CONTI, C. Critique and Form - Adorno On Beckett

CRITIQUE AND FORM: Adorno on "Godot" and "Endgame"
Author(s): Chris Conti

Source: Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, Vol. 14, After Beckett / D'après Beckett
(2004), pp. 277-292
Published by: Brill
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CRITIQUE AND FORM:
Adorno on Godot and Endgame
Chris Conti
The most common criticism of Beckett's theatre is its supposed obscu

rity. Early defenders of Godot and Endgame were themselves criti
cised as formalists for their inability to say what these plays were
'about' or 'meant'. Adorno's theory of the modernist artwork ex
plained the historical development of art's opaque content and Beck
ett's own reluctance to explain his plays, solving an impasse in Beck
ett criticism with his account of the new historical role of aesthetic
form as critique.
1. A play about nothing
The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as

immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of ob
jective elements, defines the relation of art to society.
(Adorno, 1997, 6)
The scandal of Waiting for Godot, as everyone knows, is that it is a

play about nothing. Its clownish characters seem in search of a plot
and the plot in search of an ending. Accounts of the play usually begin
with a precis, as if the bare particulars of plot were all one could cling
to with any certainty. The most famous remark about Godot, as a play
"where nothing happens twice" (Mercier, 144), summarised the frus
tration of reviewers attempting to grapple with its absence of content.
Can a play without content (and plot, character, action) still be a play?
To take the play seriously seemed a threat to meaning itself, as if it
were an assault on the very categories required to make sense of it.
Initial receptions of the play as plotless and chaotic were re
vised when its rigorous use of dramatic forms like dialogue was rec
ognised. Still, the intentionality implied by this use of form did not sit
well with the loss of meaning implied by the play's absence of con
tent. No other play - with the possible exception of its successor,
Endgame - has been so puzzled over as to what it means. Doubt con
cerning the play's content (or lack of it) led many to believe the play a
hoax, and like all hoaxes, the more one searched for a meaningful
structure the more one was taken in by the hoax: "Waitingfor Godot
is not a real carrot; it is a patiently painted, painstakingly formed plas
tic job for the intellectual fruit bowl [...] asking for a thousand read
ings [it] has none of its own to give" (Kerr, 20).
But the devastated landscape suggested by Godofs emptied
stage reawakened traumatic wartime memories, and many audiences
felt they had glimpsed in the play the catastrophic outcome of western
civilisation. Articulating this relation to historical reality proved diffi
cult, because while the play seemed to be about occupied France, the
holocaust, postwar devastation, the catastrophic fate of civilisation, it
did not refer directly to any of these. The growing conviction in the
universal importance of the play resisted articulation, as if Godot had
divested itself of any connection to history beyond testifying to its
catastrophic barbarism. But how could a play drained of content relate
to the actual social dramas of the day? The absence of this direct rela
tion encouraged the idea of the play as an allegory of the lamentable
human condition, "a modern morality play, on permanent Christian
themes" (Fraser, 84). Allegory established Godot's universality but at
the risk of imposing redemptive religious meanings. So as well as a
play about nothing, Godot became known as a play about anything
and everything, meaning whatever you wanted it to mean because its
symbols were pliable enough to meet the needs of theoretical or re
ligious consolation.
Godot's sheer variety of interpretations suddenly seemed suspi
cious. Indeed the more critics enthused about the profundity of the
play the more hollow it sounded. Uncertainty about the meaning of
the play gathered around the absent character of Godot, as if the titular
character might justify the dearth of stage action and confer at least
symbolic unity on the disorder of the play. Alain Robbe-Grillet chafed
at such attempts to dignify the poverty of Beckett's tramps and
blocked the path to such affirmative criticism by asserting the play
was not 'about' anything at all. It was about itself; the physical pres
ence of the tramps on stage:
278
Explanations flow in from all quarters, each more pointless
than the last. Godot is God [...] Godot [...] is the earthly
ideal of a better social order [...] Or else Godot is death [...]
Godot is silence [...] Godot is the inaccessible self [...] But
these suggestions are merely attempts to limit the damage,
and even the most ridiculous of them cannot efface in any
one's mind the reality of the play itself, that part of it which
is at once most profound and quite superficial, and of which
one can only say: Godot is the person two tramps are wait
ing for at the side of the road, and who does not come.
(110)
This anti-criticism reduced the play to the barest of plot descriptions
and aped Beckett's own refusal to say what the play meant or who
Godot represented: "Those who are perplexed by the play's 'meaning'
may draw at least some comfort from the author's assurance that it
means what it says, neither more nor less" (Fletcher, 68). The sense of
the play was to be found by feeling it in a performance, not by hunting
down symbols in the text: "So the play is not 'about': it is itself; it is a
play" (Kenner, 31). If the play was devoid of content, it was because
the form was the content. What this meant was unclear, because it
restated the problem: while everyone agreed there was an excessive
use of form in the play, few agreed as to what this meant.
If symbolic criticism made too much of the play this anti
criticism made too little, confirming sceptics in their view of the play
as a pretentious hoax. But as Robbe-Grillet suggests, Godot seemed to
include the various perspectives of criticism and deflect each as in
adequate to it. That an artwork is not exhausted by its interpretations
is one of its definitions, but Godot offered shelter to grand interpreta
tions precisely to scuttle them, defeating its symbolic accounts be
cause it already contained a critique of the symbol. Theodor Adorno
understood this negative moment as essential to the modernist artwork
and its new critical function.
279
2. Difficulty and disintegration
Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their
will, to the extent that they negate meaning.
(Adorno, 1997, 154)
The difficulty of understanding Godot and Endgame is integral to

each of them and not the perverse invention of academics. The confu
sion regarding the content or meaning of these plays goes to the heart
of both of them: the loss of meaning following the destruction of ex
perience in modernity. The divided reception of Godot as either pro
foundly significant or a pretentious hoax, as too meaningful or not
meaningful enough, pointed to the antinomies or paradoxes borne by
the modernist artwork.
The modernist artwork burdened aesthetic form with the task of
absorbing the self-destructive rationality, or 'logic of disintegration',
which was unravelling the social fabric of modern life. For Adorno,
Beckett's theatre, particularly Godot and Endgame, is exemplary in
this regard. His defence of the pre-eminence of Beckett's theatre
played a significant role in its critical reception - Lukacs had argued
that Beckett's work was the product of a distorted mind, relevant only
as a symptom of the distortions produced by capitalism - and is tied to
an account of the catastrophic fate of civilisation after the war. Lukacs
and Adorno agreed on a diagnosis of the disastrous social effects of
the capitalist economic system but arrived at diametrically opposed
views as to the consequences for art and critique. Adorno's defence of
Beckett's theatre was a defence of artistic modernism and its critical
relation to social reality.
The burden of this defence lay in establishing the greater social
relevance of the formal concerns of Beckett's theatre, which appeared
to many a retreat from the social, over the more obviously social
theatre of Brecht or Sartre. Adorno puts Lukacs in reverse: the social
realist portrait of reconciliation was the forgery; the modernist portrait
of alienation closer to the real state of affairs. The conditions for the
realism Lukacs demanded - a more stable reality susceptible to con
ventional forms and categories - no longer held. In this sense, the
modernists had in fact inherited the mantle of realism, for it was not
Kafka, for example, that distorted what reality had become; reality had
become Kafkaesque. Blaming the nihilism of the twentieth century on
280
Kafka's and Beckett's unheroic narratives was bad faith. The crisis of
subjectivity was an objective situation; the categories conferring spe
cious order on social development the real solipsism.
The logic of disintegration thus describes the objective condi
tions of modernity and how they affect subjective life. The authority
of narrative recollection to order human experience into integral uni
ties and meaningful wholes has been undermined by the success of
science as a cognitive paradigm and the success of capital as an socio
economic one. This undermining of the structure of experience has
profound consequences for critique and aesthetic form. "The explo
sion of metaphysical meaning" (1992, 242), as Adorno refers to Max
Weber's disenchantment thesis, renders the older aesthetic unity
which relied on it unavailable. To persist with conventional forms that
implied the coherence of subjective life meant artistic ignorance (ex
istentialist theatre), complicity in barbarism (culture industry) or both
(socialist realism). The integral unity that once characterised art per
sisted now as a forgery. Only a discordant aesthetic unity was equal to
the extremities of the age: "Beckett's plays are absurd not because of
the absence of any meaning, for then they would simply be irrelevant,
but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history" (1997,
153). This history was the central concern of Adorno's aesthetic the
ory and, if we are to believe Adorno, of Beckett's theatre. The diffi
culty of understanding Godot and Endgame, Adorno contends, finds a
counterpart in the difficulty of understanding the irrationality of con
temporary society. The temptation to dispel the darkness of either play
with the clarity of meaning must therefore be resisted (1997, 27).
Once again, the onus is reversed: criticism must measure up to the
plays, not the plays to criticism; it is not the plays that must yield in
telligibility in conceptual terms, but conceptual terms that must yield
before the irrationality of contemporary life. Reconstructing this un
intelligibility brings the plays' content into view: the critique of the
instrumentalisation of modern life.
The difficulty facing an artist who accepted that the logic of
disintegration did not stop at the door of the arts was to incorporate
the fragmentation of meaning in forms that enacted the integral unity
of meaning. It was not enough to write a play about absurdity (like
Sartre's Huis Clos), as if art could take the measure of social rationali
sation simply by making it a topic. Treating absurdity as a theme or
making it a category imparted to it a coherency it did not possess,
281
thereby escaping the very experience it purported to treat. The mean
ing lost from social life is in this way won back in art, reducing art to
consolation. The integral unity of the pre-modernist artwork articu
lated meanings positively and implied the unity of the social. The
modernist artwork, alternatively, no longer represents the unity of the
social because the social no longer constituted a unity (1992, 244).
As the experience of the disintegration of experience evaded di
rect presentation, it had to find expression at the level of form, in the
logic of the material itself and not simply in the content. A new aes
thetic unity would bear the wounds inflicted by the historical crisis of
subjectivity, gathering up critique into the details of form by giving
expression to the powerlessness of the subject. The materials com
bined to produce the eviscerated reality of Godot and Endgame there
fore carried an implicit critique. Becket's method was able to admit a
negativity of meaning into the details of form, implicating the means
of presentation in the negativity it sought to express, and in the proc
ess revealed the shortcomings of the existentialism with which it is
still often confused. Conventional dramatic categories are not rejected
in this process, they are subjected to the experience of disintegration.
The result is not chaos of form, but the search for a new unity capable
of bearing this antinomy. A disrupted unity, bearing the wounds of the
destruction of experience, defined a task demanding the same rigour
that defined the integral unity of traditional artworks. For Adorno, the
crisis of subjectivity was not a situation art could avoid; it had rather
to bear it, and would be judged on its ability to do so.
In Beckett's plainer terms, the task was "to find a form that ac
commodates the mess" (Driver, 23). The mess, however, encompassed
art as well, recoiling on the forms that sought to present it. Beckett
understood the artist's implication in this task, this time in more para
doxical terms that Adorno would have recognised, when 'B.' in
"Three Dialogues" speaks of "the expression that there is nothing to
express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to ex
press, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the
obligation to express" (17). The goal of a new aesthetic unity implied
immersion in the material, for only here could the expression of the
subject deprived of expression occur. Adorno and Beckett reinsert the
question of commitment into the immanent dialectic of form. Critique
in Go dot and Endgame proceeds via determinate negation of meaning
- testing traditional categories against contemporary experience - not
282
its abstract negation. In this process, old and forgotten forms emerge
as new possibilities. Music-hall gags and panto, stichomythia, the
Greek messenger and medieval angel, the Japanese Noh play make up
the materials of this new unity, just as the conversational games and
rituals of the tramps, which seemed so strange to Godot's first audi
ences, are some of its fruits. This formal experimentation is the means
by which both plays put 'meaning on trial', and is the reason why
Adorno saw in them the retrospective vision of the catastrophe of
history that Walter Benjamin saw in Klee's Angelus Novus.
3. Damaged life
Even the jokes of those who have been damaged are dam
aged.
(Adorno, 1992, 257)
Simon Critchley (157) criticises Adorno's lack of humour as the chief

failing of his 1961 essay on Endgame. Adorno's treatment of Beck
ett's humour, however, is consistent with his entire approach: he re
fuses to turn humour into exit from Beckett's negativity. Critchley
mutes the play's critique when he restores agency to the characters
that joke about having lost it. The jokes in both plays, invariably con
cerning the absence or destruction of meaning, are ultimately on us:
One daren't laugh anymore.

Dreadful privation.
This is really becoming insignificant.

Not enough.
We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impres

sion we exist?
Yes yes, we're magicians.
(1956, 11,68, 69)
When was that?

Oh way back, way back, when you weren't in the land of the
living.
283
God be with the days!
Do you believe in the life to come?

Mine was always that.
What? Neither gone nor dead?

In spirit only.
Which?
Both.
(1958, 33,35, 45)
In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, Adorno's own

black jokes carry the same sting, just as the subtitle glosses both plays.
The destruction or "withering" of experience refers to:
the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real
fate lies. It is as if the reified, hardened plaster cast of events
takes the place of events themselves. Men are reduced to
walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no
spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on screen.
(1978, 55)
When reality becomes unreal or "incommensurable with experience",

art is forced to conspire with critique in an attack on art itself (1997,
30). Adorno saw a critical method in the conventional failure of Beck
ett's drama, especially in the inability of his characters to move the
plot. If the fate of Beckett's characters cannot be mapped out in ad
vance according to psychology, as in naturalism, this is because the
subject has been stripped of its interiority and is powerless to alter its
fate. The depiction of this mutilated subject was art's loudest protest
against it, a criterion for a new naturalism yet to be outmoded by cur
rent developments in global capitalism.
There is no false consciousness in this, for the characters are as
aware of their condition as they are baffled by efforts to alter it. The
constant play-acting and theatricality in both plays is not just theatri
cal, in other words, but symptomatic of the crisis in subjectivity. With
every joke we are reminded of the characters' struggle to cope with a
suspended fate. "It is as if the two tramps were on stage without a part
284
to play", said Robbe-Grillet (113). Like the mime Act without Words
that followed the first London production of Endgame, the tramps are
trapped in a hellish repetition. As well as the source of comedy and
the reinvention of old forms, then, the word-play and rituals represent
attempts to cope with the 'withering of experience'. Even the play's
darker remarks are framed as conversational diversions. Pozzo's pero
ration, "That's how it is on this bitch of an earth", is delivered with an
eye on his audience: "How did you find me? Good? Fair? Middling?"
(38). Lucky's fragmented speech, also delivered as an entertainment
for the other players, is the play's celebrated instance of the withering
of experience.
Though trapped in a present cut off from the past and future, the
tramps constantly take their bearings, arguing over whether or not
they are in the same spot as the day before, whether the tree has grown
a leaf or two, whether Estragon remembers anything of the day before.
Pozzo and Lucky provide a new set of diversions, and later on (in
their absence) the subject of a game (72-73). The prospect of suicide
or parting from each other also become games. Indeed anything can
and does becomes the subject of a game, because the withering of
experience encompasses everything. The games are designed to pass
the time, and perhaps an entire life, but threaten to fail when needed
most:
VLADIMIR: (in anguish) Say anything at all!

ESTRAGON: What do we do now?
VLADIMIR: Wait for Godot.
ESTRAGON: Ah!
Silence.
VLADIMIR: This is awful!
ESTRAGON: Sing something.
VLADIMIR: No no! (He reflects.) We could start all over
again perhaps.
ESTRAGON: That should be easy.
VLADIMIR: It's the start that's difficult.
ESTRAGON: You can start from anything.
VLADIMIR: Yes, but you have to decide.
ESTRAGON: True.
Silence.
VLADIMIR: Help me!
285
ESTRAGON: I'm trying.
Silence.
(63-64)
The effort to divert themselves is palpable, as is the absurdity of the

predicament that defeats their efforts to do so, but a new word-game
suggests itself: "That's the idea, let's contradict each other"; and
"that's the idea, let's ask each other questions". As another pointless
silence gapes, a game of hat-swapping ensues. When that game ex
hausts itself, Vladimir asks "will you not play?" to which Estragon
retorts "play at what?" (72).
This is both entertaining and unsettling, as if it can only end in
senility. We never forget for long the pathetic motivation for these
games: to play at living, to pretend meaningful life is still possible.
The play's concentration on the present moment is so telescoped as to
defeat symbolism, for symbols place "a current perception in the con
text of collected experience" (Winer, 76), conferring a coherence on
events the tramps struggle to achieve with their ritualised banter. That
loss of memory is an index of decline in the play is clearer in the 'se
nile dialectic' of Pozzo and Lucky (Adorno 1997, 250). When asked
where they are going, Pozzo replies simply "On". The trope of 'on
wardness' recurs throughout the play (and Beckett's later prose) in a
consistent parody of Victorian notions of material and moral progress
(see Abbot, 32-42). We are left to guess what happened to Pozzo and
Lucky between Acts I and II, though the 'progress' of the story is
measured by their deterioration, in Lucky's muteness and Pozzo's
blindness and memory loss. Whether a day or more has passed is ir
relevant to Pozzo, who reacts angrily to Vladimir's efforts to mark the
passage of time: "It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not
good enough for you?" (89). Similar exchanges in Endgame likewise
suggest the disintegration of subjective experience into 'one damn
thing after another,' or into moments that do not add up to a life, just
as grains of millet do not make a heap - the paradox referred to in the
play: "Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!" "That means
that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day" (32).
Hamm's chronicle, though we may wonder who will ever set eyes on
it, represents another failed attempt to uncover narrative meaning in
recollection.
286
It is not just the jokes and one-liners that testify to damaged
life; joke-telling itself becomes another coping technique, though
hardly a successful one:
ESTRAGON: You know the story of the Englishman in the

brothel?
VLADIMIR: Yes.
ESTRAGON: Tell it to me.
VLADIMIR: Ah stop it!
ESTRAGON: An Englishman having drunk a little more
than usual goes to a brothel. The bawd asks him if he wants
a fair one, a dark one, or a red-haired one. Go on.
VLADIMIR: STOP IT!
(16)
Jokes and joke-telling in Endgame, like the rest of the dialogue, inten
sify Godot's sense of being rehearsed to kill the time. Nagg complains
at one point, "I tell this story worse and worse" (21), as if the effort
disclosed only his senility. The ostensible failure of these efforts to
confer narrative coherence is the successful implication of critique in
the constituents of dramatic form. Few would deny, however, that in
Godot a certain dignity, even heroism, attaches to this failure. The
possibility of such Stoic heroism accounts for the affirmative readings
of the play and the greater popularity of Godot over Endgame, for in
Endgame Beckett circumvents the possibility of heroism entirely.
4. The memory of wholeness
An unprotesting depiction of ubiquitous regression is a pro

test against a state of the world that so accommodates the
law of regression that it no longer has anything to hold up
against it (Adorno, 1992, 248).
In the effort to harness the play's negativity to the purposes of social

critique, Adorno risked reducing Endgame to "forlorn particulars that
mock the conceptual" (1992, 252), as Robbe-Grillet had reduced Go
dot (and theatre) to physical presence. The direction of this effort ex
plains his suggestion that Nagg and Nell's trashcans are "emblems of
287
the culture built after Auschwitz" (1992, 267). The peculiar concrete
ness of Beckett's objects - armchair, gaff, stepladder, bloody hand
kerchief - possess something of the disenchanted character of modern
life generally that calls for conceptual articulation, even as it evades it.
The task facing criticism is to explore this tension between disen
chanted particulars and the concept without releasing it altogether.
This means resisting the temptation to construct a philosophy of the
remainder out of Beckett's remains - a reduction Adorno risks when
he reads Endgame as the deconstruction of the subject1 - for the more
difficult task of articulating Beckett's method in connection with the
eviscerated reality of postwar life, which unfolds with the logic of
catastrophe.
Godot proved Beckett's method adequate to the destruction of
experience, the ne plus ultra of which is the inescapable prospect of
nuclear annihilation. Reference to contemporary reality is once again
withheld, giving the play the appearance of "an allegory whose inten
tion has fizzled out" (1992, 269). Endgame is no more 'about' nuclear
Armageddon than Godot is 'about' occupied France. A drama about
nuclear catastrophe would only reveal the inadequacy of its constitu
ents, "solely because its plot would comfortingly falsify the historical
horror of anonymity by displacing it onto human characters and ac
tions" (1992, 245). The bomb is never referred to - this would render
it more amenable to the concept and to understanding itself - but the
nihilism of technical reason represented by the bomb suffuses the
linguistic and dramaturgical infrastructure of the play.
The absurd dialogue and rehearsed patter, for example, is a re
sponse to a collapsed world and not in itself absurd. Vladimir's cajol
ery, "Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can't you, once in a way?" (12),
becomes Hamm's shrill command, "Keep going, can't you, keep go
ing!" (40). The word games this time possess a logic that cannot be
mistaken for stoic endurance:
HAMM: Open the window.

CLOV: What for?
HAMM: I want to hear the sea.
CLOV: You wouldn't hear it.
HAMM: Even if you opened the window?
CLOV: No.
HAMM: Then it's not worthwhile opening it?
288
CLOV: No.
HAMM: [Violently.] Then open it!
(43)
This inverted logic seeps into the object-world of the play:
HAMM: The alarm, is it working?

CLOV: Why wouldn't it be working?
HAMM: Because it's worked too much.
CLOV: But it's hardly worked at all!
HAMM: [Angrily.] Then because it's worked too little!
(34)
What does the reason for anything matter at this stage? The idea that
this form of life could "mean something" provokes Clov's strangled
laughter; a "rational being" returning to earth might make sense of
this mockery (27), though not enough to enjoy "a good guffaw" (41).
While everything has to be explained to the creatures (32), no expla
nation could possibly suffice (47).
This logic is turned against life itself, as if Hamm and Clov
were the last men and given the task of overseeing the extinction of
the species. Both take an ironic pleasure executing this duty:
HAMM: A flea! Are there still fleas?

CLOV: On me there's one. [Scratching.] Unless it's a
crablouse.
HAMM: [Very perturbed] But humanity might start
from there again! Catch him, for the love of
God!
(27)
Not even the kitchen rat can escape (37). Clov powders his groin with
insecticide aimed at the flea, though the earth went sterile long before
he did. The play's drive to sterility, or ironic solidarity with the tech
nical reason that culminates in lead waves (25) and stinking corpses
289
(33), justifies Hamm's denial of help to the interlocutor of his chroni
cle, who wants food for his son ("as if the sex mattered"):
HAMM: [...] Bread? But I have no bread [...] Then per

haps a little corn? [Pause. Normal tone.] That
should do it. [Narrative tone.] Corn, yes I have
corn [...] But use your head. I give you some
corn [...] and you bring it back to your child
and you make him - if he's still alive - a nice
pot of porridge [...] full of nourishment. Good.
The colours come back to his cheeks - perhaps.
And then? [Pause.] I lost patience. [Violently.]
Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're
on earth, there's no cure for that!
(36-37)
The last sentence might be the refrain of the play. When Clov spies a
boy through the window he prepares to exterminate him as he had the
flea:
CLOV: I'll go and see. I'll take the gaff.

HAMM: No!
[CLOV halts.]
CLOV: No? A potential procreator?
HAMM: If he exists he'll die there or he'll come here.
And if he doesn't...
[Pause.]
CLOV: You don't believe me? You think I'm invent
ing? (49-50)
The boy, like the flea, the rat, and Hamm's interlocutor, may be in
vented for the purpose of distraction, especially when Hamm's appar
ent direction of the action is considered: "It's the end Clov, we've
come to the end" (50). The interruptions and rehearsed narrative tone
of Hamm's story suggest not its unreality, however, but the narrative
scenery required to relate the moral vacuum at the centre of it. In Go
dot this could still be done in the slapstick antics of Vladimir and Es
tragon's long-winded responses to Pozzo's cries for help, but End
game's theatricality is a darker reminder of the fafade required to
290
conceal the broken social bond. Hamm and Clov live on, or play out
their lives, with no wish for self-preservation but only to ensure the
end is not miscarried, lest the agony start all over again. That a design,
any design, may be at work in this is a hope that can only be whis
pered: "Something is taking its course" (17, 26).
The missing ends in Endgame are moral as well as narrative, for
characters in search of an ending find their counterpart in lives with
out ethical and meaningful ends. Just as the bomb exceeds all con
ceivable ends, so Beckett's endlessness is our own.
Note
1. Adorno sought confirmation from Beckett in person over whether

'Hamlet', and thus the dramatic subject as such, is deliberately
echoed in 'Hamm'; Beckett rejected the idea (see Knowlson, 428).
Adorno dedicated his Endgame essay and his magnum opus Aes
thetic Theory to Beckett.
Works Cited
Abbott, H. Porter, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph

(Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1996).
Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Min
neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997).
-, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. J.F.N. Jephcott
(London: Verso, 1978).
-, "Trying to Understand Endgame", Notes on Literature, vol. 2, trans.
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CRITIQUE AND FORM: Adorno on "Godot" and "Endgame"

Author(s): Chris Conti

The most common criticism of Beckett's theatre is its supposed obscu

1. A play about nothing

The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as

The scandal of Waiting for Godot, as everyone knows, is that it is a

(Adorno, 1997, 154)

The difficulty of understanding Godot and Endgame is integral to

(Adorno, 1992, 257)

Simon Critchley (157) criticises Adorno's lack of humour as the chief

One daren't laugh anymore.

This is really becoming insignificant.

We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impres

When was that?

Do you believe in the life to come?

What? Neither gone nor dead?

In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, Adorno's own

When reality becomes unreal or "incommensurable with experience",

VLADIMIR: (in anguish) Say anything at all!

The effort to divert themselves is palpable, as is the absurdity of the

ESTRAGON: You know the story of the Englishman in the

4. The memory of wholeness

An unprotesting depiction of ubiquitous regression is a pro

In the effort to harness the play's negativity to the purposes of social

HAMM: Open the window.

HAMM: The alarm, is it working?

HAMM: A flea! Are there still fleas?

HAMM: [...] Bread? But I have no bread [...] Then per

CLOV: I'll go and see. I'll take the gaff.

1. Adorno sought confirmation from Beckett in person over whether

Abbott, H. Porter, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph

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