The Crisis of Sense in Endgame

Expressing the absurd is impossible, because if we try to do so, we need to assume the position of a subject that does the expressing. Meanwhile, the absurd alludes to a condition where the subject is disintegrated. Therefore, Beckett cannot reflect it on the purely contentual level, for example by describing a meaningless life; he needs to deconstruct any structure that could make the subject ‘magically’ reappear, he needs to disintegrate the form so as to disintegrate the subject. Adorno identifies three such formal levels, which we will analyse one by one: (1) The “metaphysical content”, (2) “the intention as a whole as a structure of meaning [Sinnzusammenhang],” and lastly (3) “the sense of the words and sentences which the characters speak” (ibid. 120). In other words, the first level concerns philosophy as a possibility to think and conceptualize sense, which according to Adorno has become historically impossible; the second level concerns the theatrical form that creates a structure out of particular events and actions (beginning/middle/end; a ‘climax’ and a ‘lesson’) as a possibility to represent sense; and the third level concerns language as a way to express sense. To truly reflect the absurd means to reflect the crisis of sense on all these levels. This means that the impossibility of sense on the ‘highest’ philosophical level must necessarily tarnish the ‘lowest’ level of language. In short, as long as we can speak meaningfully about the absurd, we have not really reached it yet:

“Such construction of the senseless also even includes linguistic molecules: if they and their connections were rationally meaningful, then within the drama they would synthesise irrevocably into that very meaning structure [Sinnzusammenhang] of the whole which is denied by the whole” (ibid. 120)

(1) Let’s start with the ‘top’ level, the metaphysical one. It concerns the collapse of the possibility to ascribe our life an objective sense due to our position in the cosmos, or, rather, in a cosmological order. For example, if we say that God has created us and has deemed his creation good, then our lives are legitimised due to our status as intended creation. If we say that all citizens have an obligation to serve the state, and the state reflects a natural order, then our lives are legitimised as long as we fulfil this task etc.

Sense in this case is based on the identification of the individual’s position within a certain structure. Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, absurdity lies exactly in radical dissolution, rendering such sense-providing structures void. Uncovering their ideological moment was a chief achievement of Enlightenment, even though for the most part unintentionally (none of the main ‘original’ Enlightenment philosophers aimed for a collapse of the religious order). The total collapse of metaphysical sense was in a certain way an excess, but a necessary one. It is this “historical moment” (ibid. 122) that Adorno deals with in his Negative Dialectics:

“Positive metaphysical meaning is no longer possible in such a substantive way (if indeed it ever was), such that dramatic form could have its law in such meaning and its epiphany” (ibid. 120)

This aspect is connected to an observation that is very common in modern thought, namely that the traditional institutions of sense and meaning, primarily religion and the state, have imploded and are no longer able to establish an ‘objective’ order. Human subjects are in a free fall, and it is this that the Existentialists tried to express with the absurd (man as the ‘per se undefinable being’). In Endgame, this condition is summarized as such: “there’s no more nature” (Beckett: Endgame [E], 11). This means, that “the phase of completed reification of the world” (UE, 122) has already happened in the play and it is in a state of “permanent catastrophe” (ibid. 123).

The absence of nature, be it theological or even biological, once again points to the complete dissolution of any unified and integrating structure of sense for human life towards a ‘free-floating’ state. The establishment of sense in the theological interpretation of nature in the form of “be fruitful and multiply,” is in the end not that different from the biological one, with its orientation towards procreation. Both interpretations of nature offer at least a minimum of sense for human life, a minimum value in preserving the status quo of staying alive and having children. Endgame depicts a world (maybe rather a non-world: “Outside of here it’s death!”), where even this minimum has been eradicated. Hamm’s parents live in dustbins, representing a complete absence of generational contract; the windows open the view on complete desolation. It is truly a state of no future. What Camus formulated as the problem of suicide, where the individual needs to negate suicide in each moment and choose to stay alive, so that the continuation of life is imbued with ineluctable affirmation, is cynically reinterpreted here as a radical indifference towards either choice— stay alive, or die, it doesn’t matter.

This is a condition of the complete dissolution, of the absence of any unified and integrating structure, meaning that all objects and people are dissociated from one another; a free-floating state, as we have already sketched it above. But instead of reaching concreteness, a strengthening of their autonomous being, the characters of the play appear completely abstract in their indifference, in their lack of quality; unlike what the Existentialists hoped for once the subject frees itself from the shackles of authority (religion, the state). Radically independent, the subject will dissolve, and will not become free. In this light, we can return to the difficult quote above and understand it in its very concrete interpretation:

“He lengthens the escape route of the subject’s liquidation to the point where it constricts into a ‘this-here,’ whose abstractness — the loss of all qualities — extends ontological abstraction literally ad absurdum, to that Absurd which mere existence becomes as soon as it is consumed in naked self-identity” (ibid. 124)

(2) What about the dissolution of sense on the level of the theatrical form? After all, Adorno says that this is one of the core differences between Sartre’s and Beckett’s plays.

A well-ordered play mirrors a well-ordered universe, even unintentionally. Hollywood movies, with their ‘strokes of fate’, ‘happy accidents’ and ‘endings’, even their ‘well-disposed nature’ express a world in apple-pie order, preserved in its dramatic structure. Their crises, safely embedded between Act II and III, prepare the arrival of the climatic resolution and are therefore themselves replete of sense due to their structure. This, as Adorno would say, is deeply anachronistic, ideological even, because the untruth of it is metaphysically attested. Unlike Endgame:

“It yields both to the impossibility of dealing with materials and of representation according to nineteenth-century practice, as well as to the insight that subjective modes of reaction, which mediate the laws of form rather than reflecting reality, are themselves no absolute first principle but rather a last principle, objectively posited” (ibid. 127)

The theatrical form is institutionally set, just as the viewer’s expectations, as he is prepared to react to specific cues (Chekhov’s gun, for example) and to ‘read’ the development of the action (silent movies are harder for us to ‘read’ because they had developed a specific ‘language’). All these elements are synthesised in the overarching action of the play that condenses in the climax, in the final decision, where the hero expresses his singularity — they are all missing in Endgame. Even in Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit) the famous final exclamation “L’enfer, c’est les autres [Hell is other people]” points to a final conclusion that summarises the whole plot that has continuously unfolded the characters’ backstories, which are interconnected and form a dense net. Sartre’s dramatic form thereby expresses a central idea, it creates sense through its structure, even though thematically, it aims at expressing the opposite. The subject creeps back in through the dramatic organisation.

In Endgame, there are no lessons learned, no essence to be derived, in fact, there is no hero to speak of: “Along with subjectivity, whose final epilogue is Endgame, the hero is also withdrawn” (ibid. 136). The conflict of the hero against outer forces — be it Destiny, God(s), Nature or Society — was always a way to express his autonomous interiority, even if he fails in his resistance. In fact, his climatic failure would always affirm both his unity as an individual and the unity of the play with help of the final heroic deed. On the other hand, the dramatic form would affirm his subjectivity, because, after all, he’s the protagonist (just as it does with the antagonists, and even side characters) — character and action determine each other dialectically. There is no such conflict in Endgame, and hence no unity of action, no difference between inner and outer when it comes to the characters. What is left is indifference only, of action and of character (note that the Wikipedia page of Endgame lacks a description of the ‘plot’):

“As soon as the subject is no longer doubtlessly self-identical, no longer a closed structure of meaning, the line of demarcation with the exterior becomes blurred, and the situations of inwardness become at the same time physical ones” (ibid. 129)

Without a goal to aspire to, one that would provide one’s life with unity and a purpose, there is no action to conceive. We are left with a state “of ‘not being in a hurry’,” situations that “allude to the indifference and superfluity of what the subject can still manage to do” (ibid. 132). The busyness of the figures of Endgame, with their weird rituals and quirks, becomes as silly as the busyness which we invest into our daily lives: “Am I right in the centre?”

(3) The ‘lowest’ level of dissolution, but at the same time the most radical one, is that of language; because as long as we manage to speak, we utter meaning. But even here, Endgame doesn’t halt:

“Short of breath until they [the speakers] almost fall silent, they no longer manage the synthesis of linguistic phrases; they stammer in protocol sentences that might stem from positivists or Expressionists” (ibid. 137)

Silence is the death of language, the last consequence of senselessness, because there is no point of speaking about anything. The protocol only lists the immediately available and disposable; it’s the reification of language. Beckett’s strategy, then, is neither silence nor the disintegration of language to pure sound, to the pure sighs and exclamation of the suffering, as the Expressionists did (“Oh! Ah! Alas!”), because language “cannot shake off its semantic element” (ibid. 138) — as the exclamations’ proximity to kitsch shows. Instead, Beckett “turns that element into an instrument of its own absurdity and he does that according to the ritual of clowns, whose babbling becomes nonsensical by presenting itself as sense” (ibid.). It is “the second language of those falling silent [zweite Sprache der Verstummenden]” (ibid.), a language that only works with phrases, clichés, slogans that seem to express something, but are actually completely empty. Like: “Ah the creatures, everything has to be explained” (E, 43), which “is drummed daily by millions of superiors into millions of subordinates” (UE, 139); or all those “I’ll leave you”, that lose their performative element through the endless repetitions. Language therefore becomes absurd not by silence, but by the paradox state where it speaks without speaking and therefore becomes truly senseless and empty.

Note the difference to Camus’ linguistic strategy in The Stranger: “Each sentence is a present instant, but not an indecisive one that spreads like a stain to the following one. The sentence is sharp, distinct and self-contained. It is separated by a void from the following one[.] […] When the word makes it appearance it is a creation ex nihilo. […] We bounce from sentence to sentence, from void to void” (CO, 41). In this extreme ‘presentism’, language has come fascinatingly close to the free-floating condition of total dissociation that we’ve sketched out above, the condition of the absurd. But while the structure of the whole is dissolved, a “void”, the singular sentence is still “distinct” and complete. The singular sentence therefore remains untouched by the dissolution, it is even affirmed in its singularity against the surrounding emptiness. This repeats the Existentialists’ conception of the absurd, where the singular human subject is untouched by the dissolution of the metaphysical whole. The absurd remains external to the singular (sentence or subject).

It is due to this inconsequence that Camus is able to affirm the ineluctable freedom of the subject, in spite of this reduction that turns out to be the bedrock, from which the ‘stranger’ arises in his uniqueness. Beckett, on the other hand, goes further by also dissolving the meaning of sentences and words. He thereby draws the final consequence of the absurd, namely that in such a state of pure presence, of pure dissociation, the individual would perish as well. Only because of this difference can Camus affirm absurdity, but, at the same time, his abstention of the subject from the process of dissociation ultimately remains ideological.

While there is no hope left for the characters of the Endgame, the viewer might be better off, as “Beckett’s language bring[s] about a healing illness of those already ill: whoever listens to himself worries that he also talks like that” (UE, 139). All hope of Endgame lies in the possibility that it’s not too late for us yet, that complete reification is still avoidable. All this is in the viewer’s responsibility who needs to experience the despair that is expressed in the play, an experience that awakes the desire that things should not be this way, that change is necessary to avoid this state of complete hopelessness — an aspect that is crucial in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. As long as we experience the dread that seeps between the lines of Endgame, as long as we understand how much is at stake if we continue our path towards reification, not all is lost.