ABSTRACT Author: Ivan Nyusztay Assistant Professor Budapest Business School University of Applied Sciences Title: The Merry Sufferer: Authentic Being in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days The heroine’s gradual sinking into the mound in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days is surely one of the most baffling instances of human suffering in world literature. Yet Winnie’s light-hearted concern with her imminent death is not only astonishing, but, even more uniquely, authentic. I adopt Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity and present a Heideggerian reading of Beckett’s play. Simultaneously, I address Beckett’s unique counterpoint to suffering in Happy Days: the merriness characterizing authentic being. While a Heideggerian reading of Beckett helps to trace the development of authentic being, a Beckettian reading of Heidegger may help to see the delight (absurdly) accompanying it. The Merry Sufferer: Authentic Being in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days Merriness and suffering seldom accompany each other. Looking at Samuel Beckett’s dramas we find human beings whose suffering is both primordial – simultaneous with their conception – and final, allowing no culmination or relief. The sufferers have become indifferent towards their suffering because of a palpable lack of an alternative. They have grown accustomed to their misery, since their life was never anything but misery. Needless to say, in Beckett this ubiquitous misery and suffering never appear in themselves. The extremities of human calamities presented in various startling ways – Winnie’s gradual sinking into the mound in Happy Days being perhaps the most baffling – call for a legitimating dose of fitness, vitality and wellbeing against which suffering can be measured. When no such alternative modes of living are found, one begins to discover the dramatic relevance of Beckett’s counterpoints. Within the confines of this essay I cannot do full justice to the staggering variety of counterpoints in Beckett’s work. Suffice it here to say that primarily as means of subversion and alienation, these counterpoints include the perspectival (the trivial constantly counterpointing the universal in Waiting for Godot) and the temperamental (the ‘romantic’ mood of the love-scene in the short story, First Love is grotesquely punctuated by references to filth, death and garbage), to mention but two of such counterpoint’s most conspicuous forms. Yet no Beckettian counterpoint is quite as baffling as Winnie’s cheerfulness in Happy Days.1 In my reading this cheerfulness dominates the emotional content of the play to attain its full manifestation in the final song, The Merry Widow. At this crucial moment the song is sung together by Winnie and Willie interrupting a long chain of monologues delivered solely by the heroine. The merriness of the dying heroine is not only astonishing and unsettling, but – as I will argue below – authentic. I adopt Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity as beingtowards-death, a kind of anticipation and “running forth” (“Cast your mind forward, Winnie”) characteristic perhaps mostly of the heroine in Happy Days. In what follows I will first look at the nature of suffering and confinement in Beckett’s play, and highlight those aspects which render it baffling even in the light of the entire Beckett corpus. Second, through a short recourse to Heidegger’s description of the different modes of being, I present a Heideggerian reading of Beckett’s play, and also examine the limits of such an approach. Third, I address Beckett’s unique counterpoint to suffering in Happy Days: the merriness pertaining to authentic being,2 and the aesthetics of misery. In my view, if a Heideggerian reading of Beckett helps to trace the development of authentic being, a Beckettian reading of Heidegger may help to see the delight (absurdly) accompanying it. This delight seems to triumph over the very Angst that in Heidegger’s thought constitutes “a basic mood had in face of nothingness,” to speak with Simon Critchley, “the anxiety for my Being experienced in being-towards-death.”3 Moreover, Winnie’s merriness rehabilitates something from the lightheartedness banished famously by Adorno from the realm of art after Auschwitz. Dealing with confinement Confinement is inexorable in both Acts of Happy Days. It soon becomes obvious that Winnie’s gradual sinking into the mound is by no means temporary: it is an unalterable life condition, without a concrete beginning or end. Winnie herself does not make any attempt to set herself free: the idea of liberation never occurs to her. Indeed, her miserable condition becomes so habitual that she does not even consider it worthy of reflection. Similarly to Endgame, this gradual sinking also foreshadows the nearing of an end, a linear development and culmination that may be contrasted to the cyclicality of Waiting for Godot. While rendering the character inactive, this extreme confinement questions the meaning of action in a meaningless universe. At the same time, the various Beckettian forms of restrictedness ought to be considered in the larger context of theatricality. As Martin Puchner has rather convincingly argued, this phenomenon of arresting actors in barrels, urns and mounds are to be considered together with what he calls Beckett’s meticulous stagings and his crusade against actors, which betray an overwhelming anti-theatricality, itself part of the modernist resistance to theatre shared with such diverse authors as Yeats and Brecht. It is vital to see, however, that these figures – according to Puchner – “channeled their resistance to the theater back into the theater itself.”4 Puchner’s contribution to a better understanding of the modernist resistance to theatre thus helps us handle the disturbing anti-theatrical moments on Beckett’s stage. In Beckett’s plays the inability to act is not only characteristic of those restrained in movement. In Endgame the disabled Hamm is unable to stand up, and the three-legged toy dog always leans to its side, but there is no apparent reason why Clov cannot sit down. Nevertheless, if confinement and inaction are predetermined, ways of dealing or coping with them are definitely not. Winnie handles her situation with remarkable ease, evoking and recounting her favourite topics. In my reading these themes and motifs disclose patterns of behaviour reminiscent of Heidegger’s das Man, and betray a specifically Beckettian attitude towards death, which comes very close to Heidegger’s concept of authenticity. Moreover, the brief recapitulation of the heroine’s daily doings below will serve to demonstrate the dramatic crystallization of authentic being. In Happy Days, more than in any of Beckett’s dramas, I find this authenticity not only the most palpable mode of being but also outstanding in its daring association with merriness. In Act One the world of objects dominates the stage. Winnie is mainly preoccupied with dealing with the bag and its contents; she cleans her teeth, puts on her glasses, drinks from the medicine bottle, applies lipstick in front of a mirror, puts on her hat, combs her hair, polishes her nails. Winnie is surrounded by objects that keep her busy until the end of the day. Apart from the contents of the bag, we find a list of objects: the parasol, the handkerchief and Willie’s newspaper and postcard. In Act Two objects play a lesser role, as a consequence of Winnie’s increased confinement. According to the stage direction her head remains immobile, only her eyes move. This impossible situation gives rise to new themes and pastimes, like the emphatic concentration on hearing. Winnie hears noises: “Sometimes I hear sounds [. . .] They are a boon, sounds are a boon, they help me…through the day” (p. 25).Those are the happy days when she hears noises and her head is full of cries. Other ‘actions’ include the storytelling about Mildred, and the recalling of the last couple of mankind. In the meantime, her concern and care for Willie becomes more and more pronounced. Spatial distance from the bag and its contents is an act of moving closer to the Other, which finally triggers the great reunion and the final ‘catharsis’ of the song. Words and things Winnie’s inability to move paradoxically highlights mobility, humanity’s toiling with objects. Similar to Winnie, who reads the text on the toothbrush through a magnifying glass, we can follow the movements of her hand and interpret her use of tools in a magnified because limited space of movement. For Winnie the world is primarily a world of things or tools in the Heideggerian sense. Adopting Heidegger’s terms, Winnie’s Dasein is a “being-in-the-world,” and its “Being towards the world is essentially concern.”5 There have been many contributions to the influence of Heidegger’s work on the Beckett ouvre. As Alain Robbe-Grillet claims, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is the dramatised version of Heidegger’s Dasein.6 Furthermore, in Mary O’Hara’s extreme view, Heidegger’s philosophy is so closely linked to Beckett that the latter’s works are to be read as the literary realization of Heidegger’s thought. 7 Building on O’Hara’s theory, Lance St. John Butler devotes a lengthy chapter of his book to prove the effect of Being and Time on Beckett. His contribution, however, betrays a questionable conviction that there is no proof of Beckett’s familiarity with Heidegger. Steve Barfield draws a similar conclusion in his illuminating survey on Beckett and Heidegger, when he talks about the two authors’ “similar preoccupations” instead of one’s influence on the other.8 Yet leading beyond the similar preoccupations, Rodney Sharkey offers striking biographical evidence to establish Beckett’s familiarity with Heidegger’s philosophy.9 As he points out, the figure to mediate this philosophy was Beckett’s friend and initial mentor in philosophy, Jean Beaufret. Followed by Derrida and others, Beaufret was the first to defend his own mentor, Heidegger from the ostracism triggered by his morally deplorable relation to National Socialism, and the first to orchestrate his “repatriation into the pantheon of important philosophers” (p. 411).10 It is unconceivable how Beaufret would have responded to the recently unearthed ‘black notebooks’ which testify that Heidegger steadfastly refused to abandon his political delusions. Apart from Beaufret, Sharkey also draws on Beckett’s diaries, which he kept while in Germany in 1936-37. In the diaries Beckett records having received a pamphlet on Heidegger written by the painter Karl Ballmer.11 Beckett appears to have studied the painter’s interpretation and then summarized the main conclusions, which, to Sharkey, proves that Beckett was “comfortable with Heidegger’s distinct language and style wherein being is revealed obliquely” (p. 415). Needless to say, this familiarity with Heidegger’s thought never turned into an ideological influence. Long before joining the French resistance in 1941, Beckett displayed what Mark Nixon calls a “distaste for the new Weltanschauung” already in the German diaries (p. 87). Another important figure deeply concerned both with Heidegger and Beckett is of course Adorno, whose personal meetings with the latter and his thought-provoking notes on Endgame bears witness to a possible impact. According to Dirk Van Hulle, Adorno composed his notes on Endgame in a time when Heidegger was the leading exponent of hermeneutics.12 However, as Van Hulle reminds later in his essay, Adorno sharply differentiated Heidegger’s language of existential ontology from Beckett’s language, namely the “hieratic language” of the former from the “regressive language” of the latter (pp. 16-17). Abstractionism here is opposed to concretism, abstraction to subtraction. Where I believe Adorno comes closer to Heidegger – within the scope of my present investigations – is the emphasis on Sachlichkeit, or ‘objectivity’ which, Van Hulle notes, characterized the realistic style of the 1920s, that concentrated on plain objects in contrast to Abstract art and Expressionism (17).13 In his analysis of Endgame Adorno traced a “hidden objectivity” grounded on Beckett’s own deletion of a reference to a concrete object after the second draft. Yet the object in Beckett survives. In Endgame it survives through the omission itself, as Adorno claims (p. 18). In Happy Days, I would like to add, plain objects dominate the world. Instead of taking sides with either Barfield’s “similar preoccupations”, Sharkey’s direct impact or Adorno’s stance on objectivity, one needs to consider also Beckett’s well-known – though sometimes questioned – aversion to philosophy. As he declared in an interview, he did not read philosophers for he did not understand them: “When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess.”14 Still, whenever Beckett is looking for the form in his work to accommodate this mess, he comes very close to Heidegger. Though several works can be used – and are used – to demonstrate Beckett’s proximity to Heidegger, I believe that it is in Happy Days where this proximity is most conspicuous, at least when the present undertaking’s main concern, the different modes of being, is at stake. What we (and Winnie) encounter in our everyday dealings as closest to us is what Heidegger calls ‘equipment’ (Heidegger, p. 98). Winnie is dealing with things ready-to-hand, using the equipment of her regular, day-to-day activities and concerns. Consequently, the things around her are not just lying scattered around ready-to-hand (Vorhandenes) but are present-at-hand (Zuhandenes), existing as the being of the equipment. The things dug out from the bag are taken by her hand: Winnie uses them like tools. However, I believe we have something more here than a woman’s concern with maintaining her appeal. Firstly, these tools are removed from the context of habitual everyday life. Secondly, as a consequence of the above, the use of cosmetic devices in the given context of the play may better be explained by the repeated purpose of ‘passing the time’. In Heidegger’s definition equipment is essentially something ‘in-order-to’, and in Winnie’s case this is of particular importance. Winnie’s careless, routine-like recourse to tools keeps demonstrating the purpose or ‘in-order-to’ of the equipment. In the given circumstances, however, this practice is merely a parody of usability, since both the ‘assignment-context’ and the primary ‘towards-which’ – stressed by Heidegger – are missing. Winnie is preparing for the day: she cleans her teeth, combs her hair, puts on lipstick, but the ‘in-order-to’ of these dealings only comprises killing time and attempting to save her dignity from being shattered. It is evident that Winnie is concerned with the things existing ready-to-hand. At the same time the Beings, to which Dasein as Being-together is related, are not ready-to-hand, but Dasein themselves, reminds Heidegger. Thus, Winnie and Willie’s relationship is to be interpreted by the structure of care. Amongst Winnie’s old things there appears Willie making the days happier by repeated attempts to communicate. Nevertheless, Winnie’s existence is different from the thingliness of the present-at-hand, not just by being Dasein, but also by the togetherness that defines her relation to the world. Togetherness is an underlying concern even when Winnie is immersed in her things. Even though she can see Willie only at certain times (and the audience even more rarely, mostly through her eyes), her actions and her care are transcended by her husband’s presence, “just to know that in theory you can hear me even though in fact you don’t is all I need, just to feel you there within earshot” (p. 11). Winnie’s actions are marked by an everyday character, which likens her to das Man. Her regular daily activities undertaken with care are the consequence of what Heidegger calls “the dictatorship of das Man”. Indeed, the secret force that collects Winnie’s things scattered during the day and which rings the bell to remind her of the daily deliveries, may also be seen as the embodiment of this dictatorship of das Man (the ‘they’). Heidegger writes, “The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self – that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way” (eigens ergriffenen). As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the ‘they’, and must find itself (p. 167). The nonevaluative, perspectival sense of authenticity, as Taylor Carman observes, “marks a distinction between one’s immediate relation to oneself and one’s mediate relations to others.” However, Carman also pinpoints another, perhaps more relevant sense of authenticity, which refers to “a desirable or choice-worthy mode of existence.”15 In Beckett’s play genderless das Man is embodied by a woman: filing her nails, cleaning her teeth, making herself up, Winnie is an average woman and also an authentic being. Heidegger remarks that “Authentic Being-one’s-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the ‘they’.” It is rather an existential modification of the ‘they’: of the ‘they’ as ‘essential existentiale’ (p. 168). Dasein is lost in das Man, and it is yet to discover itself, to emerge as an authentic being. Winnie’s confinement from this perspective is the confinement of an inauthentic Being locked up in das Man’s toiling with objects. The question is what other mode of being may surface in this seclusion and isolation and how its summoner – to use a Heideggerian term – is represented. The call of conscience “calls Dasein forth (and ‘forward’) to its ownmost possibilities, as a summons for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self,” says Heidegger. And further, “conscience summons Dasein’s Self from its lostness in the ‘they’” (p. 319). But what is the message of the call? “The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness,” writes Heidegger, “the bare thatit-is in the ‘nothing’ of the world” (p. 321). There are no better words to describe Winnie’s situation. The always overwhelming feeling of alienation, homelessness and anxiety, the indefinable nothing and nowhere: this is where Dasein emerges. Winnie frequently mentions the hours of depression, sorrow and fear, her insupportable condition, but these are consistently counterpointed by her merry comments. Her misery in lostness is evident, her merriness in homelessness absurd. Although the caller is Dasein itself, the call asserts nothing. The call invites Dasein to its ownmost possibilities. “Conscience discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent,” stresses Heidegger (p. 318). Winnie’s endless chatter is rhythmically segmented by pauses, the series of blocks signifying the impossibility to express Dasein’s anxiety in words. In accordance with the gradual sinking the speech blocks and silences become more regular and deeper, not only foreshadowing the terrible silence of death, but also creating space for the emergence of her ownmost possibilities. In these moments, “when the call of conscience is understood, lostness in the ‘they’ is revealed [. . .] When one has an understanding of Being-towards-death – towards death as one’s ownmost possibility – one’s potentiality-forBeing becomes authentic and wholly transparent” (p. 354). In this distinctive possibility of Dasein’s own self, says Heidegger, “it has been wrenched away from the ‘they’.” Furthermore, the temporal relation of Dasein to its own being-towards death (Sein zum Tode) is anticipation: “Anticipation turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being – that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence” (p. 307). Besides embodying das Man, Winnie is also free from all the illusions of das Man, since her freedom is the freedom of running forth and anticipation, and her merry mood is the joy of freedom. She is a person of a double nature: a das Man and a Being-towards-death, constantly wrenching herself away from the ordinary. Yet Steve Barfield warns against ascribing to Beckett’s characters and narrators “that authenticity of feeling that Heidegger intended” (Lane, p. 161). Concentrating on The Trilogy, he argues for a differentiation between Beckett’s and Heidegger’s notion of death as finitude, and claims that besides undermining the meaning of death as finitude, Beckett presents death as both more uncertain, and “seemingly incapable of offering more than the phantom promise of a cessation of existence.” In Happy Days, however, Winnie’s gradual sinking into the mound does seem to prognosticate her unavoidable death with utmost certainty. To be sure, buried in the mound she is both Dasein and its parody. At the same time, in Beckett’s version of being and time the heroine’s incessant merry mood overcomes her anxiety. Though at times there is a distinct sense of strain, Winnie seems to bear her exposure with hardly a word of complaint, and – heading towards an anticipated death – continues to live day after day with a more or less undisturbed merriness.16 The aforementioned duality is represented by the things luring her into lostness on the one hand, and by the pauses between the words severed from things on the other. The repeated parallelism between speech and things to do highlight the human being’s alternatives to deal with everyday reality. The daily doings in this light encompass both the correct use of tools and that of words. For Winnie the necessity to speak involves uttering the words at her disposal together with the numberless variations and repetitions she randomly improvises. Thus she builds herself a shelter against solitude from the words and things surrounding her. It goes without saying that Winnie does not use words in their direct referentiality, since that would not provide her any solace. The only exceptions are the text on the toothbrush and Browning, the revolver. The words on the toothbrush draw attention to the equipment ready-to-hand, and momentarily wrench her away from her lostness, the characteristic mode of Being of das Man. Eventually, the good old Browning, the ultimate solution to all things, remains unused. Direct referentiality therefore is a reminder of the habituality from which she tries to escape. The words that promise momentary relief are not to be found in the bag, but are products of her imagination. Winnie is constantly creating imaginative spaces and time dimensions from words severed from their direct referentiality. She resorts to fictitious and real recollections, alternately, quoting the classics or telling tales. Regarding their function, Winnie’s monologues are mostly independent from her doings, and are mostly directed towards disentangling herself from the fetters of her misery. The only exception is, obviously, her communication with Willie, which is mostly one-sided. Winnie is talking by herself, to herself and about herself. In the meantime, she hopes that Willie is there to listen even when he remains silent. Winnie’s insistence on Willie’s attention betrays the actress’ dependence on her spectators. In turn, Willie makes superhuman efforts to respond, and as a result, he makes Winnie’s day, “Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be a happy day!” (p. 9). Keeping the conversation flowing is crucial to maintaining dramatic tension; Winnie shall never believe that she is abandoned forever. It is Willie’s primary function to attenuate Winnie’s perpetual terror from being left alone. Willie reads papers: an absurd image of homeliness and habitual actions in the burnt out desert of homelessness. Reading papers is out of context in the given circumstances, just like Winnie’s habit of making herself up. The words in the newspaper ad (“Opening for smart youth”, “Wanted bright boy”) are stripped from their context, and the writing on the toothbrush (“hog’s setae”) is unintelligible. Nevertheless, these textual references reactivate the context and intelligibility of things, right by the power of being out of place and context. Winnie is unable to interpret the sign and the news in the paper, just as she is unable to use the things around her in the appropriate assignment-context. Consequently, the source of Winnie’s merriness cannot be found in the world of words and things. It has to be sought elsewhere. Merriness and the aesthetics of misery As we have seen, some degree of misery is inseparable from human existence in Beckett’s thought. In this world there is no place for health, happiness or normality in any sense. In contrast, there is a clear tendency in Beckett’s works of making misery itself the norm. Perhaps to forestall this, we are confronted with the abnormality of merriness in Happy Days. Merriness is both a counterpoint and a sheer impossibility. Winnie’s fits of enthusiasm are mostly triggered by Willie’s actions and reactions: “Oh this will have been a happy day!” (p. 18) she cries out clapping hands, when Willie starts to sing in his rusty voice. Conversing with Willie offers a refuge from solitude: “Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be a happy day [. . .] Another happy day” (p. 9). Needless to say, merriness is fundamentally Winnie’s self-defense. She protects herself from her irremediable condition by – as we have seen – resorting to habits and to the lostness of das Man, from which she occasionally succeeds to emerge as an authentic being. As Gontarski concludes, it is also an element of Winnie’s self-protection that she is able to live for the moment only. Beckett himself stated with regard to a performance he directed in Germany, that Winnie’s experience of time is an “incomprehensible transport from one inextricable present to the next” (Gontarski, p. 74). Indeed, the days are happy as soon as Winnie’s strategies of self-defense prove to be effective, and when Willie is inclined to pay attention and perhaps even to communicate. Reinforcement expected and gained from the other, is thus probably one of the most important themes of the play.17 Winnie strives to be recognized, to be accepted, to elicit feedback confirming the fact that she is still alive despite being buried alive. When up to her neck in the ground, only able to move her eyes, Winnie makes an inventory of her remaining body parts. In Beckett’s use of George Berkeley’s axiom,18 perception and self-perception affect each other. Willie is the exception to the rule being the strongest presence, to which – despite his being invisible – Winnie adheres until the end. Furthermore, another sign of her attachment is the urge to become visible to the man, to be perceived, and not to be cast away to nothingness before her time: “Can you see me from there I wonder [. . .] No? Oh I know it does not follow when two are gathered together [. . .] in this way [. . .] that because one sees the other the other sees the one, life has taught me that…too. [. . .] Could you see me, Willie, do you think, from where you are, if you were to raise your eyes in my direction? (Turns a little further.) Lift up your eyes to me, Willie, and tell me can you see me, do that for me, I’ll lean back as far as I can” (p. 12). The relation between being and non-being is further complicated by a force secretly operating in the background. Despite being invisible – not even Winnie’s spectacles or magnifying glass can spot it – it exercises an inexorable power over Winnie’s life (p. 168). Without seeing and being seen Winnie’s visible, tangible life would be “eternal dark [. . .] Black night without end” (p. 29). The problem of seeing leads from the merriness in misery to the aestheticisation of misery. In all her misery Winnie preserves her female dignity: she puts on lipstick in the mirror and makes herself up. At the same time, the first thing we see about Willie is his skull,19 with the stripe of blood on it. Willie covers it with a tissue, and puts on a straw hat. After all these precautions, in order to attract even more attention, his skull is framed by the newspaper. The face framed by the mirror, and the head framed by the newspaper are striking Beckettian moments of the aesthetic counterpointing misery. Judging by the stage directions, Beckett pays significant attention to perspective: who sees what and who fails to see what. Willie is most often seen by Winnie’s eyes. To us, spectators, only certain of his body parts are visible: his hands, his skull. Conversely, as Alan S. Loxterman points out, “from Willie’s point of view [Winnie] will have changed because the mound has advanced to hide her arms and breasts.”20 Willie’s complete physical body only appears at the end of the play, when he staggers up the mound toward Winnie, with his hands and feet on the ground, “dressed to kill.” The Sisyphusian attempt is a failure, he rolls back down, yet his effort is moving. What is more, the so far speechless Willie addresses Winnie for the first time, “Win.” Winnie softly sings along the tune of Die Lustige Witwe, then the spouses keep watching each other in silence, while the curtain descends. Beckett leaves his drama open-ended – it is not clear whether Willie’s intention to approach Winnie was to be kissed or to fetch Winnie’s revolver, Browning. Yet the question of Willie’s real motive is marginalized by the Die Lustige Witwe, the hymn of Winnie’s undefeatable, perverse merriness. It has been the main thrust of this paper to demonstrate that Winnie’s anticipation of and concern with decay comes close to Heidegger’s understanding of Being-towards-death and authenticity. In this respect the crucial episodes in the play proved to be those moments when she appears to extricate herself from her doings, emerge from lostness and ‘run forth.’ I believe it is a peculiar mode of the Beckettian absurd to add a touch of merriness to this overwhelming misery that is Winnie’s destiny from the start. Notes 1. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (1960-61; repr., London: faber and faber, 1963). 2. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that,” declares Nell in Endgame (London: faber and faber, 1958), p. 20. Yet in this play neither Nell nor any of the other characters demonstrate or verify this rather peculiar observation in the manner Winnie does in Happy Days. 3. Simon Critchley, Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p.59. 4. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 19. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962; repr., Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 84. 6. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 7. Mary O’Hara, The Unfulfilled Search for Identity in the Poems and Novels of Samuel Beckett (Galway: University College, 1974), quoted by Lance St. John Butler, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 4. 8. Steve Barfield, “Beckett and Heidegger: A Critical Survey,” in Beckett and Philosophy, ed. Richard Lane (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 156. 9. Rodney Sharkey, “Beaufret, Beckett, and Heidegger: The Question(s) of Influence,” in Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies, eds. E. Tonning, M. Feldman, M. Engelberts, D.Van Hulle (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 409-422. 10. On the relation between Heidegger and Beaufret see Pierre Jacerme, “The Thoughtful Dialogue Between Martin Heidegger and Jean Beaufret,” in French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception, eds. D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), p. 63. 11. See also Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936-1937 (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 155. 12. Dirk Van Hulle, “Adorno’s Notes on Endgame,” in Journal of Beckett Studies, Volume 19 (Sep, 2010), Issue 2, p. 9. 13. See also Adorno’s 1965 essay, “Functionalism Today,” in Re-thinking Architecture, ed. Leach and Neil (London: Routledge, 1997) for emphasis on objectivity, the hand and handicraft, and even more importantly, on the thingliness of the thing (Ding) which is connected to several traditions of German thought, foremost to Heidegger. 14. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, eds. Graver and Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 219. 15. Taylor Carman, “Authenticity,” in A Companion to Heidegger, eds. Dreyfus and Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 285. 16. Kathryn White also stresses Winnie’s optimism and cheerful disposition, but she explains it by the heroine’s “determination to perpetuate her life,” and by the “human instinct to survive,” Beckett and Decay (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), p. 51. 17. In Stanley E. Gontarski’s words, “theme of validation,” The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 69. Elizabeth Barry also stresses Winnie’s penchant for a shared experience, “Winnie requires that the present be shared for it to attain an objective existence,” Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 116. 18. “Esse est percipi,” see Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theatre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 5. 19. ‘Skull’ is one of Beckett’s favourite words, a memento mori, which is given a new horizon of significance with absurd associations. As Alain Badiou observes, “The subject as skull is fundamentally reducible to saying and seeing,” On Beckett, trans. and eds. A. Toscano and N. Power (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), p. 105. 20. Alan S. Loxterman, “‘The More Joyce Knew the More He Could’, and ‘More Than I Could’: Theology and Fictional Technique in Joyce and Beckett,” in Samuel Beckett, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011), p. 36.