Cambridge companion to beckett
4711 mots
19 pages
FORM AND THE VOID Beckett's Fin de partie and Ionesco's Les ChaisesT H E ST ARTING-POINT for this study is the observation — which I am not the first to make — of the remarkable degree of similarity in setting between Ionesco's Les Chaises and Beckett's Fin de partie, the one first produced in 1952, the other in 1957. Martin Esslin notes the similarity in passing;1 Rosette Lamont devotes an article2 to a comparison between the two plays, characterizing them as 'metaphysical farce', but does not draw any particular conclusion from the parallel stage settings. Richard M. Goldman notes the comparison made by critics, but in order to dismiss any real similarity between the two.a The points of comparison can be stated briefly. In both plays the set is extremely bare; we are inside a room, the walls forming a semi-circle in the case of Les Chaises. In both settings there are windows symmetrically placed to right and left, and a step-ladder in front of one of the windows. The symmetry in Fin de partie is emphasized by Hamm's position in his wheelchair in the centre of the stage, and his fanatical preoccupation with being exactly in the middle suggests a semi-circular stage rather than a square or oblong one, although this is not stated in the stage-directions. We learn subsequently in the case of both plays that the action takes place on a kind of island, isolated from the rest of the world by water. The lighting at the beginning of Les Chaises is dim; in Fin de partie it is 'greyish'.
The setting for Beckett's play has proved a fertile ground for symbol- hunters. Bell Gale Chevigny has called it a 'womb-like room',4 and made it a visual image of Beckett's reportedly 'terrible memory of life in his mother's womb'.s She evokes another image, which has been observed by other critics,6 that of a skull, with the two windows as eyes on to the outside world, an image which would reinforce the feeling ofsemi-circularity which one has about the setting. In this interpretation,