ABSTRACTS

Dan Mellamphy (York University, Toronto)
A Look Anew at Beckett’s Other Peg

    In the wake of “La Fin”[Nouvelles et texts pour rien] there can be found in Beckett’s works a recurrent articulation and persistent examination of the uneliminable remainder—of language, of meaning, of existing. That which remains in the wake of the end, like the old stancher in Endgame, is precisely what these later works disclose, what Derrida in his discussion of Beckett’s work called “the signature, this remainder that remains” [Acts of Literature]. In fact, Endgame itself is an excellent model, perhaps the exemple par excellence, of the direction these later works take and of the work of these works. Hamm’s attempt to “sign off” on his part, to “part with” or “part from” his part, to “play and lose and have done with losing,” typifies the agonizing gesture of a protagonist antagonistic to protagonism, and points from the very first act and action to the fundamental problem of finality and its ultimate impossibility.

    The perception and perspective of such a protagonist constitutes what the present paper argues is a “new perspective” for Beckett at 100: New Perspectives. This is, in short, the perception not of signs (“signifiers” and “signifieds”) but of designs (“signatures”), the perception not of the rational world and word but of the irrational world and surd, which for Beckett is the only reality. “The only reality is provided by the hieroglyphics traced by [this] inspired perception,” he writes [Proust]. And it is precisely this perception which in the continental philosophy of Beckett’s day Heidegger and the early (Heideggerian) Levinas attempted, rather synchronistically, to articulate in terms of the “there is” or “il y a”: what remains there in the wake of de[con]struction. “There is, after this destruction of things and beings, the impersonal ‘field of forces’ of existing,” writes Levinas—something “that is neither subject nor substantive [...]. And it is anonymous: there is no one and nothing that takes on this existing. It is as impersonal as ‘it is raining’ [il pleut] or ‘it is hot’ [il fait chaud]” [Time and the Other]. This “il,” ill-seen, ill-said, is the illogical and impersonal “other peg” of every person or persona, the signature at work behind the gestures, signs and subjects—the other peg that Hamm and Clov in Endgame call old Mother Pegg, the fifth and quintessential character at play within the play (without a player and/or part to play). The absurdity of this extra and extraneous character without a player and/or part to play—the “surdity,” if you will, of this other peg that lingers like a “vieux linge” (like an “old rag”) from the very beginning to the very end of Endgame—is the new (yet very old, perpetually a priori and etertnally a posteriori) perspective which the protagonistically antagonistic protagonists in Beckett’s works after “La Fin” display and/or divulge.

    This paper sets out to show the function of this ill-seen/ill-said fifth element in the exemplary post -“Fin” Endgame and to set this uneliminable extra within the context of the contemporary works of continental (Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian) philosophy in Beckett’s day, with specific attention to Levinas’ notion of the unnameable/anonymous illeity murmuring within the depths of every discourse and discursive subject. It will be argued, then, that Beckett, in the world of arts and literature, was in many ways pursuing what Heidegger and Levinas (and post-Heideggerians/post-Levinasians such as Blanchot, Bataille and Derrida) were pursuing in the world of phenomenology and hermeneutics—i.e. philosophy—and that in this way Beckett offered both his modernist contemporaries and our contemporary post-modernists a new and literary-artistic perspective on the critical and problematic issues of phenomenology and hermeneutics, or of language, meaning and existing.