What is Our Responsibility to Others?
Posted by Joy Meads on 3/30/2010
(Joy is the Literary Manager at Steppenwolf)
We’re about to enter previews for Endgame, so this seems like a good time to share this great blog post about Beckett that I found a few months back. It’s by Conor McPherson, another Irish playwright who you might know from our productions of his plays The Seafarer, Dublin Carol, and The Weir. The entire post is good, but I particularly love his take on the central question of Endgame:
“I like to see this play as a moving picture of the human mind - only this time it’s what happens in the mind when we think about other human beings. The characters are racked with notions of responsibility and our desire to be free of it. Hamm works his way through the play trying to tell a story, or ‘chronicle’ as he calls it, about how he was asked to take in a child to save him from starvation. This story causes Hamm great discomfort as he painstakingly pieces it back together, using many diversionary footnotes to prolong its conclusion. We come to understand that he is reluctant to reveal the ending as it places him in a moral catch-22 situation. If he refuses to save the child, does he have personal responsibility for his death, even though he did not personally cause it? And if he does save the child, has he accepted a logical responsibility to save anyone who is in a similar situation? He cannot possibly save everybody in the world and he fears that his inability to do so will only cause him further psychic pain.”
I couldn’t agree with McPherson more, and this is one of the aspects of Endgame that I find most moving. It’s a question that we can all relate to, but I can’t think of another playwright who dramatizes it with such depth and force. Of course, Beckett, who lived in France during the Nazi occupation, lived in a time when one couldn’t ignore the dilemma of responsibility to others. Stirred to action by the Nazis intolerable cruelty, Beckett joined the French Resistance. But, although he was later awarded a medal for heroism, he never seemed convinced of the importance of his participation, dismissing it as “boy scout stuff.” In such a time, one wonders what he could have done that would have felt sufficient.
Living a protected, privileged life in a much easier time, I wrestle with this question in much smaller ways. I’ve never had to consider whether to help sabotage the military installations of a genocidal invader: rather, I’m deciding how much I should give to organizations I believe in, how much time I should spend volunteering, how involved I should be in the next election. When do you feel confronted by the question of your responsibility to others? Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the scope of human suffering? How do you respond?
March 31st, 2010 at 11:05 pm
thanks for sharing Joy,
My thoughts on any Beckett play seem to shift a lot, at the moment I don’t know if I would completely agree with mr McPherson on this, for me Hamm is not telling the chronicle as a way to express his inner conflict of a possible wish the save more than he has… if that’s what he means with “He cannot possibly save everybody in the world and he fears his inability to do so will cause him further psychic pain”. When Hamm says in his chronicle ” in the end he asked me would I consent to take in the child as well - if he were still alive. It was the moment I was waiting for” he has been anticipating and is rejoicing his (moment of) power, he has no real regrets concerning the lives of others, he is not pondering the lost chance to save more, he is being nostalgic. He expresses a self-loathing yes and self-pity, but the story of saving the boy is used as a moral defense, he once did save someone… possibly against his better judgment, when Clov mentions mother Pegg, whom he did not save, he has no comeback, no regrets on her loss of life, she has no place in the chronicle. What he regrets in the end is that “he was never there” it might be his own ethical failure that agonizes him or the realization of his inability to transcend or divert the role that Beckett has devised for him, his agony is about himself, not so much about the consequences for others.
Tomorrow I might feel different again. I love the fact that Beckett combines humor with these dire circumstances. I don’t know why but this line jumps out at me: (on Clov’s flea) “But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him for the love of God!”
April 4th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
If Endgame is seen as a game of chess, then it is predictable and it keeps repeating itself! Life can be seen as the same way–characters change but the cycle continues. What must be done to break the sameness of this cycle?
This is more a story of emptiness, loneliness, stinginess and deprivation–totally meaningless at the end! And as told by Hamm, he makes himself better than he really is/was. The pairing of the dominant (Hamm) with the submissive (Clov) can be seen as Beckett’s explaination of his own life with a wife he wanted to leave. We opens a completely new discussion of the meaning of this play!
Does Hamm see himself as an actor in his own life (”me to play”) and is he playing life as he wants to see it? Is Clov the child in Hamm’s story? Perhaps, so does the new child mean the cycle continues and Clov becomes Hamm as Hamm joins Nagg in the dust bin?
If seen as a play on life, Clov returns to stay, to play again the same cycle on the next day, adding the new arrival (the boy) into their life’s play.
Question about using the dog biscuit–why? I am sure Beckett did not mean a treat for a dog as the biscuit given to Nagg! I am curious why this was chosen instead of a cookie/biscuit.