Hughes Beckett Hughes and Beckett

Hughes Beckett

Hughes and Beckett -- making and failing to make a new mythology in a world vacant of belief

In the years after the Second World War, the world was confronted by the reality that the human species was capable of committing horrors of seemingly insurmountable magnitude. Writers were faced with the difficulty of creating written works of meaning in a world that seemed so cruel that any attempt of making meaning or moral sense of human behavior seemed futile. Existing genres of literature seemed incapable of encompassing the new reality of human existence. To cope with this seemingly insurmountable task, the Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett in "Endgame" created a strange, empty kind of world at the end of time, where meaning and purpose in human activity was so absent that the ailing characters were incarcerated in waste receptacles, rather than beds. The characters in "Endgame" are so mired, so stuck in their rote ways of being that they have become nearly motionless. The most mobile character is a cripple; the other characters are trapped in waste bins, and are also physically incapacitated, by blindness or pain. In what should be the most physical and mobile form of prose, the world of drama, stasis reigns. The character's stagnant inner lives are rendered into states of physical being, on stage.

In contrast to Beckett's depicted graveyard of humanity, however, the British poet Ted Hughes' cycle of poems entitled "Crow" manufactures a new, harsh, primitive form of modern mythology to challenge previous Christian constructions of belief. Crow, unlike the protagonists of Beckett's "Endgame," Hamm, Clove, Nagg, and Nell, is quick, voluble, and peripatetic in response to the cruelty of the world. Crow actively defies and wrestles with the creating deity that he despises, who has manufactured a world were all living beings will eventually meet their demise, much to the dissatisfaction of Crow. The stasis of "Endgame," which defies even conventional theatrical norms of presenting an audience with a beginning and an ending to its narrative structure, is, like the cruel world that confronts the amoral Crow, a seeming parable about human existence in the wake of a world where movement for the sake of any higher purpose seems absent -- a world that Crow responds to with anger and constant movement, rather than stasis. Yet however harsh the views of the authors, both works still offer some hope, however transient -- Beckett offers through the human connection that occasionally breaks through the characters' states of physical and emotional entrapment, and Hughes offers hope through the wild defiance in the anti-heroic figure of Crow.

According to the critic David Hayman (1991) "Endgame" dramatizes characters that seem to be "on the very edge of mortality in the wake of an unspecified catastrophe." Although the highly specific historical amorality of the Second World War may resonate to some degree in this allusion to a catastrophe, Hayman notes that the lack of specificity regarding the catastrophe may simply mean that what the characters suffered was more of a "gradual wearing away of substance," and thus their stasis may be a more general expression of frustration at the purposeless of human existence rather than a specific reference to a personal or a historical tragedy. The persons of the play seem to have lived incomplete lives that were still better than the present they are suffering. They are now facing death, and respond by dwelling mentally in the past. The person who is physically capable of moving the least, Hamm, essentially controls the movement of the most mobile character Clov, as if this is the way one 'wins' the game of life and chess -- through stasis. This is seen in the following exchange:

CLOV:

All life long the same questions, the same answers.

HAMM:

Get me ready.

Clov does not move.)

Go and get the sheet.

Clov does not move.)

Clov

HAMM:

I'll give you nothing more to eat.

CLOV:

Then we'll die.

HAMM:

I'll give you just enough to keep you from dying. You'll be hungry all the time.

CLOV:

Then we won't die.

Pause.)

I'll go and get the sheet.

He goes towards the door.)

Hayman cautions against finding any specific, singular meaning in what the critic essentially calls a deliberately unenjoyable play. The play provides for the viewer a kind of open-ended template in its eschewal of conventional theatrical techniques and meaning itself -- the play, viewed through Hayman's lens, becomes a kind of act of performance art, where the meaning or point is showing the viewer that the impulse to find logic in human life and history is absurd as the obsession of the characters. The characters sing old songs, recite old quotes and bits of dialogue, but like religion or morality, these memories of the past cannot convey meaning, only echo disconnected memories amongst persons who speak in the same room to one another, but do not real listen to what the others are saying. Yet even in the midst of this state, there is poignancy in the willingness of Clov to serve the incapacitated characters, as best he can, even though his futile opening and closing of the windows and his other gestures do not have a specific, symbolic meaning. Through such apparently purposeless exchanges, there is also a defiance of the characters' moral emptiness, and a search, however small, for human connection and reliance. If Hamm refuses to feed Clov, Clov will die, and if Clov dies Hamm will die.

No one could describe Beckett's characters as attractive, and this deliberate impulse towards ugliness is also seen in Ted Hughes creation of the mythological, ugly character in the form of "Crow." A crow, the traditional trickster character of mythology, is a harsh-voiced bird, and Hughes himself said he selected this solitary feeder upon the bones of the dead as his protagonist quite deliberately -- just as Beckett's characters feed upon the bones of a cultural system of meaning and a personal past that now has no shape or structure -- "it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more," says Nell of the "Endgame" dialogue -- the animal Crow feeds upon what is left behind, feeding upon the dead in a world that is based upon death. The crow is a "nightmare" creation, a defiant voice in the wilderness against God. (Sagar, 1975)

Hughes called the Crow cycle of poems complete in itself, in other words, although the image of Crow might resonate with pre-existing mythological structures, the poet did not wish to specifically write in conversation with these myths. The author explicitly urged the reader to view the poems as entities in and of themselves, rather than commentaries upon specific topics, just as Hayman urges the viewer of "Endgame" not to find a singular historical reference to World War II (such as seeing human beings as refuse) but to understand that the 'point' of the piece is to evade all meaning entirely, and that it is a reflection upon current events only in the emotional weight of the despair it conveys.

As Beckett avoids conventional plot structures, Hughes avoids conventional poetic techniques and harkens back to older ways of rendering meaning, such as the oldest poetic devices such as the sing-song quality of nursery rhymes, balladic narrative structures of how the world came into being, the use of refrain in folksongs and even incantation-like charms. Although not a drama to be spoken aloud like "Endgame," much of the Crow cycle uses techniques more common to oral poetry than self-consciously literary creations to be read off the page, such as the "repetitions and refrains, parallelism, catalogues and catechisms," of old English verse or epics, much like Beckett makes use of cliches and music hall songs and phrases to link his characters to older ways of expression that are now defunct. (Sagar, 1975) But Hughes' adoption of the primitive is clearly seen by the author as vital and defiant, rather than sad and broken, like the physical lives of Beckett's characters that, unlike crow, cannot defy death, move, or be resurrected from illness like Crow.