voice’ that tells them what to do:

I have spoken of a voice telling me things. I was getting to know it better now, to understand what it wanted. [...] Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly [...] the search for myself is ended. I am buried in the world, I knew I would find my place there one day, the old world cloisters me, victorious. (Trilogy, Picador Edn., p.199.)

Characters caught up in this sort of inner world can never be sure if their search for truth and selfhood, home or ‘mother’ - and every Beckettian character is on some sort of mission - is a futile torment or a holy grail: ‘But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am’ (ibid., p.226).

It falls to the Unnamable, at the last stage of the process of contraction that takes seems to take its course in Beckett’s trilogy of novels, to give expression to this idea in its simplest form: ‘I was given a pensum at birth perhaps, as a punishment for having been born’ (ibid, p.310). That pensum (simply a thought in Latin), is a very unsettling thing since it bears within itself the shocking possibility that, after all our attempts at self-expression, it is not we who think our thoughts at all but our thoughts that think us in to existence.

If Molloy grasps the substance of this idea -

You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To, hell with it anyway. (Ibid., p.33.)

- it is the Unnamable who confronts it in its elemental form:

[...] all words, there’s nothing else, you must go on, that’s all I know, they’re going to stop, I know that well, I can feel it, they’re going to abandon me, it will be the silence, for a moment, a good few moments, or it will be mine, the lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts, it will be I, you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my own story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Ibid., p.382.)

That is a hugely depressing vision. Yet, in those last phrases - perhaps the best-known words in Beckett’s Trilogy - a counter-balancing principle comes to light. For those very characters who endure so much are also the exponents of an illogical impulse of resistance: they will go on; and, in going on, they achieve partial escape from endless misery through laughter.

In this way the essential dynamic of Beckett’s art in the Trilogy is based on the reciprocal connection between earnestness and release - a humanist device already tested by James Joyce in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses and, perhaps, likewise at the root of all comic visions of experience. From this standpoint Molloy’s main affliction is an overdose of earnestness (however warranted by the nature of his predicament):

For I was already in the toils of earnestness. That has been my disease. I was born grave as others syphilitic. And gravely I struggled to be grave no more, to live, to invent, I know what I mean. But at each fresh attempt I lost my head, fled to my shadows as to sanctuary, to his lap who can neither live nor suffer the sight of others living. I say living without knowing what it is. I tried to live without knowing what I was trying. Perhaps I have lived after all, without knowing. I wonder why I speak of all this. Ah yes, to relieve the tedium. Live and cause to live. There is no use indicating words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle. After the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again, to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another. How false all this is. No time now to explain. I began again. But little by little with a different aim, no longer in order to succeed, but in order to fail. (Trilogy, Calder Edn., p.179.)

Against earnestness and all that it connotes of the human condition, the only antidote is laughter - often ironic and obscene and always touching on what is most intolerable about the creatures that we are. The unnamed narrator of First Love (1973) exemplifies this conception through his habitual resort to obscenity as a form of relief from the sheer desperation of his condition:

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must. The smell of corpses, distinctly perceptible under those of grass and humus mingled, I do not find unpleasant, a trifle on the sweet side perhaps, a trifle heady, but how infinitely preferable to what the living emit, their feet, teeth, armpits, arses, sticky foreskins and frustrated ovules. And when my father’s remains join in, however modestly, I can almost shed a tear.

Laughter may not, in the end, lead to happiness, but it stands in a powerful relation to its opposite. That is to say, the sheer extremity of our condition can only inspire laughter even if that laughter tends to dry up after the first application - as Nell, the decaying parent in Endgame believes:

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness [...] Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more. (Ibid., p.20.)

But then, with Beckett, we laugh again because the difference between the situation of the characters and that of the audience is that for the latter the spectacle is ultimately cathartic. It is cathartic because - as W. B. Yeats observed in ‘‘Lapis Lazuli’’ - tragedy, thus conceived, possesses the power of ‘transfiguring all that dread’.