French Studies, Vol. LXXV, No.

4, 468–483
doi:10.1093/fs/knab098

‘AVEUGLE COMME LE DESTIN’: BLINDNESS AND ITS

INEVITABILITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE

MOLLY CROZIER *
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON
*molly.crozier@kcl.ac.uk

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It is unclear to what extent many of Samuel Beckett’s characters are sighted. Can
Mouth see? Probably not, given she does not have eyes. What about the heads in
urns in Play? They seem to be able to sense light, their speech prompted by the il-
lumination of a spotlight, their silence brought about by the return of darkness.
But when all three are lit and speaking at once, they do not generally appear to
perceive one another, suggesting that their sensory organs do not receive informa-
tion conventionally. In Film, the protagonist wears an eye patch over one eye,
surely significant in a piece so concerned with the gaze. We tend to assume that
characters in fiction are non-disabled unless told otherwise. But there is very little
evidence to suggest that the characters in many of Beckett’s later plays can see at
all: sightedness is only specified in relation to blindness. From early in his œuvre,
characters who are explicitly defined as blind suggest to the audience that sight is
always already progressing towards blindness, and that the sightedness of other
characters is a temporary state of affairs.
Sight is explored throughout Beckett’s dramatic œuvre through the significance
of the gaze. Anna McMullan highlights this several times, observing that ‘sight is
portrayed as painful or deficient’ in All That Fall, as when Maddy Rooney is deeply
unsettled by a horse’s unmoving stare, and that Winnie’s gaze is a central feature
of Happy Days, whether directed outwards or at her own appearance in the mir-
ror.1 Logic dictates that the mound of earth will eventually blind Winnie as well as
paralysing her: having covered her up to the waist and now the neck, we must
imagine that in a hypothetical third act it would cover her head too. Emphasis on
the gaze suggests its eventual cessation.
Blindness, or at least partial vision, is often an impairment in which the audi-
ence shares. As McMullan observes, the audience for Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy
Days have limited vision, impeded by lighting or staging.2 Of course, in the radio
plays, the audience is completely blind, their vision necessarily eliminated by the
nature of the medium. In All That Fall, the dislocated audience is put in the same
position of dependency as the blind Mr Rooney. When Mrs Rooney describes
1
Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 71 and 54.
2
McMullan, Performing Embodiment, p. 46.

# The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and repro-
duction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 BLINDNESS AND ITS INEVITABILITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE 469
their surroundings to her husband, she also enables the audience to navigate a
world which is hidden from them.
In Beckett’s œuvre generally, what we do not see is often as important as what
we do: Godot himself; what lies outside the room in Fin de partie; what is below
the necks of the speakers in Play. The spectator is inevitably deprived of some de-
gree of visual information, and Beckett’s staging is likely to heighten the audience’s
awareness of what they cannot see. Winnie’s mound makes the viewer fixate on
her lower half; the darkness of Not I makes the spectator hyper-aware of the phys-

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icality of the role. The privileging of the gaze and the accompanying reduction of
the audience’s vision mean that blindness underpins the entire dramatic œuvre,
whether or not an explicitly blind character is present.
There is a small critical catalogue examining the failing eyesight of Beckett’s
characters. Peggy Phelan touches on blindness and vision, although she focuses
on visual art and reflections on seeing rather than the specific blindness of indi-
vidual characters.3 Einat Adar sees echoes of the Molyneux problem and the
trope of a blind man’s sight restored in Fragment de théâtre I.4 Patricia Novillo-
Corvalán compares Beckett’s disabled protagonists to those of Jorge Luis
Borges, touching on blindness with the observation that, in the work of both
writers, characters have a heightened awareness of their sensory organs and the
impact of these organs on their perception.5 Angela Moorjani draws on the
Oedipus myth and Wilfred Bion’s psychoanalysis to associate the play of sight,
partial sight, and blindness in Beckett with knowing and not-knowing.6 What is
notable in the existing writing on blindness in Beckett is the absence of a thor-
ough examination of sightlessness in and of itself, rather than as an allegory. As
Yael Levin observes, ‘Beckett’s readers often take disability and figures of im-
pairment to stand for abstract ideas’; she goes on to argue that ‘[a] compelling
argument against such hermeneutic practice might be that Beckett does not sub-
stitute. The vehicle is never lost, marginalized or obliterated by its tenor because
both are kept’.7
Levin also locates this tendency in Beckett in a wider trend whereby disabled
bodies are co-opted by literature to serve a metaphorical purpose, making refer-
ence to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis, which tells us that
‘literature uses disability an “opportunistic metaphorical device”’.8 Rosemarie
Garland Thomson remarks upon a parallel tendency in literary criticism: ‘when lit-
erary critics look at disabled characters, they often interpret them metaphorically

3
Peggy Phelan, ‘Lessons in Blindness from Samuel Beckett’, PMLA, 119.5 (2004), 1279–88.
4
Einat Adar, ‘From Irish Philosophy to Irish Theatre: The Blind (Wo)Man Made to See’, Estudios Irlandeses, 12
(2007), 1–11.
5
Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, ‘Literature and Disability: The Medical Interface in Borges and Beckett’, Medical
Humanities, 37.1 (2001), 38–43 (p. 39).
6
Angela Moorjani, ‘Peau de Chagrin: Beckett and Bion on Looking Not to See’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui,
14 (2004), 25–38 (pp. 29–30).
7
Yael Levin, ‘Univocity, Exhaustion and Failing Better: Reading Beckett with Disability Studies’, Journal of
Beckett Studies 27.2 (2018), 159–74 (p. 165).
8
Levin, ‘Univocity, Exhaustion and Failing Better’, p. 158.
470 MOLLY CROZIER

or aesthetically, reading them without political awareness’.9 While I do not wish to

dismiss the ontological, aesthetic, or otherwise metaphorical implications of dis-
ability as it manifests in Beckett, I wish to focus on its physical rather than
metaphysical aspect. Following Levin’s thinking, my focus on disability-orientated
readings of these plays is not a dismissal of more abstract interpretations: rather, I
hope that it might be taken in concert with such analysis. In what follows, I discuss
three characters in Beckett’s dramatic œuvre in particular relation to the facts of
sightlessness, using the framework of contemporary disability studies: Hamm in

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Fin de partie, Pozzo in En attendant Godot, and B in Fragment de théâtre I.
Throughout, I tend to assume a non-disabled spectator. There are two reasons
for this. The first is that theatres remain inaccessible spaces for many disabled
people. Both the physical barriers of the space and the norms of audience behav-
iour mean that theatres are often difficult spaces for disabled people,10 meaning
that the disabled character on stage may often be the only disabled person in the
room (even they might not ‘actually’ be disabled: whenever I refer to the disabled
character, I do so with an awareness of the tendency to cast non-disabled actors in
these roles).11 Petra Kuppers addresses this in the account of a trip to the theatre
with which she opens Theatre and Disability, stressing the shortage of wheelchair
spaces and the issue of where to leave her wheelchair if she uses her cane to get to
her seat. She also refers to the challenges attending audio description, and the
stimming behaviours in which many (but not all) autistic people engage in order
to ‘maintain their bodily boundaries’, which can result in expulsion from the the-
atre unless they attend a ‘relaxed’ performance. The second reason for my
assumption of a non-disabled spectator is that this is the position I occupy. I am
not disabled, and this limits my capacity to engage with how these representations
might impact a disabled audience member. I therefore consider Beckett’s repre-
sentations of disability as moments of interaction and even confrontation between
disability and non-disability, following Garland Thomson’s argument that ‘literary
representation sets up static encounters between disabled figures and normate
readers, whereas real social relations are always dynamic’.12 I also consider where
theatre might fit into this schema, as a non-static form of literary representation,
or a literary form of social relation.
En attendant Godot is undoubtedly Beckett’s most famous theatrical work. It has
been performed all over the world, in locations as varied and surprising as New
Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, siege-battered Sarajevo during the
break-up of former Yugoslavia, and San Quentin State Penitentiary. As we know,
it centres around two men on a country road, waiting for the eponymous Godot,
who never appears. In each of the two acts, Vladimir and Estragon are visited by a
9
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 9–10.
10
See Petra Kuppers, Theatre and Disability (London: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 1–4.
11
Accessibility features such as surtitled performances or, more pertinently to this piece, audio description, are
increasingly available to disabled theatre-goers. However, theatre is still infrequently designed with disabled audi-
ence members in mind.
12
Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 11.
 BLINDNESS AND ITS INEVITABILITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE 471
master and slave, Lucky and Pozzo. All four characters exist in varying states of
impairment, from sore feet to muteness.13 Of particular interest here is Pozzo,
whose deteriorating eyesight brings his disability into stark relief.
By the time of Pozzo’s second appearance he is completely blind. Attached to
his slave by a rope, he relies on Lucky’s guidance to move across the stage, and act
II’s pratfalls result from his blindness. On his second appearance, before he even
speaks he has bumped into Lucky, both indicating his vulnerability and suffusing
his reduced capacities with a sort of slapstick ridiculousness. Beckett often mines

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impairment as a source of slapstick (tragi)comedy — a potentially troubling ten-
dency. There is undoubtedly an element of cruelty in the invitation to laugh at a
disabled character, particularly when one considers that Pozzo has generally been
played by sighted actors; there is no disabled person who is in on the joke.
However, it is not quite that simple. Pozzo was the highest-status character in act
I, but increased disability stereotypically comes with a decrease in status. As
Hannah Thompson notes, blindness is frequently associated with emasculation,14
and considering that Pozzo exerted no small degree of stereotypically masculine
physical dominance over Lucky earlier in the play, we might expect this authority
to have been lost along with his vision.
Pozzo’s altered position could produce a sense of poetic justice in relation to
the abuse he inflicted on Lucky in the first act, were a loss of status the conse-
quence of his impairment. In fact, Lucky has gained nothing as a result of Pozzo’s
altered capacities, as the stage direction for their re-entry establishes: ‘Lucky chargé
comme au premier acte. Corde comme au premier acte’.15 Although one might assume that
Pozzo’s reduced capacity would permit Lucky greater autonomy, he has main-
tained his control over his servant by shortening the physical link between them.
Lucky remains Pozzo’s slave despite his master’s hypothetical loss of status, and is
therefore still the victim of his (potentially violent) whims. As with Hamm and
Clov in Fin de partie, the more disabled character is positioned as master, under-
mining the preconceived equivalence between disability and low status. As such,
the pratfalls cannot be entirely dismissed as laughing at disability, although there
are certainly elements of that. The audience are simultaneously laughing down at a
member of a minority group, and laughing up at an authority figure who has used
his status to injure his subordinate. While Pozzo’s physical decline might be un-
avoidable, his status does not inevitably decline in tandem, making the ethical
question of jokes around disability more complex and perhaps, therefore, more
uncomfortable. Moreover, although his initial tumble might suggest a correspon-
dence between disability and weakness, his continuing high status undermines
such an interpretation.
Creating situations in which the audience laughs at a blind man may force spec-
tators to confront their responses to disability. Pozzo’s fall has the potential to
13
See Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and
Director, I: From ‘Waiting for Godot’ to ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ (London: John Calder, 1988), p. 71.
14
Hannah Thompson, Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction, 1789–2013 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 17.
15
Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (Paris: Minuit, 1952), p. 108.
472 MOLLY CROZIER

disconcert non-disabled spectators as they react instinctively and then catch them-
selves in the act of laughing. Laughter might be said to have a Verfremdungseffekt in
this context, heightened by Beckett’s tendency to repeat himself, whether within a
single play or by reoccurring motifs throughout his œuvre. Such a multiple re-
sponse is characteristic of the disjuncture and discomfort which, according to Ato
Quayson, often characterize non-disabled reactions to disability. He describes
such uneasiness as ‘aesthetic nervousness’, a response to disability in literature
which ‘is seen when the dominant protocols of representation within the literary

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text are short-circuited in relation to disability’.16 This occurs on a number of lev-
els, both internal and external to the text, the dimension which occurs between
reader (or spectator, perhaps?) and text being most pertinent:
The reader’s status within a given text is a function of the several interacting elements such as
the identification with the vicissitudes of the life of a particular character, or the alignment be-
tween the reader and the shifting positions of the narrator or the necessary reformulations of
the reader’s perspective enjoined by the modulations of various plot elements and so on. [. . .]
For the reader, aesthetic nervousness overlaps social attitudes to disability that themselves often
remain unexamined in their prejudices and biases.17

He argues that these responses, characterized by anxiety, dissonance, and disor-

der, are a manifestation of the power relationships created by a normative
hierarchy of bodily traits, a hierarchy which the audience, consciously or otherwise,
is likely to have in mind before they enter the theatre. This dissonance, then, must
be aggravated by a high-status blind character. Is part of what is potentially funny
about Pozzo’s imperious cries for help the fact that this character, whom stereo-
types would categorize as weakened by his disability, still sees himself as powerful?
Such questions are even more productive of anxiety, and thus the aesthetic ner-
vousness becomes more and more heightened. The cessation of sight comes with
numerous disadvantages in the popular imagination, turning the blind person into
an object of pity, and yet Pozzo rejects such responses to his disability. In these
instances, it is unclear to what extent Beckett buys into these negative stereotypes,
given that his characters at one moment (literally) fall into them and at the next re-
fuse to see themselves in such a light.
Quayson goes on to say that
[t]he frames within which the disabled are continually placed by the normal are ones in which a
variety of concepts of wholeness, beauty, and economic competitiveness structure persons with
disability and place them at the center of a peculiar conjuncture of conceptions.18

Significantly, such standards of beauty and wholeness mean that the disabled
body will be found wanting by the normative gaze, a gaze which a sightless charac-
ter cannot return. Blind characters are the objects of scrutiny, but are
stereotypically denied the right to return that scrutiny: they might be said to be

16
Ato Quayson, ‘Aesthetic Nervousness’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. by Lennard J. Davis (London:
Routledge, 2013), pp. 202–13 (p. 202).
17
Quayson, ‘Aesthetic Nervousness’, p. 202.
18
Quayson, ‘Aesthetic Nervousness’, p. 204.
 BLINDNESS AND ITS INEVITABILITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE 473
denied agency by their inability to return the objectifying gaze. Thompson
explores this question of the gaze, making reference to Garland Thomson’s notion
of the stare, which is different from the disciplining, subordinating gaze. The stare
is rather a bodily response to one’s eye being caught, more potent than simply
glancing, scanning, and so on: ‘Crucially, Garland-Thomson is careful to point out
that the neurological nature of the stare means that it is an inquisitive response
which is not necessarily associated with the ability to see: blind people can stare
too.’19 So, the blind character on stage is unable to subordinate the audience with

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his gaze as they do him, but he can stare at them, unsettling their likely preconcep-
tion of their own advantage and resulting in aesthetic nervousness.
As this suggests, Quayson’s concept is further complicated in a theatrical con-
text, where the actor on stage is positioned as an object of admiration, fantasy,
and even desire simply by being on stage, but a non-disabled audience is likely to
struggle to fit a disabled body into this frame of perception, having been taught by
normative standards that disability is undesirable. The frames to which Quayson
refers function even more strongly when the body is literally framed by the cur-
tains of a stage or edge of a television screen. This raises an additional question as
to who has the power in this particular context: the character, placed in a position
of desirability, or the audience member, containing the blind person on stage
within the frame of their potentially limited, normative gaze.
Quayson focuses on written forms, but theatre creates a more direct experience
of aesthetic nervousness, wherein the theatre-goer is physically confronted with a
tangible disabled body. Visual art, as opposed to written forms, brings the (dis-
abled) body to the fore. Margrit Shildrick offers an explanation of why witnessing
disability in this way might be disquieting to a non-disabled audience member:
If we ask why disability should be so unsettling, so productive of anxiety, it is surely because it
speaks not to some absolute difference between the experience of disabled and non-disabled
forms of embodiment, but to a deeply disconcerting sense of commonality.20

Witnessing disability reminds us of the transient nature of non-disabled identity,

and of the likelihood that we will become disabled at some point in our lives, ‘a re-
ality many people who consider themselves able-bodied are reluctant to admit’.21
A visual witnessing of sightlessness, therefore, is inextricably linked to the aware-
ness that one will not always be able to witness in this way.
Pozzo’s altered state is a manifestation of the prevalent association between dis-
ability and decline, a tendency observed by Tobin Siebers, among others.22 We
generally assume that physical health declines with age, and the gradual deteriora-
tion of one’s eyesight commonly features in this. Pozzo progresses from sighted
to blind, apparently in keeping with norms of ageing. However, while the
19
Thompson, Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction, p. 48.
20
Margrit Shildrick, ‘Critical Disability Studies: Rethinking the Conventions for an Age of Postmodernity’, in
Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. by Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas (London:
Routledge, 2012), pp. 30–41 (p. 35).
21
Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 14.
22
Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), p. 5.
474 MOLLY CROZIER

chronology seems credible on paper, it has happened too rapidly to be truly con-
vincing. Only a single day has passed, as Vladimir reminds Estragon.23 Although
Estragon’s forgetfulness does open Vladimir’s account up to doubt, no other time
frame is suggested. Pozzo’s account of how he became blind suggests that his
sight did not gradually fade over time, nor was it lost as a result of a sudden acci-
dent, either of which would be believable medical explanations:
VLADIMIR. Vous disiez que vous aviez une bonne vue, autrefois, si j’ai bien entendu?

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POZZO. Oui, elle était bien bonne.
[. . .]
VLADIMIR. Je vous demande si cela vous a pris tout d’un coup.
POZZO. Un beau jour je me suis réveillé, aveugle comme le destin. (Un temps.) Je me demande
parfois si je ne dors pas encore.24

While sudden blindness is medically possible, it is unlikely to seem plausible to

the audience. It would be unreasonable to imagine that Beckett included this in an
attempt to raise awareness of a little-known medical issue. Rather, the purpose of
this explanation is to further reduce the plausibility of Pozzo’s decline.
Although Pozzo’s disability seems unrealistic, his understanding of it has some
similarities with disability theory. His description of himself as ‘aveugle comme le
destin’ hints at the temporary nature of non-disabled status. He could mean that
all humans are destined to lose their eyesight eventually, whether through deterio-
ration or death. In this, he would be thinking along the same lines as Siebers, who
states that ‘[a]ble-bodiedness is a temporary identity at best, while being human
guarantees that all other identities will eventually come into contact with some
form of disability identity’.25 This is not far from suggesting that disability is an in-
evitable human destiny, and Pozzo likewise draws a link between disability and
fate.
Despite its potential parallels with disability theory, ‘aveugle comme le destin’ is
also a self-aggrandizing description of Pozzo by Pozzo, which suggests that he
equates himself to the figure of Fate. Indeed, this description echoes the Graeae,
the three sisters of fate in Greek mythology who have only a single eye and a sin-
gle tooth between them. This further complicates the question of power. While
his new impairment would tend to be associated with a loss of status, Pozzo con-
tinues to associate himself with high-status figures. He makes another comparable
statement, saying, ‘Les aveugles n’ont pas la notion du temps. [. . .] Les choses du
temps, ils ne le voient pas non plus.’26 This too is tinged with self-
mythologization. It is suggestive of a quasi-mystical blind man, whose lost eyesight
is compensated with a dramatic, supernatural alteration in perception, echoing
Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus or the myth of the blind, gender-swapping seer
23
Beckett, En attendant Godot, p. 111.
24
Beckett, En attendant Godot, pp. 121–22.
25
Siebers, Disability Theory, p. 5.
26
Beckett, En attendant Godot, p. 122.
 BLINDNESS AND ITS INEVITABILITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE 475
Tiresias. The suggestion may be that he is above such quotidian concerns as date
or time. With this remark, Pozzo attempts to place himself in a separate, mythical
stratum of beings, different for reasons more mystical than eyesight or lack
thereof.
David Bolt comments on the prevalence of this idea of the ‘extraordinary
senses’ which accompany blindness, observing that while this might appear to be
a so-called positive stereotype, its impact is negative: ‘cultural representations of
extraordinary senses serve, at best, to render magical the talent and achievements

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of people who have visual impairments and, at worst, to justify the ascription of
various animal-like characteristics’.27 As Thompson explains, ‘Both of Bolt’s sce-
narios result in the distancing of blind people from their sighted peers’.28 Pozzo,
who already viewed himself as superior to the other characters prior to the loss of
his sight, is seeking to play into these stereotypes, perhaps even choosing to see
his blindness as evidence of his own exceptionalism. However, he does not suc-
ceed in convincing either the other characters or the audience that he has any
extraordinary sense, rendering himself imperious rather than transcendent. His
statement blends lofty claims with the commonplace — it might equally refer to
the fact that he can no longer see to look at a clock — and thereby undermines it-
self. In Beckett, blind characters do not conform to what Thompson terms the
‘compensation myth’,29 the tradition in which the loss of sight is compensated by
some kind of improvement in another sense: they simply cannot see. Indeed,
given the tendency towards sightlessness which can be seen throughout his œuvre,
it might be argued that, within the world of Beckett’s theatre, blind characters are
entirely unremarkable. Pozzo, in this instance, rejects a stereotype of sightlessness.
However, this resistance to tropes of disability is not consistent. The blind
Pozzo is an isolated figure, the object of derision and manipulation, which was
not the case when he could see. Having discussed attacking Lucky in his sleep,
Vladimir and Estragon turn their attention to Pozzo. Vladimir suggests that ‘le
mieux serait de profiter de ce que Pozzo appelle au secours pour le secourir’.30 If
the use of ‘profiter’ were not sufficient proof that Vladimir believes that they
might gain something by Pozzo’s vulnerable state, it is even more evident in
Beckett’s English translation, wherein this sentence becomes a short dialogue.
Estragon expresses surprised disbelief, as if it were ridiculous to suggest helping
such a pathetic figure. In his reply, Vladimir does not claim that helping Pozzo
would be a moral act; rather he proposes doing so ‘[i]n anticipation of some tangi-
ble return’.31 Pozzo is at their mercy, and although they do not act on this
conversation, it serves as a reminder of his vulnerability. This plays into wide-
spread fears around ageing, disability, and weakness.
27
David Bolt, The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2014), p. 67.
28
Thompson, Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction, p. 34.
29
Ibid.
30
Beckett, En attendant Godot, p. 111.
31
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), pp. 7–88
(p. 74).
476 MOLLY CROZIER

The repetitive nature of theatrical performance reinforces the inevitability of

sight loss: night after night, Pozzo will progress from sighted to blind, becoming
reliant on Lucky anew in every performance. The script will brook no alternative
to his blindness, making it all the more unavoidable. Pozzo might be the only
character in a Beckett play to draw an explicit link between blindness and fate, but
that link is nevertheless present in other representations of blindness in Beckett’s
theatre.
Fragment de théâtre I is a short piece, written in French in the 1950s. It depicts two

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disabled men, A, who is blind, and B, who uses a wheelchair. B suggests that they
join together in order to balance out each other’s disabilities, as he can guide A
while A pushes the wheelchair. However, this partnership collapses when B strikes
A with the pole he had been using to propel himself. He immediately asks for for-
giveness, but while there are moments of affection and intimacy as A tucks a
blanket around him and kneels at his feet, the closing image is one of violence, as
A abruptly wrenches the pole from B’s hands.
Like Hamm in Fin de partie, A expresses discontent with his disability, albeit in-
directly. His wish to know more about the world around him indicates
dissatisfaction with his reduced perception, as Einat Adar states.32 He describes
himself as ‘[a]ccroupi dans le noir, grattant une vieille rengaine aux quatre vents’, a
bleak image of isolation and abjection.33 That said, he does not instantly jump at
B’s solution. Instead, he avoids the question: when B says ‘nous sommes faits
pour nous entendre’, A changes the subject.34 This demonstrates an awareness of
the vulnerability which is a function of his disability. He seems to be uneasy about
other people: although he does immediately call out on hearing B approach, his si-
lence when B asks ‘vous n’avez pas appelé? (Un temps.) Crié?’ seems to indicate
that when he has previously heard people approaching, he has not drawn attention
to himself.35 He cannot trust whoever might be passing by not to injure him and
remains distrustful of B once they have met, a concern which proves reasonable
when B attempts to hit him with the pole.36 B might offer a potential solution to
the problems brought about by his blindness, but that solution is presented from
the outset as risky, fallible, and even undesirable, because of its reliance on another
human being.
Adar relates this Fragment to the Molyneux problem, which asks whether a blind
man who had learned to differentiate between a sphere and a cube by touch would
be able to visually distinguish the two were he suddenly able to see. The problem
asks how people understand drastically new information:

32
Adar, ‘From Irish Philosophy to Irish Theatre’, p. 8.
33
Samuel Beckett, Fragment de théâtre I, in Pas, suivi de Fragment de théâtre I, Fragment de théâtre II, Pochade radiophonique,
Esquisse radiophonique (Paris: Minuit, 1978), pp. 19–34 (p. 24).
34
Ibid., p. 26.
35
Ibid., p. 25.
36
Ibid., p. 28.
 BLINDNESS AND ITS INEVITABILITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE 477
Even though the play does not refer to the problem directly, or indeed features [sic] a medical or
miraculous restoration of sight, it can be seen to dramatise the story of a blind man made to see
in an altered, but still recognisable form.37

Unlike Hamm but like Molyneux’s hypothetical blind man, A tells us that he
has ‘toujours été ainsi’, and is briefly ‘cured’ by forming a union with B.38 But,
Adar tells us, Beckett does not give an answer to the problem, rather telling us
that the attempt to grasp radically new notions is doomed to fail: ‘The pursuit of
knowledge and practical utility implied in the trope of the blind man made to see,

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together with the aspiration to transcend human knowledge, repeatedly fail’.39
Applying the Molyneux problem to Fragment de théâtre I renders both blindness and
ignorance inevitable. One cannot hope to understand radically new information,
nor can A hope to see.
My interest, however, lies not in the philosophical or metaphorical implications
of the piece’s response to the Molyneux problem, but in its implications for the
healing narrative proposed by the problem. Such a narrative of cure can be found
in countless mainstream depictions of disability. Kuppers identifies it in the X-Men
films, in which mutant superheroes led by the wheelchair-using Professor Xavier
battle other mutants.40 Kuppers disagrees with the praise the films received for
their depiction of disability, referring to the cure plotline of the third in the series,
‘a storyline that chimes both with public disability discourses [. . .] and with gay
history and the notion of a cure for homosexuality’.41 This narrative reflects wider
discourses around disability, notably the medical model, which perceives it as an
individual issue in need of medical intervention. As Adar points out, Fragment de
théâtre I is Beckett’s only play in which characters seriously entertain the possibility
of a cure, and that cure fails.
Indeed, Fragment de théâtre I might be said to subvert the narrative of cure. A’s
and B’s attempt at a union which will restore A’s sight and facilitate B’s mobility
fails, in front of an audience who have been taught to desire a cure for impair-
ments by normative anxiety around disability: ‘There is nothing like a wheelchair
to make people realize how interesting their shoe has become’.42 The word
‘wheelchair’ here might easily be replaced with ‘visible disability’. Danielle Peers
and Lindsay Eales demonstrate that observing disability is likely to make a non-
disabled audience uncomfortable, and, were the cure to work, the audience would
no longer be forced to observe either character’s disability. But it does not.
Spectators must sit with their discomfort. Blindness on stage is not only inevitable
for the character: the audience cannot avoid it either, required as they are by

37
Adar, ‘From Irish Philosophy to Irish Theatre’, p. 8.
38
Beckett, Fragment de théâtre I, p. 24.
39
Adar, ‘From Irish Philosophy to Irish Theatre’, p. 9.
40
Petra Kuppers, ‘The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric: The Performance of Disability’, Drama Review, 51.4 (2007), 80–88
(p. 84).
41
Kuppers, ‘The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric’, p. 86, n. 1.
42
Danielle Peers and Lindsay Eales, ‘Moving Materiality: People, Tools, and This Thing Called Disability’, Art/
Research International, 2.2 (2017), 101–25 (p. 115).
478 MOLLY CROZIER

theatre etiquette to sit motionless, facing the stage, watching visibly disabled fig-
ures struggle to cope with their disabilities.
One might read this attempt to ‘see’ as rather endearing given its basis in mu-
tual support and collaboration, which brings to mind Tom Shakespeare’s
discussion of interpersonal relationships.43 Unsurprisingly, disabled people are
more reliant on others than non-disabled people, both for day-to-day assistance
and emotional support. Despite this, isolation is widespread among disabled peo-
ple, and Shakespeare tells us that such solitude is more common for disabled

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people than it is for other minority groups.44 His description of both the signifi-
cance of friendship for disabled people and the difficulty of participating in social
life has parallels in Fragment de théâtre I:
[D]isabled people may not know any other disabled people in their family, neighbourhood or
wider community. They may find it difficult to identify as disabled. They may be excluded from
social settings. Prejudice, ignorance and hostility may create barriers which prevent connecting
to strangers or make entering public spaces an ordeal [. . .]. Disabled people may lack the energy
or skills or resources to socialise.45

While these issues are not all explicitly present in A’s and B’s troubled interac-
tions, Fragment de théâtre I dramatizes the challenges of socializing while disabled.
Both of them are alone before they meet, having experienced exclusion. Each of
them experiences hostility from the person with whom they are attempting to
build a relationship, and it is arguably B’s ignorance of A’s communication needs
which results in the breakdown of relations. Their need for one another’s friend-
ship is greater because of their respective disabilities, but the challenges are greater
too. The partnership fails — cruelly so. In Beckett, ‘two incomplete bodies can
never hope to transcend their shortcomings and achieve unity and their attempt at
collaboration is reduced to a brief, catastrophic encounter’.46
A repeatedly falls into the stereotype of vulnerable, feeble disability. The verb
used most often for his movements is ‘tâtonner’.47 The English text codes his
movements even more clearly as disabled, with directions including ‘fumbles’ and,
when he gets a hold on B’s wheelchair, ‘pushing it blindly’ (given that he is blind, one
might well ask how else he would push it).48 He begs, a frequent trope in depic-
tions of disability, and of blindness in particular, which puts him in a low-status
position.49 He falls victim to a violent attack which he quite literally does not see
coming. Even his posture is one of subservience, on his knees because B puts him
there.50 But despite his vulnerability for the majority of the piece, it closes with an
image of assertion on his part, when he ‘saisit le bout de la perche et l’arrache des mains

43
Tom Shakespeare, Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited (London: Taylor & Francis, 2014), p. 191.
44
Ibid.
45
Shakespeare, Disability Rights and Wrongs, p. 191.
46
Alexandra Poulain, ‘Failed Collaboration and Queer Love in Yeats’s “The Cat and the Moon” and Beckett’s
Rough for Theatre I’, Ilha do Desterro, 71.2 (2018), 233–44 (p. 239).
47
Beckett, Fragment de théâtre I, p. 29.
48
Beckett, Rough for Theatre I, in The Complete Dramatic Works, pp. 225–34 (pp. 231 and 230).
49
See Bolt, The Metanarrative of Blindness, pp. 10–11.
50
Beckett, Fragment de théâtre I, p. 30.
 BLINDNESS AND ITS INEVITABILITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE 479
51
de B’. The audience is allowed to fall into the comfort of simplistic stereotypes,
which are then complicated by the higher status of another disabled character, and
then undermined. In this final tableau, A might not escape his blindness, but he
does escape the abjection associated with it by asserting himself. He thus problem-
atizes the association between disability and vulnerability which has been
established in the rest of the piece.
The attempt to see via someone else unites A and Pozzo with Hamm in Fin de
partie. A true cure is never suggested, but this alternative solution is ever-present.

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In ‘What’s Cool about Being Blind?’, Rod Michalko proposes the idea of a world
that is ‘just there’, which seeing can take for granted. Blindness, by contrast, ‘needs
to “see” the just-thereness of the world in order to believe it — to believe that the
world is there-to-be-seen’, to synchronize itself with sight.52 In other words, blind
people must exert effort in order to adapt themselves to the sighted world, an ef-
fort which is unnecessary for sighted people for whom the world is always already
legible. The attempts made by Hamm, Pozzo, and A to see via other people can
be seen as enacting this notion by reports about the ‘thereness’ of the world.
Hamm is the best example of this. He is curious about the world that he cannot
see, prompting Clov to get the ladder and look outside by asking about the
weather, then ordering him to look in specific ways.
HAMM. Regarde la terre.
CLOV. Je l’ai regardée.
HAMM. À la lunette?
CLOV. Pas besoin de lunette.
HAMM. Regarde-la à la lunette.
CLOV. Je vais chercher la lunette.53

The repetition of ‘regarder’ in this extract emphasizes looking and seeing for
the sighted audience member, while the repeated use of ‘lunette’ is suggestive of a
fixation on not only vision, but vision in its clearest, most augmented form as well
the tools which enable such sight and a desire for the reports he receives about
the visual world to be completely accurate. Following Michalko’s thinking, Hamm
is attempting to keep himself in synchronicity with seeing, to prove to himself that
the world taken for granted by sighted people is there. He, like Pozzo and B, can-
not evade his own bodily reality, but he can attempt to find a way around it. Clov’s
resistance is symptomatic of the ‘just-thereness’ of the world for those who can
see — he does not grasp why Hamm wants to ‘see’ in detail, and perceives the
fetching of the telescope and ladder through the lens of the inconvenience to him-
self. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry observes that another person’s pain ‘is so

51
Ibid., p. 34.
52
Rod Michalko, ‘What’s Cool about Being Blind?’, Disability Studies Quarterly 30.3–4 (2010), <https://dsq-sds.
org/article/view/1296/1332> [accessed 27 May 2021].
53
Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie, suivi de Acte sans paroles (Paris: Minuit, 1957), pp. 41–42.
480 MOLLY CROZIER

elusive that “hearing about pain” may exist as the primary model of what it is “to
have doubt”’.54 This is equally true of blindness. For Clov, sight is so inarguably
present that he fails to compute a world in which sight is absent, the very world
inhabited by Hamm. While for Hamm his own blindness (and by extension Clov’s
future blindness) is so inexorably present that doubt is impossible, it is so far re-
moved from Clov’s experience that he can only doubt it. Hamm’s blindness is
avoidable for Clov.
That said, it is not fair to depict Clov as entirely unsympathetic. The same scene

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in which he ‘sees’ for Hamm features some evidence of compassion. As Clov
enters and exits, he describes his actions, enabling Hamm to follow what is hap-
pening. ‘Je suis de retour’, ‘J’apporte l’escabeau’.55 Even before he begins
describing the view, he demonstrates an awareness that their surroundings and the
events occurring in them are not ‘just there’ for Hamm in the same way as they
are for him. This scene also ensures that the audience cannot forget, ignore, avoid,
or assimilate Hamm’s blindness. The (presumably sighted) audience can see that
Clov is moving on and off with various objects, but his commentary on his own
actions serves as a reminder that not everyone can. Indeed, this section might be
read as analogous to the audio description provided to visually impaired theatre-
goers, a moment in which the difference between that description and the content
of the play collapses.
In some ways, Hamm’s disabilities are easily assimilable into normativity. He is
stationary for much of the play and is not seated in a conventional wheelchair. His
blindness may be invisible — dark glasses do not necessarily indicate blindness.
For the audience to understand a character as disabled, we have to be able to per-
ceive their disability: if Hamm stays still, in what appears to be an ordinary
armchair, not mentioning his sightlessness, his body is unremarkable. But there
are moments which do emphasize Hamm’s disability, notably when he has Clov
move him around the room:
HAMM. Fais-moi faire un petit tour. (Clov se met derrière le fauteuil et le fait avancer.) Pas trop vite!
(Clov fait avancer le fauteuil.) Fais-moi le tour du monde! (Clov fait avancer le fauteuil.) Rase les murs.
Puis ramène moi au centre. (Clov fait avancer le fauteuil.) J’étais bien au centre, n’est-ce pas?
CLOV. Oui.
HAMM. [. . .] Tu rases?
CLOV. Oui.
[. . .]
HAMM. Stop! (Clov arrête le fauteuil tout près du mur du fond. Hamm pose la main contre le mur. Un temps.)
Vieux mur! (Un temps.) Au-delà c’est. . . l’autre enfer. (Un temps. Avec violence.) Plus près! Plus
près! Tout contre!
CLOV. Enlève ta main. (Hamm retire sa main. Clov colle le fauteuil contre le mur.) Là.

54
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985),
p. 4.
55
Beckett, Fin de partie, p. 42.
 BLINDNESS AND ITS INEVITABILITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE 481
Hamm se penche vers le mur, y colle l’oreille.
HAMM. Tu entends? (Il frappe le mur avec son doigt replié. Un temps.) Tu entends? Des briques creuses.
(Il frappe encore.) Tout ça c’est creux! (Un temps. Il se redresse. Avec violence.) Assez! On rentre.56

This scene is a reminder of both Hamm’s disabilities. His blindness is fore-

grounded by his tapping to search for the wall; his impaired movement is
highlighted by his requests to be pushed around the room, closer to the wall, and
so on.

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In a moment when his disability is heightened, Hamm observes that the bricks
on which he is tapping are false, and by extension that this is all a performance.
This could remind the audience that (casting dependent) the actor is not blind or a
wheelchair user, precisely when his disabilities are foregrounded. Uncertainty
around the truth of the actor’s body complicates the interaction which results in
aesthetic nervousness. In fact, the role is frequently played by high-profile, recog-
nizable actors including Alan Cumming, Michael Gambon, and Hugo Weaving,57
who the audience know are not disabled. Even when the actor is unknown, there
may be unease around whether they really need the wheelchair, complicating the
anxiety of interaction between disabled and non-disabled people. This is redolent
of real-world suspicion of whether disabled people are ‘really’ disabled, and adds
another level of tension and distrust to the relationship between audience and
character. On the other hand, it offers the audience the opportunity to reconcile
themselves with the disabled body on stage by telling themselves that this is not a
‘real’ disabled person, while casting a disabled actor might lead to greater discom-
fort on this front.
That said, the possibility that the disability is ‘fake’ might create apprehension
around the ethics of impersonating a minority group. There is layer upon layer of
discomfort to the experience of watching a disabled character in theatre, a discom-
fort which is brought to the fore when that character draws attention
simultaneously to his disability and to the possible falseness thereof. Thomas Fahy
suggests that disability theatre proposes a ‘challenge’ to its audience, asking them
‘to reevaluate preconceived notions about disability’.58 This uneasiness, described
by Quayson as aesthetic nervousness, constitutes such a challenge. It might be
hoped that we would ask ourselves why we feel anxious when faced with a disabled
character on stage, examining the multiple layers of our responses, and that this
could lead to an examination of fears about our own unstable embodiment and
fading vision. Such a multiplicity of responses to Hamm is potentially reflective of
day-to-day reactions to disability, including but not limited to discomfort, disbelief,
pity, disgust, and confusion. By creating these reactions in the artificial setting of
the theatre, productions could prompt a questioning of preconceptions, or at least
an acknowledgement of the negative stereotypes underlying them.
56
Beckett, Fin de partie, pp. 39–40.
57
London, Old Vic, 2020; London, Albery Theatre, 2004; Sydney, Roslyn Packer Theatre, 2015.
58
Thomas Fahy, ‘Peering behind the Curtain: An Introduction’, in Peering behind the Curtain: Disability, Illness, and
the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theatre, ed. by Thomas Fahy and Kimball King (New York: Routledge,
2002), pp. ix–xiii (p. x).
482 MOLLY CROZIER

Reactions to Hamm beg the question: why might we be uncomfortable with

disability? As mentioned earlier, Margrit Shildrick suggests that disabled people re-
mind non-disabled people of the transient nature of non-disabled identity, and of
the likelihood that they will eventually become disabled themselves.59 The audi-
ence is particularly reminded of this by Hamm, who makes a lengthy speech
predicting Clov’s future blindness and paralysis in reference to his own changes in
embodiment:
Un jour tu seras aveugle. Comme moi. Tu seras assis quelque part, petit plein perdu dans le

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vide, pour toujours, dans le noir. Comme moi. (Un temps.) [. . .] Tu regarderas le mur un peu,
puis tu te diras, Je vais fermer les yeux, peut-être dormir un peu, après ça ira mieux, et les fer-
meras. Et quand tu les rouvriras il n’y aura plus de mur. (Un temps.) L’infini du vide sera autour
de toi, tous les morts de tous les temps ressuscités ne le combleraient pas, tu y seras comme un
petit gravier au milieu de la steppe.60

This is straightforwardly in the future tense: there is nothing conditional about

Clov’s impending blindness. As well as reminding Clov, and by extension the audi-
ence, that disability is inevitable, in this speech Hamm conforms to the trope of
disabled despair. He refers to his blindness as ‘le noir’, conforming to linguistic
norms in French disability discourse, as noted by Bertrand Verine, who highlights
the prevalence of metaphors referring to la nuit and le noir (as opposed to the lu-
mière of medical, educational, or social compensation for blindness), despite the
arguable inefficacy of such metaphors in communicating the experience of im-
paired vision.61 Hamm’s use of such a metaphor suggests that he feels disability is
a void into which he has fallen and his life was better before, reinforcing the no-
tion that disability is undesirable or to be feared, and thereby creating precisely the
‘disconcerting sense of commonality’ to which Shildrick refers. In this way,
Beckett — read through the lens of contemporary disability studies — participates
in negative stereotypes of blindness.
Blindness looms in the future of all the characters in these plays and in much of
Beckett’s wider œuvre, if it has not already arrived. By extension, the gaze of the
audience, the very means by which the sighted spectator observes these blind pro-
tagonists, is also eventually bound to cease. The response, as Quayson, Shildrick,
and Bill Hughes argue, is one of discomfort and even fear.62 The repetitive nature
of Beckett’s œuvre means that these responses are created repeatedly, forcing the
audience to (re)consider their initial reactions to witnessing disability. The self-
consciousness of audience members attending performances of Beckett’s work
has the potential to remind them that their — our — automatic responses ought
to be questioned. They are not innate, they are not natural: they are created and
can be undone. They are not inevitable, even if blindness is.
59
Shildrick, ‘Critical Disability Studies’, p. 35.
60
Beckett, Fin de partie, pp. 51–52.
61
Bertrand Verine, ‘La Nuit et le noir, clichés métaphoriques de la cécité’, in Discours et représentations du handicap:
perspectives culturelles, ed. by Céline Roussel and Soline Vennetier (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), pp. 247–60
(p. 248).
62
Bill Hughes, ‘Fear, Pity and Disgust: Emotions and the Non-disabled Imaginary’, in Routledge Handbook of
Disability Studies, ed. by Watson, Roulstone, and Thomas, pp. 67–78 (p. 69).
 BLINDNESS AND ITS INEVITABILITY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE 483
While blindness is shown to be inevitable for the characters (and by extension
the audience), the despair which accompanies it is not. Although all three blind
characters profess abjection, their behaviour belies this. In all three examples here
discussed, the audience witnesses blind characters claiming status and dominating
other characters to varying extents, resisting stereotypes of disability and thereby
suggesting that the loss of sight does not always coincide with the onset of despair.
Characteristically of Beckett, in a situation the audience might presume to be
bleak, his characters are able to find nuance and even humour within their

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blindness.
These plays offer commentary on actual disability, as it might be understood
outside of the theatre space; or at least, they could offer such commentary if pro-
ductions chose to highlight the disabled status of the characters, as Jess Thom’s
production of Not I has done to great effect. Thom has Tourette’s syndrome, and
has spoken about her experience of reading Not I for the first time: ‘I recognised
that this character was a neurodiverse character, a disabled character, and should
absolutely be played by someone with that shared lived experience’.63 This pre-
paredness to recognize disability enabled Thom to see beyond traditional staging
and produce something which remained faithful to the text while foregrounding
disability by using Thom’s embodied knowledge to express something about
Mouth. This ought also to be possible for blind characters. Beckett’s depiction of
blindness might not be realistic, per se, but it is also not entirely isolated from the
realities of disability, as viewing these plays through a disability-theory lens reveals.
There are certainly further questions to be asked in relation to the ethical implica-
tions of Beckett’s depiction of disability. If disability looms large in all our futures,
as Shildrick suggests, what does the ever-present probability of blindness in
Beckett’s theatrical œuvre tell us about our own ailing bodies?

63
Natasha Tripney, ‘Touretteshero’s Jess Thom: “Disabled People Need to Be Written in, Not Written Out’”,
28 February 2018, <https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/tourettesheros-jess-thom-disabled-people-need-to-be-
written-in-not-written-out> [accessed 27 May 2021].