The Madman in Becketts Endgame, an Answer to Nietzsche Halfway through Endgame, Hamm remembers visiting a madman, who resembles

the madman in Nietzsches The Gay Science. The remembered visit is anomalousit is unlike Hamm to have had a friend or to have visited anyone. The unusualness calls attention to the memory. So does strategic placement. The memory occurs on page 44, at the approximate middle of this 84-page play, and in this play middleness is thematically emphasized.1 Shortly after remembering the madman, Hamm says of the ringing of Clovs alarm, I prefer the middle (48). Earlier, after having Clov push his chair round the room, he insists on being placed right in the center more or less right in the center roughly Bang in the center (26-7). By placing Hamms remembered visit to the madman at the center of the play, Beckett seems to be signalling its importance to the play as a whole. That importance appears to be its allusion to Nietzsches madman at a moment of Nietzsches most famous pronouncement, God is Dead. By bringing a similar, equally prophetic madman into Endgame through Hamms remembered visit, Beckett establishes his play as thoroughgoing contradiction of the Nietzschean optimism about the putative non-existence of God. Half-way through the play, Hamm says to Clov:
I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painterand engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! (Pause.) He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. (Pause.) He alone had been spared. (Pause.) Forgotten. (Pause.) It appears the case is... was not so... so unusual.

The madmans atheism is implied, since for him the end of the world involves no religious or metaphysical hope. His atheism correlates with that ambiguously expressed

2 by Hamm after he, Clov, and Nagg attempt, apparently in vain, to pray: The bastard! He doesnt exist (55)! The case of the madman is, as Hamm says, not so unusual since the appalling conditions he describes, once limited to the mans insanity, are now the reality of the characters in the play. Looking out the windows at the earth and sea, Clov reports: Zero zero and zero (29), Corpsed (30). In his garden, seeds wont sprout (13). He says (only slightly exaggerating), Theres no more nature (11). Hamm says, Outside of here its death (9). The vision of the madman has proved prophetic.2 Hamms friend, the madman who thought the end of the world had come and who thinks the earth and the sea are now ashes, closely resembles the madman in The Gay Science, who announces in the marketplace that God is Dead. And we have killed him.3 (He is a transparent spokesman for Nietzsche, who twice elsewhere in the book announces without intermediary that God is Dead [108, 279]). After Hamm says that God doesnt exist! Clov says, Not yet (55). The notion of a God not-yet existing balances Nietzsches notion of God once-existing but now dead: both deny Gods essential attribute of eternal life. After Nietzsches madman declares God dead, he relates the consequences of this momentous event. As in Becketts play, these are ecological and apocalyptic, though Nietzsches is also cosmological. As in Becketts play, only the madman can see them:
How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continuously? Backwards, sideways, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? (181)

So far, the madmen of Nietzsche and Beckett are in close agreementtheir visions corresponding closely to the future as experienced by Hamm and Clov, for whom the land and the sea are waste. After expressing his vision of desolation, Nietzsches madman becomes optimistic: Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after usfor the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto (181). Later in the book, in a section entitled The meaning of our cheerfulness, Nietzsche continues: the consequences of

3 God being dead are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn. our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation (280) Endgame contradicts this optimism. For Beckett, Gods non-existence is not the occasion for the joyful freedom. His characters everywhere implicitly deny Nietzschean optimism as farcical delusion. Absence of God is the absence of meaning and precludes real or lasting happiness. In Beckett, all that is left to Godless humanity is absurdity and despair, which Hamm fearfully, habitually (and, for the audience, unsuccessfully) attempts to keep at bay through generating dialogue, enacting familiar routines, asking the same questions and giving the same answers (5), and retelling and extending a little his narrative (50-4). Clov says, life is a farce, day after day (32). Hamm says crying is proof of living (62). If nature has left us, nevertheless, Something is taking its course (13), and that can only mean, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals (11)! What Hamm says of the dialogue is true of their lives: This is not much fun (13), This is deadly (28). When he finally says of his life, I was never there, Clov replies, Lucky for you (74). Becketts allusion to The Gay Science begs further questions about the play. Are other aspects intended to contradict or ridicule Nietzsche? Might Clov be Becketts ironic version of the Overman, who, in the next generation, will give meaning to Godlessness existence? Nietzsche asserts that names, initially false, give things their apparent meaning and that creating new names would create new things.4 Just before Hamm remembers visiting the madman, Clov says to him that if the words you taught me dont mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent (44). Nietzsche exhortats philosophers to embark in order to discover new worlds.5 Hamm orders Clov to build a raft so he can embark and be carried to other mammals but then he wonders about there being sharks and changes the subject (34-5). The play ends with Clov having announced his intention to leave but remaining on stage, so the next performance, the one after that, and those that follow may be considered as a single long play or sequence of plays or endless cycle of plays that amounts to a discouraging version of Nietzsches hypothesis of eternal return.6 THOMAS DILWORTH and CHRISTOPHER LANGLOIS, University of Windsor

Notes

Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1959). All other references are to this text. The pagination of the original publication in French is an even closer approximation to centricitythe passage occurring on pp. 62-3 of a 112page book. Fin de partie (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1957).
2

Prophecy is a minor motif in the play owing to Hamm asking Clov, what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene? (12)

words seen by the prophet Daniel on the wall, foretelling the end of a kingdom (Daniel 5:25-6).
3

Freidrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 184. Subsequent

quotations references to this work are to this translation. Beckett was fluent in German and read Nietzsche in the original. Beckett may have Nietzsche at university and later at various times. Deirdre Bair reports that in London in 1934 he read Nietzsche and contemplated the futility, sterility and boredom of his life. Samuel Beckett (New York: Harcourt, 1978), p. 193.
4 5 6

The Gay Science, p. 122. Ibid. pp. 231-2. Martin Esslin correctly writes, though not apropos of any work in particular, Beckett suffers under the thought of eternal

recurrence but never overcame the dread of an infinity of time and suffering. His quest, in contrast to Nietzsches, remains the pursuit of that supreme moment of unity with eternity that is the end of time . Samuel BeckttInfinity, Eternity, Becket at 80 / Beckett in Context, ed. Enoch Brater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 122-3.

"Nietzsche exhorts philosophers to ..."

"... and who thinks the earth and sea are now 'ashes'" (are instead of is)