TALKING HEADS:  Samuel Beckett's Play & Schopenhauer's Philosophy

 Play, written in English in 1963, has been associated in various studies—almost in passing-with The Unnamable.  Knowlson and Pilling see the novel as the inspiration for Play; Gontarski begins his study of Play with a quotation from the novel; Rosen tosses off a parenthetical similarity between the two works.  Its place in the canon has usually been expressed in superlatives:  “it is one of the most advanced of Beckett’s plays;” “a key work in Beckett’s dramatic canon,” “the most perfect-example” of his dramatic art.   Yet, Play has been approached in virtually every other way except through a systematic examination of some central Schopenhauerian concepts.  It has been viewed as a “psychological drama,” and in terms of its affinity with Sartre’s No Exit and Yeats's Purgatory.  The philosophical links with Proust’s “love as habit” and Descartres’ separation of the mind and body have also been duly recorded.  Yet Play’s impact is more than the sum of its parts and this effect can be traced to Beckett’s dramatization of the same concerns that he expressed in the Triology as a whole and in The Unnamable in particular, where philosophers abound and wrap themselves around each others’ ideas all within the overarching tapestry of certain key Schopenhauerian concepts.

 Play is a twelve minute “act,” where our attention is focused on three urns above which the heads of a man and two women are visible.  Their faces are “so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of [the] urns” (P 45).  Physically they recall The Unnamable’s Mahood, who lived, or imagined himself living, in a jar outside a restaurant, his protruding head illuminated by lanterns.  The fragmented monologues or narrative sequences speak tonelessly in the past tense of adultery and suicide within the hellishly literal “eternal triangle,” although they are linear on stage, of  a man, his wife, and his sometimes mistress.  They are unaware of each other’s presence on the stage, staring “undeviatingly front”, mid-distance into the audience, without names and with only the most basic characteristics; the man hiccups, the wife is bossy, the other woman has a “wild laugh.”  The fourth character, the “hellish half-light,” provokes their speech although “the response…is not quite immediate.  At every solicitation a pause of about one second before utterance is achieved, except where a longer delay is indicated”  (P 45).  This light, according to Brustein, seems “guided by a malicious unseen will.”  The experience of watching Play with its repetition of past events, makes a fifth character out of the audience.  The light and all the other characters—the talking heads, the author, and the audience—engage in a process similar to Genet’s The Balcony, where there is the “hundred-thousandth-reflection-within-a-reflection in a mirror.” Fletcher and Spurling compare this pattern of reflection and entrapment to the image of the net, as Pozzo terms Lucky’s “dance” in Waiting for Godot.

 Several Schopenhauerian concepts underscore Play, as several critics have noted.  Beckett employs the concept of subject and object and the concept of earth as a purgatory.  In addition, many of Schopenhauer’s ideas about the deceitfulness of women and the distinctions between men and women emerge as M, W1, and W2 reveal bits of their past and their personalities.  However, the central and controlling concept is Schopenhauer’s idea of the will.  The will emerges through the characters retellings of their former actions, through their experiences on the stage during the play (most notably their experiences with the stage spotlight), and through the audience’s experience of the play.  Viewed in this manner, both the subject matter of Play and the theatrical experience of Play can be seen as layers of a metaphor for the Schopenhauerian Will.  The specific components of that Will, which will be focused on in this study, are its relation to suicide, the sex drive, time, space, causation, the individual will, the role of the intellect, and the idea of the circle.

 While earlier studies avoided the issue of what had happened to the three characters, more recent works accept the idea that they have committed suicide.  In fact, Gontarski notes that Play “seems almost a literal dramatization of Schopenhauers’ arguments about suicide,: that it is has, finally, little effect on the essential condition of man, on the “thing-in-itself.”  Or as Schopenhauer observed, “suicide, the willful destruction of the single phenomenal existence, is a vain and foolish act, for the thing-in-itself—the species, and life, and will in general—remains unaffected by it.”

 A man is never happy, but spends his whole life wishing after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes to harbour with masts and rigging gone.  And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over (Studies 34).

 Once a human being recognizes and understand his truth, he or she may then achieve freedoms from this cycle.   The understanding comes that the world cannot bring happiness, and so the striving for it ceases (WWR 183).

 The characters in Play are no strangers to these concepts.  They are caught in a purgatorical limbo and are forced to retell the stories of their lives throughout eternity.  The individual rehashing of their pasts reveal that the blind, unceasing, grasping will of which Schopenhauer speaks was present in their dealings with each other.  M loved W1, or so he tells us now (P 47).  However, he found that love was not enough, and he began an affair with W2.   Unable to settle with either woman, he told W1 that the affair had ended and W2 that he would go away with her (P 51).  His grasping will never let him be satisfied; he loved and did not love and he wanted and did not want both women.  W2 was certainly never satisfied with the situation either.  Once the affair intensified, she tried to convince M to leave his wife.  These two individuals were so clearly caught up in self-centered and unsatisfied desires that they lived life as they are “living” death:  side by side, unaware of the other and therefore unable to connect.  The best example of the unsatisfied will, though, is revealed through the behavior of W1, who is unable to settle on any one course of action and be happy.   When she suspects M of having an affair, she hires a detective to follow him.  Receiving no positive result from that, she decides to confront the mistress in person.  As W2 recalls the event:  “One morning as I was sitting stitching by the open window she burst in and flew at me.  Give me up, she screamed, he’s mine…I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinks of bitch” (P 46).  When M confesses, W1 is not satisfied with this situation either.  She suggests “a little jaunt to celebrate, to the Riviera or … Grand Canary” (P 49).  Denied this pleasure, she revisits W2 to taunt her and to gloat over her victory.  Then she returns to taunt M:  “I ran into your ex-doxy, she said one night on the pillow, you’re well out of that” (P 51).  Schopenhauer might well be speaking of W1 when he writes:  “Then again, how insatiable a creature is man [or woman].  Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desires, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will”  (Studies 37).

 To Schopenhauer, one of the primary motivators of this unending search by men and women is the sexual urge (P 35).  “The genitals are subject merely to the will and not at all to knowledge. …  The genitals are the real focus of will, and are therefore the opposite pole to the brain, the representative of knowledge [the intellect, which Schopenhauer saw as the servant of the will]” (WWI 330).  Thus, all three of these characters are rather mindless affirmers of the will, although their discussions of sex per se remain rather euphemistic and double-entendred:   “And there was no denying that he continued as … assiduous as every” (P 47), says W1.  W2’s “And of course with him no danger of the … spiritual thing” (P 49).  M:  “Have I lost … the thing you want?”  (P 58).

 These ellipses are used in the same manner when they are talking about … death.  M’s affair continues long past a rational ending point, with WI threatening to commit suicide and at every turn taunting W2, who seems to be losing her mind—“ a shade gone, just a shade, in the head” (P 46).  We can agree with Schopenhauer that M’s genitals are controlled by his will rather than his mind, and keep him from the peace that he hopes he will find in death—only to discover that the desire goes on, although action is now impossible.  In keeping with the pessimistic tone of Schopenhauer’s thinking, the characters reveal that they were not happy even in the sexual aspects of their relationships, and that, in spite of all the pain and the screaming, “all that was just… play” (P 54).

 It should be noted at this point that the characters’ stories vary a bit as they are retold.   Discrepancies exist in details and in time sequences.  Part of this could be due to their altered states of consciousness.  Each one “knows” in varying degrees that while each is the subject of the memories of the past, each is now an object of the light.  Consequently, they are aware of having moved from one plane of existence to another—although they certainly are not sure what that state may be.  The discrepancies could also be due to the fragmented nature of the narrative as it is unfolding.  Time, after all, is relative not only for the speaker but also for the listener, in this case the audience, who has two opportunities to go over the fragments of the memories.   A more inclusive explanation, though, would be Schopenhauer’s that the world exists for each individual not as it really is but as the individual perceives it.  “The world is my idea.”  (WWR3).  M, W1, and W2 cannot possibly remember the same events in the same sequence because they all experienced those situations differently, through their own perceptions, and because all these retellings are the product of memory, which in itself is subconsciously selective in terms of how things are recalled.  Thus, the comments of the wife are rendered coarser in the retellings of the scenes by the mistress and the husband, while the husband recounts his experiences in phrases far more vague and non-specific than either the wife or the mistress, primarily because he is not present during those moments they talk about most often.  Caught as he is between the two women, he seems the least “real” of the characters, neither very much in the wife’s world nor in that of the mistress.  Rather he keeps trying to create a fantasy world in which the three of them are in a “little dinghy… drifting”, which somehow cancels out the other world as “never been.”  Even after death, he cannot talk about the pain of the past without hiccupping, the only outward manifestation of his inner tensions, at which point his narratives veers off in another direction.

 Thus, the three characters are trapped in all space, yet space one yard high, all time and no time.   The urgings of the will cause the characters to become Tantalus-like, ever longing and yet ever denied.  This Schopenhauerian duality, in which the will is set against its representations (intellectualize love in the manner of Dante and Plato) is thereby dramatized.  In trying to “know” the will, the characters have seen the concept of love as a goal-oriented activity, with happiness as the sought after end and boredom as the negative incentive (WWI Chapt. 29).  Life for these characters, then, has been like life for Schopenhauer; it is a pendulum that swings between pain and boredom, with “happiness” a fiction created by the limited intellect in the service of the undeniable and basically unknowable will.

 At this point in the play, we realize that as they could never “know” the will in life, they certainly cannot know it in this limbo.  The only material they have to work with is their own skewed memories of the past, and they can neither change these nor learn from them.  And our understanding of this is guided by the light.  If we view the light as an additional character, then we see that none has changed as a result of his or her death.  Each is denied the kind of insight which Sartre’s trio can know but never act upon.   M  still plays with his own fantasies rather than trying to relate to the light; W2 still tries to find a relationship, although now it is with light rather than with M; and WI screams “Get off me! Get off me!” throughout, in a phrase which seems sexual as well as literal.  Further, WI comes closest to interpreting the presence of the light, feeling that “some day somehow I may tell the truth at last and then no more light at last” (P 54). These characters, then, react to the new situation in the same way that they reacted to past ones, only the light instead of M becomes their object—which simultaneously they become the subject of the light and the audience.  So they and we continue to strive with the same sort of cravings that we have experienced in the past and seem powerless to change in the present.