develop an argument on the theme in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

Beckett's "Happy Days": Rewinding and Revolving Histories

Author(s): Katherine Weiss

Source: South Atlantic Review , Fall 2010, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Fall 2010), pp. 37-50

Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/41635652

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Beckett's Happy Days:

Rewinding and Revolving Histories

Katherine Weiss

In Happy Days Samuel Beckett's bird-like protagonist, Winnie, resists

readings by those who, like Richard Gilman, desire to situate Beckett's stage images outside of history.1 While the set of Happy Days is very much an unrecognizable wasteland (echoing Gilman's description of Waiting for Godot ), much of the play's monologue are Winnie's memories. Buried up to her waist in Act I and her neck in Act II, Winnie

recalls days long gone, rewinding and revolving her personal past as well as a cultural and historical past she once took part in. Despite the cheerfulness that accompanies many of her memories, Winnie is a victim of molestation. Futilely, she attempts to keep the memory of the traumatic incident at bay. However, Winnie is winding down, becoming slower and increasingly trapped by her trauma. Beckett is keenly interested in ways individuals unsuccessfully attempt to disown

their past. His explorations into this reflect his awareness of being a survivor of the Second World War. Beckett's involvement in the French

Resistance, hiding after his cell of the Resistance was discovered by the Nazis and his work with the Irish Red Cross must have left a mark

on his person as well as his work; these wartime experiences are like ghosts haunting Beckett's stage, paralleling the past that haunts Winnie.

Beckett's creative output reveals that history leaves marks, inflicts us in

ways that change us.

Mark Nixon and James McNaughton offer invaluable explorations of Beckett and history with particular detail to his movements leading up to the Second World War. Both scholars put Beckett's own statements disavowing history and politics in context. Nixon shows that

although "the correspondence and publications tend to avoid political and historical references, Beckett's notebooks from the 1930s paint a different picture" (32). Extensively, he points to Beckett's critique of, and even disgust with, the rise of Nazism. His critique, moreover, was a well-informed one. Beckett, for example, listened to broadcasts of Hider and read Mein Kampf or as Beckett called it, "Mein Krampf"

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38 Katherine Weiss

(qtd. in Nixon 33), and as such saw through the irrational narrative of Nazism. Like Nixon's, McNaughton's investigation of the diaries reveals Beckett's deep concern about the future of Europe. He argues:

Not until after the trip [through Germany] does Beckett find a

way in his creative work to reconcile his earlier conviction that

abandoning historical sense and cause-and-effect judgment represents a political liability and his later awareness that rationalising the chaos of history can generate dangerously irrational historical narratives that lead to censorship and war. (102)

What we see happen in the diaries and Beckett's creative work, according to McNaughton, is "a performative erasure of history" (102), but erasure always leaves impressions - traces. Beckett keeps from trying to rationalize what he sees happening; he accepts the chaos

and longs to see the thing as it is. In his diaries, this awareness is put into

action through the listing of what he witnesses rather than producing a narrative to "understand" what he witnesses.

Jonathan Boulter, likewise, argues that the past has left its trace on

Beckett. He begins his 2009 essay, "Archives of the End: Embodied History in Samuel Beckett's Plays," with "Samuel Beckett's characters are haunted by the ghost of memory" (129). Boulter concludes by suggesting that the body on stage

must function as an index of its own compromised attempt to maintain, to contain, a history which could, ideally, offer the subject - in the work of mourning - a totalized vision of itself to itself. And thus the posthuman subject, finally, is the

only viable trope of the archive as it really is: the spectral site

of history's effaced continuity, "irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous." (146)

Like Boulter, Daniel Katz is careful to warn us that it is important that we do not read Beckett's work as "a representation of the death camps," or any other historical event, for that matter. For Katz, Beckett's work exhibits a " refusal to express, within the clear sense of an obligation that has no name" (2009, 145). Beckett's work cannot express the way Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms does because he witnessed something unimaginable which, according to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, silenced writers. In his essay of 1936, Benjamin asks, "Was it not noticeable at the end of the war [World War I' that men returned from the batdefield grown silent - not richer

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South Atlantic Review 39

but poorer in communicable experience?" (84). How can one express something so irrational, so unknowable, Benjamin wonders. We can imagine that if Benjamin had survived the Second World War, he would

have argued that this silence had intensified with post- World War II writers. Beckett's work expresses that silence, refusing to name the ineffable horror. Several years after Benjamin's observation, Adorno argued that "poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (34). While often read

as questioning how anyone could write poetry after the atrocities of the Second World War, this claim may be reinterpreted as suggesting that the only poetry worthwhile after the war was one that expressed the barbarism of Auschwitz - an expression that is impossible and necessary.

Trauma, like that which survivors of the Second World War

experience, is "The encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it" (Caruth 7). Theorist Cathy Caruth goes on to explain that "What returns to haunt the victim [. . .] is not only the reality

of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has

not yet been fully understood" (2-3). Drawing on Freud, Caruth argues that the traumatic event is repressed because of the witness's guilt to surviving the unfathomable encounter with death. The unwelcome repetition of the event is "not just an unconscious act of the infliction

of the injury," but rather "a voice that cries out from the wound, a voice

that witnessed the truth" that the survivor cannot reconcile (2-3). Writing is that very display of the voice that has witnessed the

horror of truth and cries out from the wound it inflicts - a cry that is resisting or repressing the past. The manifestation of trauma takes on three characteristics: repetition, the need to stabilize the "it," and

fragmentation. Adam Phillips, also indebted to Freud, argues that "Repetition is the sign of trauma; our reiterations, our mannerisms, link us to our losses, to our buried conflicts" (142), and he continues to

point out that writing and painting are "a form of repetition that easily

obscures its own history, the conflicts it was born out of, the problems

which made it feel like a solution" (142). Not only is Beckett's writing ripe with repetition (one needs only to think of Vivian Mercier's famous

1956 review of Waiting for Godot , in which he claimed that Beckett had

done the impossible, he had written a successful play "in which nothing

happens, twice " [29]), but also the very act of writing is a re-seeing, or

re-saying that is always distorted by a lack of distance; the writing of

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40 Katherine Weiss

the past, in other words, is, to borrow from the title of Beckett's 1981 novella, ill seen ill said.

The second indicator of internal conflict, or trauma, according to Adam Phillips, is "the need for things to have an exact position -the determined commitment to a definitive historical narrative" (146). While Beckett's texts are not historical narratives (they are not attempts

to reconstruct or revise historical events), there is in Beckett's plays an

attempt to situate the body in an exact position. In Endgame , for example,

the blind and wheelchair bound Hamm absurdly tries to ensure that his

servant Clov has returned him to the exact center after taking Hamm on a little tour of the stage. Moreover, as Antonia Rodriguez Gago points out,

In Beckett's early plays, past memories are kept in various containers, dustbins in Endgame , tapes in Krapp's East Tape , a

mound in Happy Days, [urns] in Play, or are embodied through

sound and repeated in the stories the characters tell. In the late plays, however, memories, or imaginings of the past, are contained in, or are prisoners of, the stage darkness (116).

Quite literarily, Beckett imprisons his storytellers perhaps to show how

the past - their histories - imprison them. This desire to position the body in an exact location reflects, in some sense, the historians need for exactness. We can also think of those voices in Beckett who undergo a self-correcting process. In Not I, for example, this process reflects a desire and horror in getting the story right. Yet, as Dominick LaCapra

discusses in Writing History, Writing Trauma, the historian's need for

accuracy is thwarted by the impossibility for the survivor to provide an exact account of traumatic events because of the tension between

needing to cry out from the pain of the wound and the avoidance of the wound altogether. Nonetheless, LaCapra urges that their inexact accounts of traumatic events make the experience no less accurate. Such testimony bears witness to the individual survivor's intimacy with the traumatic event.

Beckett's fragmented bodies reflect a "too-closeness," or the lack of critical distance from trauma. Survivors have no distance from

the traumatic event, Adam Phillips argues in his essay on historical trauma and painting: their experience is one of intimacy and as such is

manifested in distortion and fragmentation (147-8). Beckett's characters

often suffer from being too close to a traumatic event. We need only to think of Eh Joe. With the help of the camera, Beckett is able to

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South Atlantic Review 4 1

express Joe's "too-closeness" to the suicide of his former lover. During

the remembrance of her suicide in the form of rehearing a mysterious

voice recall the tragedy, the camera inches forward, closing in on Joe's

face until his agonizing expression is caught in an extreme close-up, showing only the eyes, nose and mouth.

Dominick LaCapra gives us a language of coping with historical trauma. Like Caruth and Phillips, LaCapra theorizes that survivors of catastrophic events are "possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes - scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically caught

up in a melancholic feedback loop" (21). In the unwelcome return, or what LaCapra calls, the acting out of the event, "tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene. [. . .] In this sense the aporia and the double bind might be seen as marking a trauma that has not been worked through" (21). "Acting out," for LaCapra, another follower of Freudian thought, "is a process but a repetitive one" (148). It comes back, repeatedly, haunting those affected by traumatic events and keeping them from obtaining the critical distance needed to examine the experience and event. Obtaining distance and being able to construct a controlled narrative of the event (a process LaCapra calls "working through") does not release an individual from the ghosts of the past, it is not, in other words, a cure; it does allow one to come to terms with traumatic events: "In

working through, the person tries to gain critical distance on a problem

and to distinguish between past, present, and future" (143). LaCapra warns that acting out and working through are not binary oppositions,

but rather similar processes both of which involve repetition, and both

of which may coexist in a person. However, the repetition involved in the process of working through is not one that is "compulsive"; it is, instead, a process that leads "to a rethinking of historicity and temporality in terms of various modes of repetition with change" (149).

To bring the matter back to Beckett, LaCapra argues that much of post- modern experimental literature is a controlled response to trauma - a process of working through traumatic experience. Here he differs from Phillips who leaves it ambiguous as to whether the artist or writer

is working through or acting out in the process of creation. In fact, Phillips leaves it ambiguous as to whether the artist or writer is working through or acting out in the process of creation. However, Caruth and LaCapra see writing as a more deliberate act and claim that the reason

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42 Katherine Weiss

we see so much post- World War II writing display a process of working

through trauma is because "literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested

in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing" (Caruth 3). Whether Beckett's writing is a working through or acting out - or perhaps a mixture of both - is difficult to say. What is apparent, however, is that Happy Days embodies a concern with the pain of the past in both its plot/ content and in its form/ style.

Samuel Beckett's 1961 theatrical tour de force , Happy Days , rewinds

and revolves historical narratives through its repetition, fragmentation,

and stage image of a woman caught in a mound - an image which is an embodiment as well as embodies histories. Indeed, Happy Days can be read in terms of Beckett's experience of working with the reconstruction of Saint-Lô, Normandy - a town that was devastatingly

bombed during the Second World War. The image of Winnie in Happy Days t for Phyllis Gaffney, whose father was a pathologist with the Irish

Red Cross in Saint-Lo, "echoes the real experience of a Saint-Lo citizen who was found by rescue-workers standing upright, unable to move, stuck in the ruins of his house" and "Winnie's care to look her best

recalls the women of the town, who would emerge into the sunlight from their dusty cellars, beautifully turned out in starched white blouses" (76). Having been a witness to the aftermath of the bombing of Saint-Lô, Beckett wrote to his friend, Thomas McGreevy, "St.[-]Lo

is just a heap of rubble, la Capitale des Ruines as they call it in France. Of 2600 buildings 2000 completely wiped out, 400 badly damaged and 200 'only' slighdy" (qtd. in Knowlson 313). Moreover, Beckett recorded his impressions for a radio broadcast which was never aired. In "The Capital of the Ruins," he writes of the destruction, the efforts to reconstruct the city by hand, the lack of medicine, and the "imaginative

people" of Saint-Lô who continued to "smile at the human conditions" (277). The echoes are perhaps too obvious. The destitute landscape in Happy Days is described as an " expanse of scorched grasť (138) and Winnie's medicine, toothpaste, and lipstick are "running out" (141), yet

she repeatedly smiles and even concludes the play with "Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day!" (168). Her relendess

happiness attests to her endurance.

Interestingly, it is the endurance of the people of Saint-Lô that stays with Beckett. Their endurance to survive, and their struggle to preserve their past, despite the urge to forget it, haunts Beckett's Happy

Days . What we discover in this play is a rewinding of collective, cultural

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S outh Atlantic Review 43

and personal histories into voluntary and involuntary narratives. In remembering them, Winnie revolves these histories. In other words, she re/ creates the past through a process of storytelling.

From the onset of the play, Beckett provides his audience with an exploration of how memory works in his portrayal of Winnie, who insists on following through with the "old style." She insists on keeping

up her appearance mostly by keeping up old habits and by attempting to

remember forgotten quotations. Frequently, she asks, "What are those wonderful lines?" (140). Several scholars, mostly notably S.E. Gontarski,

Derek Goldman and Ruby Cohn, have written about Winnie's half- quoted and misquoted fragments.2 Such readings have rightly posited that the cultural debris littering the play represents the very mound of earth imprisoning Winnie. She is stuck in the old ways and the old sayings, and these habits are like the ballast that chains Beckett's dog to his vomit ( Proust 8). While habit and memory are impossible to break away from and indeed are necessary to continue the struggle of existence as we see in Waiting for Godot , Beckett here suggests that

holding on to the "old style" too vehemently is also detrimental as it leads to paralysis.

In trying to remember the forgotten lines, Winnie takes part in attempting to reconstruct the past-a narrative that privileges the classics. She is saddened that "One loses one's classics" (164) whereas Beckett, according to Anne Atkin, "feared erudition swamping the authenticity of a work, and constantly warned against that danger for other artists, having had to escape from it himself" (Atkin qtd. in Feldman 5). Winnie, like an archive, embodies cultural debris, but by doing so, constructs a historical narrative that is always lacking, always

fragmented, and as such she is imprisoned. Through Winnie, Beckett reminds us of the impossibility of forgetting.

Thus, Winnie continues to rewind and as such revolve her histories. This is best demonstrated in Beckett's attention to the musical-box.

While Winnie only once retrieves the musical-box, when she does so, she " winds it up, turns it on, listen /' (155), happily "j 'wayßngj to the rhythm'

of the 1905 operetta waltz duet "I love you so" from The Merry Widow.

The musical-box tune also stirs up happy memories for her husband, Willie as he continues humming the melody once the musical-box winds down. This song, which reappears at the play's conclusion when Winnie sings once her husband attempts to climb up the mound to join

her, harks back to happier times for the married couple, but what those

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44 Katherine Weiss

times entail we cannot know. Now, in their destitute wasteland these

memories are re-enacted by consciously winding up the mechanism which holds a degraded version of the operetta. Musical-boxes almost never provide the tune in its entirety. Invariably, after winding up such

a box, one hears only a fragment of the song, recorded or "fixed" into

the mechanism's "memory." As such, the musical-box functions very much like Winnie's mind, and for that matter, the human mind. As

Fiona Shaw in a 2008 interview on New York public radio noted, when Winnie recollects her memories she is "nearly remembering" the event

before it "collapses in her mind" (Shaw). Beckett, as Shaw comes close to expressing, suggests that the construction of history is an attempt to rebuild, and invariable fabricate, where memory has collapsed.

The revolver, too, connects to Winnie and Willie's history. For Winnie, the revolver, or Brownie, stirs up mixed emotional responses. When she first pulls out the revolver after dipping into her bag, she " kisses it rapidly " (141) and returns it to the bag. However, later in Act I, when she takes out the revolver, she is " Disgusted ' (151) but leaves

the miserable object on the mound. It is at this point, too, that we learn about Willie's suicidal thoughts. Here we see how the revolver works very much like the musical-box, yet the sound that escapes this

gadget is very different. Winnie rewinds Willie's past agony when she reminds him of his suicidal tendencies: "Remember Brownie, Willie?

[Pause.] Remember how you used to keep on at me to take it away from

you? Take it away, Winnie, take it away, before I put myself out of my

misery" (151). Even though the revolver reminds Willie and Winnie of the painful past, Winnie nevertheless claims that "Oh I suppose it's a comfort to know you're there, but I'm tired of you" (151). The audience is left to ponder why a revolver is a comfort. Although the revolver offers a way out of their misery and in doing so r/ evolves their

history as it has done in a larger world context, it does so ultimately by

potentially ending life-Willie's or Winnie's. Brownie is not only a reference to the poet, Browning whose "My

Last Duchess" offers a sinister way to read the end of Happy Days , but also to the Browning pistol (Knowlson and Pilling 106). Curiously, however, the Browning is not a revolver even though it has often been mistaken for one. John Moses Browning designed the modern self-loading pistol more than a hundred years ago (Venturino 20-1). This automatic pistol has changed history as it was implemented in both World War I and World War II, offering soldiers possibilities to

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South Atlantic Review 4 5

fire more rounds without cocking a barrel and without reloading the cartridge as often as one does with a revolver (Asia Africa Intelligence Wire). Whilst the Browning altered the way in which wars were fought,

an evolution that results in destruction, terror and death is perhaps more accurately a degeneration. An equally important allusion to war is Willie's moustache. When

Willie makes his first full appearance at the end of the play, the audience

sees an old man wearing a "Rattle of Britain moustache" (166). Perhaps a minor detail and one that a less conscious director would cut, the moustache alerts the audience to a significant historical narrative. In 1940, the German Luftwaffe waged a campaign against the British air force. This campaign, the Batde of Britain, was the first major campaign fought mainly by air. While most of the pilots did not wear the elaborate moustache, Squadron Leader "Teddy" Donaldson who flew his Hurricane into one of the more devastating air-strikes did. During the attack on July 12, Donaldson's Squadron suffered severe losses and although he returned unwounded his plane was badly damaged (Mason 164-5). Fortunately, after three months of fighting, Britain was able to defeat Germany on September 17, but if Germany had been victorious, they would have launched an amphibious and airborne attack on Britain. Although Happy Days is not a play explicidy about the Second World War, the Batde of Britain or Donaldson, the allusion to the batde suggests that Beckett's too-closeness with the events of the war have put their mark on this play. The ghost of the bombing of London and Saint-Lo haunts the play.

The newspaper Willie reads, Reynolds News, or Reynolds Weekly News ,

also informs the audience of the importance of historical narratives.3

One does not, however, have to know the make-up of the popular newspaper which ran from 1850-1950 since its radical politics-the Chartist political reform movement, campaigning for secret ballots and

voting rights to all men of 21 years of age regardless of property-are not apparent in Happy Days (Madden and Dixon 147). However, what we do gather is plenty. Newspapers in themselves help to make up a collective historical narrative. The reporting of politics, world events, and even deaths and employment opportunities help to construct a narrative of the past. Even if newspapers claim to disperse information

about current happenings, the news is always in the past, although usually an immediate past. In reading newspapers, we learn what happened before the moment we are reading about it. Beckett reveals,

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46 Katherine Weiss

moreover, that Willie reads, or rereads, an old newspaper. We are told that the newspaper sheets are yellow (142); thus, what Willie reads is, indeed, part of the past-a past that this old married couple connects to. We learn of "His Grace and Most Reverend Father in God Dr.

Carolus Hunter dead in tub" (142). The obituary that Willie reads brings up happy memories for Winnie-memories of a flirtatious and promiscuous past. Beckett further emphasises this desire for a long lost

youth which involved play and frolic with the want ads. While Winnie

perhaps longs for a "smart youth" or a "bright boy" (142-3), she is stuck with the marriage partner she chose-Willie.

Print media to recollect the past appears again when Willie looks at a pornographic postcard (143). After noticing that Willie is closely examining a postcard, Winnie, burning with curiosity, manages to convince Willie to hand it over to her. Despite never being told what sexual act is depicted in the postcard, from Winnie we learn that "this is just genuine pure filth! [Examines card.] Make any nice-minded

person want to vomit!" (144). However, Winnie's reaction is once again muddled. Her words express her disgust while her action of examining

the card and looking closer suggests that, like Willie, some part of her is turned on by the obscenity in the card (144). Indeed, her earlier reminiscences of her first ball, her second ball, and her first kiss in a

tool shed (142-3) helps to establish Winnie as a woman with real sexual desires and a sexual past that does not involve her husband.4 More to the point, the postcard is a pictorial representation of the past, and pornography is a narrative of human sexuality and sexual taboos. It is a history that appears to be hidden. The cameraman makes him/ herself into a peeping tom, recording activities that are constructed to

be taking place behind closed doors. In actuality, however, the historical narrative of sex and sexuality is not an exposure of what happens in the bedroom between men and women but rather a fabrication and

distillation of sexual taboos in print form. Photography is perhaps one of the most deceptive history-makers as the framing of it always suggests a posing (even in candid shots) and editing out or in; it is a medium constructed in terms of repetition, fixing, or freezing the moment, and fragmentation. Thus, Winnie's reaction, which is tied to her memory of Mildred, is tied to her history and her personal trauma.

Not until the second, and last, act does Winnie recollect her most

painful memory: "There is my story of course, when all else fails" (163). By referring to the narrative as "my story," Winnie sets up an

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S outh Atlantic Review 4 7

ambiguous relationship to the tale; she, in effect, tells us that it is a mere story, a fiction. However, the personal pronoun "my" testifies that Winnie is closer to the tale than she wishes to admit. Winnie

inadvertently reveals that this is "her story," her history. The pain of

the past haunts her, but as is characteristic of trauma victims, she has

distorted the event into an obscure tale of a mouse running up Mildred's

thigh. Paul Lawley compellingly argues that Winnie's story, along with

numerous sexual references in the play, stands for "a sexual violation-a

defloration" (98). 5 To begin with, this child, who has sneaked out of her room at night, undresses her new waxen doll, "Scolding her . . . the while" (163). Undressing a doll is, of course, a natural curiosity for

children. However, the scolding of the doll whilst it is being undressed

is not. When Winnie breaks off this story with "Suddenly a mouse-" (163), we immediately are left hanging with a burning curiosity to know

what happens. We want to peer into this closed door to discover what keeps Winnie from continuing. Instead, however, Winnie calls out to Willie for help and when he does not respond, she philosophizes until she "call[s] to the eye of the mind ... Mr. Shower-or Cooker" (164), a memory that in Act I "float[ed] up in the mind" (155). She does not want to remember how this "coarse fellow" (156) and his partner gape at her, wondering why she is "stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground" (156) and if she has "anything on underneath" (165). His coarseness is emphasized by Winnie's imitating his working- class accent and the sexual content of his expressions which are echoed in the Mildred story. What does Dolly have on underneath her clothing, the

child may have wondered. In both instances of the memory of Mr. Shower/ Cooker, as in

the tale of Mildred, Winnie interrupts and returns to the memory. In the first instance, she files her nails, punctuating the memory of Mr. Shower/ Cooker with comments about her nails as if to keep a certain distance from the past; it will not, she seems to be saying, disrupt her daily habits. At the end of this recollection, she even states that she is

"thankful for it in any case" (157). In the second act, Winnie, who is now buried up to her neck, cannot file her nails or entertain herself with other habits to distance herself from the pain of the past; she can only attempt to shut the past out by closing her eyes (164). The bell, however, forces her to face her past. Urgendy, she again calls for Willie's help. In his silence, the " Narrative " of Mildred resurfaces with

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48 Katherine Weiss

Suddenly a mouse... [Pause.] Suddenly a mouse ran up her little thigh and Mildred, dropping Dolly in her fright, began to scream - [Winnie gives a pierdng scream] - and screamed and

screamed - [Winnie screams tmce ] - screamed and screamed and

screamed and screamed till all came running, in their night attire, papa, mamma, Bibby and . . .old Annie, to see what was

the matter... [pause] ...what on earth could possibly be the matter. [Pause. ] Too late. [Pause.] Too late. (165)

This return to the narrative suggests that Winnie suffers from some sort

of trauma event similar to Mildred's. Even in her attempts to distance herself from her trauma by fixing the memory in a controlled narrative,

her history screams out through its fragmentation and repetition. In her attempt to resist her history and to avoid the wound seen in the fragmented account of the Mildred story, the resurfacing of it appears

to be increasingly painful. The repetition of the word "screamed" as well as Winnie's screaming is a reliving of the event. The violence done to Mildred, or rather Winnie, however, remains somewhat obscured.6

This image of violation is foreshadowed in Act I with the emmet, carrying "a litde white ball" (1 49) that penetrates the mound that Winnie

is stuck in. Willie tells her that the balls are "Eggs" and a process of "formication" will occur (150). To this, Winnie merely murmurs "God"

(1 50). This is perhaps the most horrifying moment in the play. Once the

eggs hatch, insects will swarm all over Winnie, devouring her as does the history she attempts to resist-to forget (Gontarski 86-7).

Beckett was all too aware of the paralysis that could occur from historical trauma. In his 1974 play, That Time , an old man, imprisoned

in the darkness of the stage, listens to voices recalling for his past memories. The three voices contain different narratives. In each

memory, the statement that recurs throughout the play, "when was that," suggests that this man is stuck in trying to remember, trying to construct a clear historical narrative to give his life meaning. Likewise,

May in Footfalls (1975) is never "done ... revolving it all?" (400). The "it" remains unknown. Her refusal to forget that "it" results in her paralysis. Winnie, like May, remains haunted by the past, rewinding and

revolving her history-that wound that haunts.

Notes

*In The Making of Modern Drama, Richard Gilman asserted that "theatre in Beckett's hands has abandoned events, direct clashes, inquiries, representation" (266). 2 See Gontarski 74-75; 83, Goldman 45-55, and Cohn 180-183.

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S outh Atlantic Review 4 9

3 In earlier versions of Happy Days, the items in Willie's newspaper were explicitly about

war. In them, he read, "Rocket strikes Pomona, seven hundred thousand missing," "Rocket strikes Man, one female lavatory attendant spared" and "Aberrant rocket strikes Erin, eighty- three priests survive" (Gontarski 80).

4 Gontarski tells us that in an earlier draft of Happy Days the "sexual overtones . . . were

more explicit" (81). 5Despite their avoidance to define Winnie's Mildred story, Knowlson and Pilling argue that it gives "expression to the fear, violence, and suffering that, in Beckett's view, seems

to be an unavoidable accompaniment to procreation, birth and being" (97). 6A mouse, according to Sigmund Freud, often symbolises the penis in dreams, folklore and mythology (245).

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