Nice Jacket: Endgame

*The Grove Press Twenty-Seventh Printing of Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play Endgame

The cover image is terrifying and conjures, for us now, less the post-modern existential horror of the play and more the squalor of our political realities.  More Abu Ghraib than a bad dream, the power of the grainy reproduced photograph of the cover comes not from the fear we have of the figure, but the moral fear produced by the figure’s implications.  The man is bound to a chair.  His face is draped with a towel.  Spots of blood form a ghostly mouth and eyes over his face.  His hands hang limply over the arms of the chair, and his human form is hidden beneath a heavy sack or straight jacket.  The typewriter font of the play’s title lends the image the quality of a piece of classified information from a government file.

We’ve all seen the now iconic images of prisoners being tortured and humiliated in Iraq.  I’m sure some have been desensitized to their power, but I still feel they symbolize the U.S.’s foreign policy of the past ten years in a way nothing else can.  There’s a delicate balance between immersing oneself in the nonstop media onslaught of the 21^st century and being a complete Luddite.  I lean toward the latter, but accept the power of images to affect policy and the moral opinion of a nation.  Sometimes a snapshot can do this more effectively than a brilliant movie or play or book.

But none of this is what Beckett’s play is about.  Endgame belongs to the Theater of the Absurd, a school of mid-century European theater firmly set on the premise that in a godless universe all human endeavors, especially communication, are meaningless.  This begs the question – why write a play in the first place?  Why, for pedantic reasons of course, to show the rest of the human race the meaningless of their lives and their relationships.  In Endgame, Hamm, a paralyzed man, is served by Clov, a clownish servant.  They rely on each other more for petty arguments than for survival.  But in this way each is indispensible to the other.  Beckett is not much of a humanist when you get down to it, though I suppose he does, in his better plays, capture the real taste of 20^th century human suffering better than most writers.

More than anything, Beckett’s plays strike me as visually important and innovative.  Happy Days, the play Beckett wrote after Endgame, centers on a woman who is literally buried up to her chin in the rubble of Western Civilization.  Her situation is much like Hamm’s in Endgame.  They are both paralyzed but still willful and struggling against the cruel world.  Joyful stuff!

These Faber editions of Beckett's plays are more typographically interesting, but much less visually powerful.

 Here's the first part of a filmed version of Endgame.

 Related Links:

1. An Appreciation of Beckett from The Guardian
2. Review of Faber's Reprints from The Telegraph
3. New York Times Review of a Recent Production of Endgame