Samuel Beckett's Happy Days - Essay Example

?Analysis of Beckett’s “Happy Days” Samuel Beckett’s play, “Happy Days,” portrays a woman, Winnie, buried in the ground, first up to her waist, then up to her neck, determined to live out her meaningful life. Although her situation is hopeless because she has no idea how she got there, Winnie trusts that her life is meaningful and truly believes that there is nothing she can do to change it. Consequently, Winnie focuses on trivial details to pass each day. Beckett definitely succeeds in making this character’s life dramatic by consuming her life with habits and rituals. Winnie’s life is focused around certain details that help her cope with her anxiety of existence. Beckett shows that internally Winnie is afraid of what cannot be controlled and therefore has her resort to trifles. Although this play is a comedy, there is a deeper side of the characters as well. It is funny in the aspect that both Winnie and Willie live in some strange universe unfamiliar to the readers and that they lead essentially meaningless lives, somehow surviving the passage of time, lack of connection with each other, and purposeless existence. As the play goes on, however, the reader starts to sense that Winnie has a fear deep inside of her about what is to come. She even starts mumbling a half forgotten prayer at the beginning of Act One where the reader only picks up, “World without end Amen” (752). Winnie blatantly prays for a world that has infinite life so she will not have to see the face of death. As the play develops, it is revealed that Winnie tries to avoid confronting the reality of her situation, Willie’s ignorance towards her, and the inevitability of death. It is almost as if Winnie is in denial about her life but does not yet recognize it. She, however, repeats, “…can’t complain – no no – musn’t complain much to be thankful for” (753) and “No better, no worse, no change, no pain” (753) as if she really is in pain and absolutely refuses to believe it because she merely trusts that she leads a meaningful life. Perhaps an evident way Beckett portrays Winnie’s dramatic story is through the variation of the phrase “this will have been a happy day” that she repeats throughout the play. Winnie proclaims this only after Willie acknowledges her existence. Each time Willie ignores her, Winnie’s conversation becomes futile and she starts to get the feeling that her hopes are false because she spends the majority of her day telling stories and yearning for her husband’s response. Her “happy days” seem to be when she experiences human interaction. Winnie understands that she talks a lot but she simply talks in hopes to generate some sort of human response. Winnie is overdramatic when Willie even utters a tiny word and proclaims that it is truly a happy day for her, once again renewing her hopes of a happy life. She seems to be a typical dramatic romantic woman who is desperate to keep her relationship with her husband alive. Winnie even admits, “I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do – for any life of time” (756). She understands that speaking aloud to no audience is simply just internal thought and is fearful for that day when she will have nobody to talk to. Winnie repeats “simply gaze before me with compressed lips” (756) throughout the play portraying her fear that one day she will have to resort to staring into space in internal thought only. Optimistic Winnie, however, assures herself that she will always have her black bag to resort to when words fail. Seeking to fill the hours of the day, Winnie chooses to reminisce about the past, speak in “old style” language, and carry out various rituals. Her black bag is the source of her rituals and it seems to be all that she really has, considering Willie hardly ever acknowledges her. Winnie starts and ends her day by the sound of a bell, quickly moving to the minute details like brushing her teeth, combing her hair, polishing her glasses, and putting on lipstick. Habit is Winnie’s sole consolation in her thought of a threatening universe winding down and eventually burning out. She insists on constructing activities to pass the time and to provide a sustaining illusion of meaning. Every action taken is in hopes to diminish her loneliness. Her rituals, repetitive in nature, erase Winnie’s distinction between past, present, and future. It is almost as if she has no free will and her habits consume her entire life on an almost superstitious level. Winnie must complete every ritual each day in order to feel whole. In the beginning of the play, the reader picks up on Winnie’s compulsiveness when she dramatically proclaims, “My hair! Did I brush and comb my hair” (756)? It seems as if superstition creeps in and Winnie cannot continue her day if she does not fully complete her rituals. Winnie bases her future on her next ritual. All of her available sources for optimism, however, are being used up in her black bag so she must work harder and harder to stay positive. Winnie lives in a static world believing that such an existence with no change will fend off death. Beckett’s quote, “Habit is the great deadener,” suggests otherwise, contradicting Winnie’s only beliefs. Winnie focuses so much on the miniscule details and following a routine that the objects start to control her, causing her to lose self control and actually driving her closer to death with such static routines. The ritual Winnie looks most forward to is singing her song at the end of the day. It excites her to sing it but she quickly becomes saddened at the end, once again exemplifying her dramatic story. The song perhaps gives her a sense of hope for life in the beginning, but Winnie realizes that it is not true in her own relationship, quickly becomes distraught, and must accept the fact that life will return to normal with her habits and rituals the next day. By the end of the play, Winnie is buried up to her neck in the ground but still refuses to admit the absurdity of her situation, constantly assuring herself that each day is a happy day, even if she is on the verge of tears. Winnie relies solely on habits and rituals to protect herself from what she cannot predict. She does not realize, however, that consuming her life with these rituals is actually bringing her closer to death. Beckett even symbolizes this through the fact that Winnie is buried up to her neck by the end of the play, taking away her ability to complete all of her rituals, and making the statement clear that death is near. Beckett succeeds in making Winnie’s story dramatic through her specific rituals and exemplifying his idea that, “Habit is the great deadener.” From a larger perspective, The work of Samuel Beckett can be seen to span both the Modernist and Postmodernist paradigms (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991; Green and LeBihan, 1996), on the one hand being influenced by such canonical Modernist writers as James Joyce and Luigi Pirandello (Knowlson, 1996) and on the other relying heavily on Postmodern notions such as the transgression of the body, the performative identity and the failure of grand narratives such as language and truth. This point is made by Richard Begam in his study Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity(1996): “Beckett's conception of his undertaking, what we would now call his postmodernism, recognized that an absolute break with the past, a complete supersession of what had gone before, was itself the product of a teleological or modern form of thinking. Proust and Joyce therefore became not figures to be replaced or surmounted but telling points of reference in an ongoing dialogue between past and present.” (Begam, 1996: 14) Beckett’s position as a liminal writer, spanning two distinctly different but obviously connected intellectual regimes, allows us to examine not only his work but the larger context of critical and performance theory. With this in mind, in this essay I would like to look at two main areas of Beckett’s work that are both metonymous with changes in post-War theatre (and perhaps literature) as a whole. Firstly I would like to concentrate on the notion of Postmodernism as it relates to performance, looking at leitmotifs and tropes as they appear in Waiting for Godot (1955) and Happy Days(1961), and secondly I would like to go on to look at the whole notion of identity and its dissolution in these same texts before drawing conclusions as to what this treatment says about the place of performance in contemporary theatre and, perhaps, the wider context of society itself. This last point, I think, is crucial to an understanding of Beckett’s place as both a Modernist and a Postmodern writer. As I have already stated, we can recognise certain Modernist images and leitmotifs in Beckett’s work (Eagleton, 1992: 186): the starkly bare characterisation, the dour vision of humanity that we also find in Eliot and Woolf and the conscious effort to experiment and innovate but, underneath this, we also detect a distinctly Postmodern sensibility; one that delights in the deliberate exposure of the performative nature of both the theatre and life. The antagonism and frustration engendered by this un-ended joke is more than a mere literary device it is also a performance device that sets up a markedly different actor/audience relationship. Unlike, say, classical Aristotelian dramatic theory that asserts the imperative of the “incentive moment” the “rising action” (Hartley and Ladu, 1948: 14) and the resolution, here Beckett (as indeed he does throughout the play) creates a deliberate anti-climax that immediately calls in to question the binary between reality and performance. The same also could be said about much of the dramatic structure of Happy Days, as the workings of the performance are constantly exposed to the gaze of the audience. Here, for instance, Winnie second guesses the thoughts of the audience members as she talks to a passer-by: “Winnie:…What’s she doing? He says – What’s the idea? He says – stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground – coarse fellow – What does it mean? He says – what’s it meant to mean – and so on.” (Beckett, 1961: 32)   Here Beckett deconstructs the very essence of the performance itself, exposing the bewildered reaction of the audience to his own drama. In a Postmodern dissolution of identity boundaries, the performer here becomes playwright, audience, character andactor as not only are the thoughts of the character exposed but so too the thoughts of the audience. This is not the only deconstruction of performance Beckett employs in the play. We see, for instance, the questioning of dramatic convention; Happy Days is, for all intents, a monologue but it features two characters, it is about the movement of time but, ironically, the main actor is static throughout and although it is primarily a play about words and not actions it is peppered with pauses and space. All factors that point to both plays as being as much rooted in Postmodernism as Modernism. We have touched upon it already but the overriding sense in Happy Days is the search and struggle for identity and this also, as we shall see, has a marked impact on the performance of the play and what it means regarding the audience/actor dialectic. The social background to Happy Days was described, in an affective way by Harold Clurman in an early review:Gp with our professional essay writing service... “Beckett is the poet of a morally stagnant society. In this society fear, dismay and a sort of a stunned absent-mindedness prevail in the dark of our consciousness, while a flashy, noisy, bumptious, thick-headed complacency flourishes in the open.” (Clurman, 1998: 235) It is against this backdrop that the characters in the play struggle to maintain their scant identities. Even before the action begins we are made witness to the difficulties in establishing an individual existence as the characters’, names, Winnie and Willie, straightway blur their respective personal boundaries. We see this also to a greater extent in Waiting for Godot, as Gogo, Pozzo and Godot, combine to form a linguistic homogeneity that suggests a group rather than an individual identity. The mise en scene of Happy Days is part Eliotesque wasteland: “Expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound. Gentle slopes downto front and either of stage. Back an abrupter fall to stage level” (Beckett, 1961: 9). Postmodern irony, as the backdrop reveals itself to be a self conscious trompe-l’oeil that represents “unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance.” (Beckett, 1961: 9). Within this, Winnie literally stands as part of the scenery, only half visible that is, in itself, a symbolic representation of both time passing and the extent that she has already lost a great deal of her personal identity. As I have already hinted at, Winnie deconstructs the notion of movement and stasis; on a psychological level she moves quickly between times as in this passage where she and us are taken back into her personal history prompted by the news of a death of a friend: “Winnie: Charlie Hunter! (Pause) I close my eyes – (she takes off spectacles and does s, hot in one hand, spectacles in other, Willie turns page) – and am sitting on his knees again, in the back garden at Borough Green, under the horse-beech.” (Beckett, 1961: 14) Physically however she is literally trapped, unable to move or stop the flowing of time swallowing her completely. Her identity becomes fashioned by her memories as at first, in the initial Act, they form a reasonable homogeneity and then, in Act Two become more and more diffuse, more and more fractured until by the end of the play she exists as merely snapshots of a life that has been: “Winnie: Win! (pause)Oh this is a happy days, this will have been another happy day! (Pause) After all (Pause) So far. Pause. She hums tentatively beginning of song, then sings softly, musical box tune.” (Beckett, 1961: 47)            As John Pilling suggests in his study of Samuel Beckett (1976: 85), the playwright twins the enormity of the search for identity in an alienating world with the minutiae of everyday living, as Winnie spends a great deal of the play’s time conducting worthless searches for toothbrushes, or lipsticks or many of the other incidental objects of existence. Ultimately, her search for a personal identity is proved fruitless as she becomes subsumed in that which surrounds her, perhaps a particularly twentieth century vision of the struggle of the personal psychology in the face of the modern city. Waiting for Godot, I think, concerns itself with similar themes and similar characters. Martin Esslin characterised Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as “concerned with the hope of salvation through the workings of grace” (Esslin, 1968: 55) and we can see that is certainly a major thread in the play. However, we can also note that it concerns itself not with a general salvation but with a very a personal one, with each character desperately searching for their own identity amid the alienation and ennui of the surrounding environment. Most of the play’s linguistic rhythm arises out of the characters’ attempt to assert their own identity in the face of the others: “Vladimir: Charming evening we’re having. Estragon: Unforgettable. Vladimir: And its not over. Estragon: Apparently not. Vladimir: Its only beginning. Estragon: Its awful. Vladimir: Its worse than being in the theatre.” (Beckett, 1955: 34)  The tooing and froing of the dialogue here is a perfect example of this point, with neither Vladimir nor Estragon willing to surrender themselves to the other. The same can be seen in a more graphic sense with the Pozzo/Lucky relationship that is, at its heart a Hegelian dialectic of the master and slave, with each party attempting (and failing) to break away from the other. In the comic scene towards the end of the play that depicts Vladimir and Estragon exchanging symbolic identities in the form of their hats (Beckett, 1961: 71-72) we can note Beckett’s observation on the ironies of Postmodern life: “Vladimir takes puts on Lucky’s hat in place of his own which he hands to Estragon. Estragon takes Vladimir’s hat. Vladimir adjusts Lucky’s hat on his head. Estragon hands Vladimir’s hat back to Vladimir who takes it and hands it back to Estragon who takes it and hands it back to Vladimir who takes it and throws it down.” (Beckett, 1955: 72)    The absurdity of this scene arises from the fact that each hat is the same, or at least very similar, so that it makes very little difference which hat ends up on which head. This is, I think, symbolic of the larger treatment of identity within the play; with the playwright suggesting the absurdity of the search for personal individuation. Are not identities much like hats, asks Beckett, remarkably the same? If Happy Days is a study of the search for identity under the crushing weight of time passing, Waiting for Godot is the search for identity within the lightness of forgetfulness. Time in the latter is meaningless, it passes with no affect in fact Estragon can not even remember the events of the day before. Within this, the characters desperately cling to the remnants of their identities whether that be in the form of an oppressive relationship to another, an item of clothing or the feint hope of someone who will never arrive. We can see then that the treatment of identity within Beckett’s two major plays mirrors the questions arising out of Postmodernism, questions that concern the nature of identity and the Self. For Postmodern theorists like Judith Butler (1999) and Michel Foucault (1990) the Self is a performative construct, both given to us by society and adopted as a mask and we note some of this sense in Beckett. Ultimately, then, Beckett’s work deconstructs the very notion of a theatrical performance, suggesting that this is merely one of a number of performances that occurs at any one time. The relationship, then, between the audience and the actor changes from one of passivity to one of dialogue as the former is exposed as relying as much on performance as the latter. This can be seen to be a reflection of Antonin Artaud’s assertions on the Theatre of Cruelty in his second manifesto: “…just as there are to be no empty spatial areas, there must be no let up, no vacuum in the audience’s mind or sensitivity. That is to say there will be no distinct divisions, no gap between life and theatre.” (Artaud, 1985: 84)  Beckett’s work says as much about the identities of the audience as the characters and as much about the performative nature of the wider society as the performance of the theatre. In short, At the start of Happy Days, we see Winnie - a plump, fifty-year-old housewife of a woman buried to her waist in the centre of a mound of earth. The sun blazes down in the form of a powerful spotlight. A barren landscape stretches into the distance. Beside Minnie on the mound are a large bag and a parasol. Throughout the play, she removes items from the bag, including a Browning automatic revolver (Brownie') and a toothbrush. Halfway through the first of two short acts the parasol bursts into flames from the unrelenting heat. At the start of the play she seems to be alone, but soon we see that there is a man (Willie) on the far side of the mound, reading a newspaper, though we see only the back of his head for the whole of the first act. He only crawls over the mound to face Winnie in a dramatic and moving scene at the end of the play, when she is buried to her neck in the mound. Winnie does most of the talking, addressing many of her comments to Willie, and he responds only occasionally and briefly. When she seems to be nodding off at times she is brought awake again by an unseen bell. At a first reading this play, like all of Beckett's plays, leaves you with a vague sense of depression and incomprehension, though you do also feel a sense of achievement in having got through it from beginning to end and of having read something worthwhile. Subsequent readings throw up all sorts of allusions and echoes that completely escaped you the first time, and if you then (and only then) read a guide to the play you recognise it for the masterpiece it is: a highly-polished jewel, a starkly concentrated appraisal of the human condition packed into two short acts, that lesser writers would and do take volumes to laboriously spell out. Despite seeming a rambling, knocked-off-in-ten-minutes affair, it is in fact a highly sophisticated interplay of repetition and variation with leitmotifs, silence and precise movements that are all indicated in the meticulous stage directions, and is almost operatic in its effect. Beckett is never patronising, he leaves you (perhaps somewhat dismissively) to work out for yourself what it is all about. Scratch the surface and you will find allusions to Zeno, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Anglican Liturgy and Holy Communion and Dante, as well as The Merry Widow. You may see it, with A. Alvarez, as a sour view of a cosy marriage', or agree with The Times that the text is an elaborate structure of internal harmonies with recurring clichs twisted into bitter truths, and key phrases chiming ironically through the development as in a passacaglia'. For me, it is all of these things, but perhaps most of all it is a comment on ageing, loneliness and loss. It will haunt all who see it or read it. References McDonald, Ronan (ed). (2007), The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Knowlson, James (1997). Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press Mercier, Vivian (1977). Beckett/Beckett. Oxford University Press Murray, Christopher, ed. (2009). Samuel Beckett: Playwright & Poet. New York: Pegasus Books  O'Brien, Eoin. The Beckett Country.  Ricks, Christopher (1995). Beckett's Dying Words. Oxford University Press  Ryan, John, ed. (1970). A Bash In The Tunnel. Brighton: Clifton Books, 1970. Essays on James Joyce by Beckett, Flann O’Brien & Patrick Kavanagh L’image, by Samuel Beckett, ‘X’ magazine; An Anthology from X (Oxford University Press, 1988). Simpson, Alan (1962). Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin. Routledge and Kegan Paul Young, Jordan R. (1987). The Beckett Actor: Jack MacGowran, Beginning to End. Beverly Hills: Moonstone Press Read More