THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS

ANALECT A HUSSERLIANA

THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME XIII

Editor:

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, Belmont, Mass.

EUGENE F. KAELIN Dept. of Philosophy, Rorida State University, Tallahassee

THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS

THE POETIC PLIGHT OF SAMUEL BECKETT

An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Literature

D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY

DORDRECHT: HOLLAND / BOSTON: U.S.A.

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Libruy of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kaelin, Eugene Francis, 1926-The unhappy consciousness.

(Analecta Husserliana ; v. 13) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906- -Philosophy. 2.

Phenomenology and literature. I. Title. II. Series. B3279.H94A129 vol. 13 [PR6003.E282Z5) 81-12137 ISBN-1 3: 978-94-009-8524-7 e-ISBN-1 3: 978-94-009-8522-3 0 0 1: 10.1007/978-94-009-8522-3

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Softcover reprint of the h ardcover 1 st e dition 1981

To My Parents, Who Knew, Without Having Read of It, The Truth of Consciousness

THE THEME

LITERATURE AND INTERDISCIPLINARY PHENOMENOLOGY: The Pessimism/Optimism controversy in the work of Samuel Beckett as

viewed by Eugene Kaelin

Eugene Kaelin's book appears in the sequence of the research program: Inter­disciplinary Phenomenology and literature, which is being carried out by The International Society for Phenomenology and Literature, and follows the forthcoming Volume XII of the Analecta Husserliana series entitled The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature. Professor Kaelin plays an im­portant role in this research program and we are happy that he has entrusted his book to us.

Proposing the philosophical program for our literature and interdisciplinary phenomenology research, I have attempted to highlight the main perspectives in which literature and philosophy meet.* The enigmatic situation of the human being, the vicissitudes of his existence, his ever repeated efforts to discover his "unique destiny" over against the common doom, present puzzl­ing issues by which both are haunted. To evoke, differentiate and show the multiple variants of answers to these issues is the task of one, while to unravel and to determine their ultimate factors in the Human Condition is that of the other.

In some literary works the philosophical quest is intermingled with artistic literary pursuit; in others, philosophical reflection serves as artistic means. Yet, due to these common innermost concerns, even those literary works which appear as devoid of philosophical thought call upon philosophy in order to be appropriately appreciated.

Eugene Kaelin's philosophical analysis of Beckett's work shows that al­though on a primary analysis philosophical thought and literary artistry may blend, it still needs philosophically enlightened criticism to perform - as if counteracting philosophy's first impact - a secondary interpretation, so as to bring the significance of this blend to its maturity.

* Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 'Poetica Nova: The Creative Crucibles of the Human Condition and of Art / A Treatise on the Metaphysics of the Human Condition and of Art,' Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XII, forthcoming.

vii

viii THE THEME

Samuel Beckett has visited upon the world one of the richest and most awe-inspiring of contemporary literary oeuvres. His life's work includes poetry, novels, short stories, plays, radio and television skits, a movie scenario - all marked by a high degree of self-conscious artistry which reduces an abstract thought to an electrifyingly concrete image, and the image to a pattern of sound that gives it body. Indeed, in the same oeuvre there are plays without words in which ideas are portrayed through bodily gesture, and fIlms that are made to breathe in sight and sound. Never, in all this prodigious imaginative creation, is an idea pursued for its own sake as summarizing for our insouciant intellects the essence of our natural or social life-worlds, or the tragedy of our humanly projected individual existences therein, or how it is with the aesthete whose writing is performed in pain, and undertaken to relieve the pain of living, or even how it is with those of us who have never created a world or written a word the least pregnant with meaning. Ideas are for the intellect; art is made to wring the elevated element from our Human Con­dition.

Professor Kaelin has not written on all of Beckett's works. He begins his treatise with an overview of the criticism Beckett's art has already engendered: some good, some bad, some merely irrelevant. What makes criticism first relevant and then good is its fittingness to the corpus that has inspired it, its analytical acuity and perceptual clarity, and, ultimately, its effect in creating the desire to revisit the original artistic and creative mass. From the extant criticism on Beckett's art, Kaelin has chosen a dominant theme: Beckett as "philosophical" writer. What makes a literary artist philosophical? An attitude of resignation? Or of ponderousness? A penchant for analysis? Or merely a concern for the perennially unsolved problems of the human species? If so, the literary artist is like any other man or woman: humble before the awfully great, or prideful and a little pompous, as the case may be; too concerned with the accuracy of one's own categories, and foolish enough to continue stretching them to cover the imponderables of human existence, including the joys a well-turned phrase may evoke in the jaded hearts of the all-knowing but mysteriously unseeing cognoscenti.

The literary artist is philosophical to the degree that his works exhibit a philosophical structure; such is Kaelin's thesis. The philosophy of a work does not appear on that work's surface, nor in the literal meanings of the words whose tokens appear on that surface, but only in the plots, if the idea is metaphysical, or in the author's characterization, if moral. For this reason, Professor Kaelin attempts to read through the surface of the works, through the semantic constructions of the author's syntax, to whatever reality is

THE THEME ix

depicted within the stratum of "represented objectivities," to use the term of Roman Ingarden, whether that is reality presented in a metaphysical or moral perspective. And since literature has been produced that is philosophical in this sense of the term - a genre of literature in which it is the literature and not the author that is philosophical, Kaelin has devised a method for the criticism of this particular genre of the literary art. We could call it "philoso­phical criticism," but he prefers the more specific label, "phenomenological structuralism." It is a way in which anyone proceeds who reads the work and then describes what appears therein, and which could therefore appear to any attentive consciousness.

The model for such a method had already been hinted at in the criticism of Beckett himself; the authors he criticized were Joyce and Proust. Such writers are "philosophical," claimed Beckett, in that they used a philosophical idea as a literary technique, merely as a convenience for giving structure to their works of art. Behind Joyce there stood Dante and Bruno and Vico; behind Proust, Schopenhauer and Bergson. This treatise attempts to gauge the extent to which Beckett himself is a "philosophical" author in the sense described; and behind him looms the shadows of a host of philosophers: Descartes, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre, to name only the most obvious.

The central question asked in pursuit of this method is not how this partic­ular work of our author seemingly expresses the absurdity of the Human Condition, for that is at once a loaded and misguided question. The works do not express absurdity at all; absurdity is sometimes used, however, to express whatever it is the total work itself expresses. Misguided, in the same vein, is the question whether these works express pessimism or optimism or meliorism; for they express neither of the three. Beckett's vaunted "pessi­mism," like the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer Beckett has on occasion used to structure his work, is also a technical convenience. Where he has depicted the human being as completely caught up in the throes of inauthen­tic existence - either as living in the past in the flight from the present in order to avoid the necessity of making a decision to produce a better future, or surrendering one's own will to that of another, or merely monotonously repeating an action that is no action because it lacks significance even to the person whose spirit has become deadened by such a habit - others have found the tragedy of our contemporary age; if so, it is a tragedy in search of a theory, a Sophoclean phenomenon in search of an unknown Aristotle.

Aristotelian catharsis, we all recall, was developed for the humanity of antiquity, and necessitated a protagonist better than the average man or

x THE THEME

woman, albeit flawed by a particular human weakness, and could for this reason not fit the world inhabited by bums, weaklings, cowards, and the moral degenerates we all can be. Beckett's are no flawed characters; as artistic creations, they are characters perfected to produce the effect they do. Our perception of their fates does not shunt off our feelings of pity and fear as if into the atmosphere itself. Rather, it concentrates our feeling as if com­pressed into an ache in the center of our breasts.

Whether novelistic or dramatic, Beckett's characters are sublime. The more they suffer, the less significant their lives, the more inauthentic their struggles to relieve the hurt, the deeper into the mud their nameless essence is driven, the greater is the tragic lift controlled by an encounter with the literary or dramatic work which may thus be all the more authentic, as art, as the heroes or antiheroes of that art are themselves inauthe,ntic as personalities. After all these years, the play is still the thing, not the idea; the novel, and not our reading of it, whose encounter produces the aesthetic effect.

For this reason, it is safer perhaps to aver that man's true nature is better known, because better learned, through our encounters with works of art than through any artist's particular vision of the truth of human nature. Such indeed is the assumption Professor Kaelin asks us to make in order to follow his account of Beckett's poetic plight. If you go along with his suggestion, you will be led through the labyrinthine ways in the imagination of a con­summate artist.

Philosophically, that imagination has been variously shaped: from the earlier points of view that are Cartesian, Berkeleyan, Schopenhaurean, we move to the middle stages in which the Hegelian self-referring infinitude of absolute mind gradually changes into the ultimate stages in which existentialist themes dominate the literary and dramatic structures. And throughout, in both the novels and the plays, there is Beckett's constant concern for getting it right, for making the direct point indirectly, to show and not merely to tell. Always the aesthete, he has approached his artistic zenith in accomplishing the maximum effect with the minimum "natural" resources - a sight varying from blinding light to utter darkness, each concealing the litter of our natural environment, and constituting one variance interspersed with another: a field of sound constituted by a baby's cry out of a stark silence and alternating with an adult's sigh; the two sets of variances constitute a new phenomenology of consciousness unfolding in less than a minute's exposure, yet experienced as a single harmony of sound and visual sense.

In the later novels, as in many of the plays, the hero is the narrator. He may be nameless because unnamable, a voice struggling to control other

THE THEME xi

voices, a ping, indeed; or he may be a groveler in the mud, or a personification unhappily divided into two parts, separated only by the nothingness of time, the one controlling the words, the other the music. But as always the puzzle to be solved entails the harmony of the music with the words, the rhythm with the image invoked. Indeed, it is in the novels of the creative voice and in the plays raised to the second exponential degree, which Professor Kaelin calls "dramaturgical ," that the author's purpose becomes most obvious: showing how it is is perhaps the only way of relieving the pain of how it is, to live as a human being.

Separated from oneself as from others and from others as from any rational ideal, which Hegel calls "the Beyond," the literary consciousness is the un­happy consciousness per se, which, left to its own devices, may be allowed to languish in the pain of its own separation from the world and from others, or to assume the pain of its own self-deliverance, which is to create a reality of significance to itself. At their highest, i.e. in the slough of their despond, Beckett's literary and dramatic works illuminate in our every encounter with them a tragedy for our modern times; and they do this by evincing the sub­limity of the human spirit.

Parts of this treatise were delivered at the second annual meeting of the International Society for Phenomenology and Literature operating under the aegis of the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, with its headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts.

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

T ABLE OF CONTENTS

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / The Theme vii

PREFACE xvii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xxiii

I INTRODUCTION

The Babel of Criticism

PART I

II IN THE BEGINNING, THE WORD 15

Beckett's Criticism:

Joyce (1929) Proust (1931)

III APPRENTICESHIP IN SORCER Y 31

Whoroscope (1930) More Pricks than Kicks (1934) Murphy (1938) Watt (1942-4)

IV THE GIFT OF TONGUES 59

Premier Amour (1945) Mercier et Camier (1946) Stories (1945)

V THROUGH STREETS WIDE AND NARROW 87

Molloy (1948) Malone Dies (1948) The Unnamable (1949)

xiv T ABLE OF CONTENTS

VI "I WAS MY FATHER AND I WAS MY SON" 116

Texts for Nothing (1950)

VII VOICES IN THE MUD 130

How It Is (1960) Enough (1966) Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Ping (1966)

PART II

VIII CREATING A SCENE 157

Waiting for Godot (1948) The Endgame (1954-6) Cascando (1963)

IX VOICES, IN ENGLISH, ON THE AIR 179

All That Fall (1956) Embers (1959) Words and Music (1962)

X ENGLISH VOICES FOR THE STAGE 198

Krapp's Last Tape (1958) Happy Days (1960-61) Play (1963)

XI THE LIMITS OF THEATER 219

Act Without Words, 1(1956) Act Without Words, II (1959) Come and Go (1965)

XII SOUL MADE LIGHT, AND SOUND 250

Film (1964) Eh Joe (1965) Breath (1969)

T ABLE OF CONTENTS

XIII SOUND, SENSE AND SOUND

XIV CLOSURE

REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

xv

269

282

305

318

320

PREFACE

In the wake of so many other keys to the treasure, whoever undertakes still another book of criticism on the novels and drama of Samuel Beckett must assume the grave burden of justifying the attempt, especially for him who like one of John Barth's recent fictional characterizations of himself, believes that the key to the treasure is the treasure itself.

No one will ever have the privilege of the last word on these texts, since any words other than the author's own found therein must be referred back to the text themselves for cautious verification. Indeed, the words the author has used to create the oeuvre stand by virtue of their own creativeness, or fail in their pretense, and need no critical comment to be appreciated for what they have achieved or have failed to achieve. In criticism there is no privileged point of view - not even the author's own. He has consulted his knowledge and experience to make the work, and whoever would criticize his efforts would seem to owe him the indulgence of doing the same. If communication is mediated through the works, the author and his readers respond in recipro­cal fashion to the expressiveness of their contexts.

For the philosopher of art, the challenge is extremely tempting - on a manifold count. Can the critic of criticism fulfill in practice what he demands of others in theory? Can he make sense of the non-sense embodied within an author's works? It all depends upon one's understanding of the words, both the creative and the critical ones. The sense2 one seeks is the meaning of the author's words, themselves presented in sensuous! gestalt. Sense!, then, is not equivalent to sense2 , even though in its patterns it controls what is under­stood as sense2. Thus, in seeking out the sense of the words, one looks for the non-sense - the meanings and the meanings of the meanings they may intend.

Beckett's own criticism of the works of others is a handy procedural guide. Words suggest meanings in the images they create. The words are themselves perceived as real images (objects of sense), and their power is to suggest the images of a non-existent reality (the objects of imagination). But in their relatedness these images create within the imagination the picture of a struc­tured, albeit unreal, world. Such a world may be like or unlike the one we all live in, depending upon its structure and the supposed structure of the real

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xviii PREFACE

world - but whether or no, all the words spoken by the creative voice ofthe narrator betoken necessary lies that constitute the truth of his own creative world.

Descriptions of the structure of the real world are found in the theories of philosophers: 'metaphysical,' they are called; 'cosmological,' when they intend the synthetic wholeness of that world, or 'ontological,' when they intend the analytical elements of the universe described. For example, 'organic idealism' is a term describing the cosmological pattern of the real world when it is thought to be composed of ideas - percepts, concepts, or volitions - as ontological elements, and when reason has been subverted by a biological metaphor.

My criticisms are not for this reason to be taken as 'organic' or 'formal.' In the abstract, when critical reason grasps its subject whole, literary works are seen to be composed of words and their meanings, along with the rela­tions they subtend, including the meanings of those meanings, should any be justified by the context in question. The tension between the words as per­ceived and the meanings as imagined and understood constitutes the expres­siveness of the context. That is a fact of the critical consciousness.

The method used in the following analyses of Beckett's creative works may therefore be called a 'phenomenological structuralism.' The critic has focused his attention as closely as possible upon the context of the words (so that the work may appear as a phenomenon to his consciousness), and the structure of the meaning relations has been given as close a description as the state of his own perception, imagination and knowledge makes possible. Before such conscious attention, the patterns develop, between the words as signs relating to images as signified; and these in turn may become signs referring to still higher "signifieds," in levels of signification that offer a clue to the interpretation of the overall structure of the represented universe. One stops when the context seems clear. The clearness of the context should like­wise be a fact of the critical consciousness.

Where necessary, hypotheses are formed, but these are always verified in a test of their fittingness against the perceptual and imaginative context of the words and images. The elaboration of such hypotheses is referred to as the 'hermeneutical expansion' of the sense of the words. The words as per­ceived are referred to as an 'aesthetic surface,' and they intend a field of "experiential depth significations." In reading from surface to depth the reader constitutes the Significance of the stratified text, and the first reader of any text is its author.

Beckett is, moreover, a philosophical writer, and self-consciously such.

PREFACE xix

Not that his works argue for the truth of a cosmological or ontological point of view - that would make him a philosopher and his narrators, tellers of the truth instead of lies. Only absurdity lies in that direction. As a philosophical writer, Beckett uses the structures of a philosophical idea merely as a con­venience, a device, to lend its relatedness to the field of experiential depth significations; that is what makes him a writer, just as in his own estimation the same technical literary device made philosophical writers of James Joyce and Marcel Proust.

The second challenge of this book, then, is to test the degree to which the philosophical structures of Beckett's works have changed throughout a representative sampling of his oeuvre. The central theme of the works is the disclosure of the nature of consciousness seeking the identity of full self­consciousness, either by acting or by reflecting on its actions. Taken as a whole, on the whole, they present a massive investigation of what it means to be human - what it means and how it feels to live a life one has never asked to be responsible for, and in living that life to assume the responsibility of disclosing the truth of the world in which one is responsible for living as one has. Existence exacts the fullest measure of personal responsibility, and a happy man is only an unhappy one, unaware of his basic existential con­dition.

For this reason, Beckett has often been called an "existentialist" writer. If that judgment is correct, and Beckett is self-conscious enough in his own existence not to vary from the principle he has found in the philosophical writings of others, existential ontology should lend the structure of its theory to the texture of Beckett's own works. In what follows I have tried to measure the extent to which this supposition is true.

It matters little whether Beckett accepts the "truth" of this philosophy or not; it would suffice, for my purposes, that his works exhibit the structures of the philosophical ideas in question. If he is unaware of the underlying philosophical ideas, the kindest thing to say is that he has discovered them in his own experiences and embodied them in the context of his works. From the point of view expressed in the philosophy, the same process applies to his own "disclosedness," his own openness to the world, as applies to his narrators and their respective worlds. States of mind must be brought to the full understanding of recorded speech.

Yet one should not be misled by the vaunted "pessimism" of the works. If that pessimism were Beckett's own, he might have come by it either em­pirically or theoretically; but however come by, it is attributable only to the works in which it is expressed. And the surface, ironic humor of its expression

xx PREFACE

goes a long way toward mitigating its sting. Had he chosen the patterns of existential authenticity, instead of the prevalent inauthenticity of human consciousness, there would have been no pessimism, and, at the same time, no profundity of human feeling, no saving grace in the humor of its expres­sion. In what follows, Beckett's "pessimism" shall be viewed only as a func­tioning counter within a total context of aesthetic Significance. As such, it will supply the basis for a contemporary theory of tragedy, in which the value of the negative images becomes transmuted, through Beckett's artistry, into a positive affirmation of human dignity. Our knowledge of our own suffering is the source of all human dignity, not our capacity, through technology or ignorance, to avoid it.

The philosophical works most alluded to in this work are those of Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Should the names of Descartes, Geulincx, Malebranche, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and others seem to stand out for their absence, it should not be forgotten that Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind traces the development of mind's evolution, and leaves ample place for the dualism of the rationalists and the idealism, subjective and voluntaris­tic, of the others.

The citations in the book reflect the conditions under which the manu­script was composed. Isolated in a corner of France, without library, and with only a shelf of Beckett's own works for my guide, I was forced by circum­stances to adhere strictly to the demands of the phenomenological method: the books contained the reality to be described, and the philosophical idea is presented in the criticism much as it would occur to the reader of the text as the occasion arose. Documentation was prepared at a later date, when I had access to my own full library , along with that of the Florida State Univer­sity, in Tallahassee.

The method used throughout the book involves at least two readings of each of the works: one for the formulation of the structural hypothesis, and another for its verification. I was able to perform the first readings of the majority of Beckett's works thanks to a grant of summer salary by the Florida State University Committee on Faculty Research Support awarded me in 1969. It was then I formed the hypothetical outline for the present work's structure. Then, in the Winter and Spring of 1974, I was awarded a second grant, this one by the Committee on Faculty Development Leaves, to con­tinue my attempts to define in practice what I had learned from the theoret­ical study of phenomenological analysis. The time had come to accept the challenges offered by Beckett's work.

The first quarter of my second grant was spent in revamping the overall

PREFACE xxi

structure of the work - via the second readings; and the second, in preparing the manuscript, after a third, and sometimes fourth reading of the more difficult texts. For the plays I used a trilingual German edition published by Suhrkamp in 1963-64, and for each of Beckett's translations of his own works - from French to English and from English to French, I have availed myself of both versions. That is a problem in itself for any coherent criticism of Beckett.

I should like to express my thanks to my colleagues of Florida State University whose confidence in my ability to undertake the work successfully was expressed in awarding me the two grants mentioned above; and to my former colleagues of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who in 1964 granted me leave with pay to begin my research in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger at the Albert-Ludwigs Univer­sitat in Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Without these three grants, this work would never have been brought to completion. Lastly, I am indebted to the en­couragement of Professor Anna-Teresa Tyrnieniecka of the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning for her encourage­ment to bring this work to publication. We share a profound respect for the pioneering work of Roman Ingarden in the phenomenological analysis of "the literary work of art." Readers familiar with Ingarden's work will perceive the added indebtedness. The method employed herein is concerned with the phenomenological problem of constitution; the results of the method display only one concretization - my own readings - of the individual works con­sidered.

Tallahassee, Florida E. F. K.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To Grove Press, Inc., of New York, holder of the English language rights outside the British Commonwealth, and to Faber and Faber, Ltd., and John Calder (Publishers), Ltd., London, who retain the English rights to the works of Samuel Beckett within the Commonwealth, the author is pleased to express his thanks for their permission to cite and to paraphrase sections of Beckett's poetic, prose fictional, and dramatic works. The credits for the copyrighted works are as follows.

'Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce,' from Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination. First published in 1929 by Shakespeare and Co., Paris, and by Faber and Faber, Ltd. Copyright © 1929,1972, by Faber and Faber, Ltd. Extracts reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Proust. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. All rights reserved. First published 1931. With concurrent permission of John Calder (Publishers), Ltd.

Whoroscope, from Poems in English. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1961 by Samuel Beckett. With concurrent permission of John Calder (Publishers), Ltd.

Murphy. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. All rights reserved. First published 1938. With concurrent permission of John Calder (Publishers), Ltd.

Watt. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. All rights reserved. First published 1953. With concurrent permission of John Calder (Publishers), Inc.

Three Novels. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1955, 1956, 1958 by Grove Press, Inc. With concurrent per­mission of John Calder (publishers), Inc.

No's Knife, Collected Shorter Prose, 1945-1966. First published in Great Britain 1967. Stories, Texts for Nothing, From an Abandoned Work, and Residua (Enough, Imagination Dead Imagine, and Ping). Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1965, 1966, 1967 by Samuel Beckett. Translation of the Stories, in collaboration with the author, copyrighted by Richard Seaver, all other translations copyrighted by Samuel Beckett. Stories, Texts for Nothing, Enough, Imagination Dead Imagine, and Ping originally published by Les

xxiii

xxiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Editions. de Minuit, Paris. From an Abandoned Work originally published by Faber and Faber, Ltd. Extracts of the translations cited by permission of John Calder (publishers), Ltd.

Stories and Texts for Nothing. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1967 by Samuel Beckett.

First Love and Other Shorts. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1974, this collection by Grove Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

How It Is. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1964 by Grove Press, Inc. With concurrent permission of John Calder (Publishers), Ltd.

Waiting for Godot. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Endgame. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1958 by Grove Press, Inc. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

All that Fall. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copy­right © 1957 by Samuel Beckett. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Embers. Extracts reprinted with permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1958, 1959, 1960 by Grove Press, Inc. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Words and Music. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1962 by Samuel Beckett. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Krapp's Last Tape. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1957 by Samuel Beckett. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Happy Days. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copy­right © 1961 by Grove Press, Inc. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Play. Extracts reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1964 by Samuel Beckett. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Act without Words I. Paraphrase of action reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1958 by Grove Press, Inc. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xxv

Act without Words II. Paraphrase of action reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by Grove Press, Inc. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Come and Go. Paraphrase of action reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1968 by Samuel Beckett. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Eh Joe. Paraphrase of action reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1967 by Samuel Beckett. With concurrent permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

E.F.K.