Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BY NELS C. PEARSON
Nels C.(2001)
ELH 68 Pearson
215–239 © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 215
Hegelian or Manichaean paradigms of master and slave, oppressor and
oppressed, that have repeatedly conspired with the course of history
(and historiography) to produce the colonial subject and that, in the
specific case of Ireland, have done so with an alarming and consistent
violence.
Let me say at the outset that I think the lack of any thorough
investigation of Endgame as a commentary on postcolonial (and cer-
tainly Irish postcolonial) predicaments is probably due to the very
aspect of the play which I believe ultimately empowers it as an astute
political commentary: its vague suggestions of, but repeated resistance
to, any specific cultural readings or singular geographic or historical
interpretations. The fact is that we cannot make Endgame “speak” about
some assumed version of a cultural past or to an a priori notion of Irish
“identity” that would help us fit Beckett, or the discursively enslaved
Clov, neatly into any master narrative of the silenced and oppressed.
But, as I hope to demonstrate, this is exactly the reason not to give up
the project of trying to come to terms with the play’s “Irishness,” or,
more specifically, with the relevance of the play’s use of imperialist/
colonial themes to both global and local (Irish) histories.
What we initially find by placing Endgame in the context of Irishness
and colonialism is that we are dealing with a play that dramatizes many
unresolved paradoxes of decolonization known acutely by the Irish and
the Irish writer—most notably language dispossession and the co-
dependency of identity between long-standing colonizer and colonized.
But on a deeper level, we discover a play that, especially in its
manipulation of representational and metatheatrical devices unique to
drama, repeatedly asks its audience to see outside of the master/slave
dialectic that it ruthlessly and scrupulously portrays. In so doing,
Endgame becomes far more than a mere allegory of master/slave
political relationships. It becomes a farsighted, mocking challenge to the
essentializing discourse, hegemonic historical (re)production, and vio-
lent opposing of contrived originary identities that thrive not only in the
imperial/colonial situation itself but also in many contemporary, (sup-
posedly) liberal, intellectual, and artistic attempts to speak for the
oppressed.
What Endgame ostensibly dramatizes is not simply a master/slave
relationship, but the lingering co-dependency between two leftover
participants from an imperial/colonial (or at the very least ruler/subject)
historical situation that no longer exists. The important thing is that
Hamm and Clov maintain the respective roles of ruler and ruled, as well
as the assumption that there is no alternative to these roles, long after
the two searchings, the British for an answer, the Irish for a meaning to
their question, intersected on each other to their mutual frustration. No
proposed external solution could ever satisfy the Irish . . . for they as a
people neither knew who they were, nor what they wanted—these were
problems they would have to solve for themselves and themselves
alone.12
is that all art and all traditions of art as they exist in the present age are
by definition bourgeois and tainted by capitalism, created for, if not by,
the bourgeoisie within a hegemony of ideas and ideals which reinforce
the bourgeoisie. . . . The problem facing the contemporary artist, then,
is complicated by form as well as content. How can the proletarian, or
colonial, or feminist writer create art without using the forms and
conventions handed down by bourgeois, imperial, or patriarchal systems
without thereby perpetuating the hegemony and ideology of those
systems?19
Indeed, these are relevant questions to ask with regard to the play. But,
not unlike the questions in the play itself, they are questions whose
answers we already know, and Golden’s thesis, which we fully expect
after the above formula for investigation is laid out, leaves us to consider
whether an allegorical reading is able to deal with the full weight of the
historical comment Beckett is making. “I would suggest,” writes Golden,
“that in his plays Beckett provides an allegory for the problems I have
been outlining [in that they] illustrate the mutual dependence and
deformation of the relationship between exploiter and exploited.”20
“Hamm,” he contends,