Bad Romance: Love and Violence in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days
In his 1931 essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett describes habit as “the guarantee of a dull inviolability.” [1] Habit is a defense against the suffering of being, the experience of life as precarious, painful, fecund, and mysterious, and a guarantee of the mechanical repetition of existence. The life of habit is inscribed within conventional narratives, which impose an illusion of order over the chaos of living. Winnie, the “well-preserved” protagonist of Beckett’s 1961 play Happy Days, uses romantic narratives to anaesthetize herself to her bizarre condition of sinking into the earth, her increasing hysteria, her farce of a marriage and sexual frustration. Her act of self-preservation commits violence against the singularity of events. This hegemony of conventional narrative comprises the crucial problem of contemporary theater, according to avant-garde dramatist Antonin Artaud. In The Theater and its Double, Artaud claims that the domination of dialogue, realism, and psychology in contemporary theater has reinforced the tendency toward self-preservation and alienated theater from its purpose: to remind us that “[w]e are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.”[2] Artuad promotes a theater of cruelty; this Artaudian cruelty is not necessarily physical violence, but overwhelming, superfluous intensity. Happy Days uses saturated, minimalist phenomena, fragmentation of narratives, and dehumanization to construct a dark mythos of dangerous but fragile cruelty and chaotic freedom.
In the past fifteen years, Beckett scholarship has shifted from strictly philosophical readings toward a focus on the mythical, mystical, and anti-rational. Several recent studies view Beckett’s work as an inversion of the quest formula, undermining the heroic ego and dramatizing a psychological journey into darkness, quiescence, and the unconscious. Much of the critical body has traditionally emphasized the failures of language. But language is not merely a failure in Happy Days. Phyllis Carey observes that Winnie’s mechanical use of language normalizes and reduces to cliché “[w]hat once struck humans with awe, elicited primitive worship of the supernatural, and seemingly endowed words with magical, transforming power.”[3] Winnie destroys fear and wonder through her adherence to and elaboration of the static narrative formulas of romance and religion. Christianity fosters an illusion of a merciful God and an orderly universe, and the courtly love narrative forces sexuality into an orderly, controlled, and thus distorted form.
Marriage is a point of juncture for Winnie’s two narratives of romance and religion. The Catholic catechism justifies the sexual bond between husband and wife as an image of God’s love for humanity. This metaphor is fragmented and distorted in Happy Days. Sexuality has become perverse, not in the transgressive excess of Sodom and Gomorrah, which I argue is the prevailing biblical allusion in the play, but in the narrative of courtly love, which spiritualizes sexuality, negating the body through language rather than risking the body’s integrity through an excessive, theatrical act.
Much like Beckett’s increasing austerity in Happy Days, Artaud discards the conventions of plot, character, and dialogue in favor of creating a new mythology based on cruelty. Artaud writes that “all the great Myths are dark, so that one cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation”[4]. Creation risks destruction, a danger that appears throughout Beckett’s work and provokes the characters’ anxiety, especially their fear of procreation, resulting in sterile, non-productive, and alienated sexuality. Winnie responds to this fear by sublimating sexuality into narrative.
Winnie’s sterile marriage to Willie is comprised of rituals in which love and sex are represented linguistically: she recites clichéd expressions of affection throughout, and in the final scene, her sentimental song replaces sexual union. The force she represses is dangerous and linked closely to her dark fantasies of apocalyptic destruction and the consuming, transgressive sexuality Artaud describes in The Theater and its Double. Artaud commends John Ford’s 1629 drama ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore for its spectacle of Eros, which transgresses every principle of normative sexuality. The central love affair is extramarital, violent, and incestuous, between brother and sister. The main character displays his intense passion and refusal to abandon his beloved by tearing out her heart “as if to feast upon it in the middle of a banquet.”[5] Superfluous, transgressive sexuality is experienced as an essential force in the aftermath of Sodom and Gomorrah as well, and Lot’s daughters commit a theatrical act driven by metaphysical fear, a response to chaos with greater chaos like the shrieking victims of the plague. In contrast, Winnie and Willie’s marriage is a mechanical, habitual devotion that fails to consume them and bring them to the edge of complete decimation.
Traces of uninhibited passion persist, despite Winnie’s aestheticized narration. In the play’s final scene, Willie attempts to climb the mound in which Winnie is buried. Winnie reads this gesture as a recapitulation of his marriage proposal—he’s come begging for a kiss again—but she cannot dispel the “something else” he may be after, the gun. David Alpaugh suggests that Willie puts forth an “attempt at communication, sympathy, and love.”[6] Alpaugh reads the violent potential as Willie’s desire to end Winnie’s suffering, but I suggest that his intent to kill may be the unleashing of sexual energy as an uncontrollable force. Winnie and Willie do not need preservation, salvation, or the word of God. Only an Artaudian act of cruelty would allow them to feel again, live again, and be again—even if only for the spectacular moment of their deaths, in total rebellion against their plight. The possibility for such release is fleeting and quickly denied. Willie fails to reach her; his act is incomplete. Winnie responds with clichéd expressions in a “mondaine” tone and “her” song, “I Love You So,” a duet from The Merry Widow. Here, Winnie is at her most unoriginal and mechanical—her song is a music box tune—as opposed to Willie’s spectacular, desperate endeavor of superfluity and passion. Winnie ultimately preserves her cherished words from disintegration by destroying Willie’s theatrical gesture and inscribing it within her narrative. Order is restored. Another happy day will undoubtedly follow.
Outside of Winnie’s torrent of words, the divine operates as a capricious, inhuman force, and sexuality is something dark, threatening and intractable. Happy Days is cruel in its theatrical excess of saturated images and affects. In my full-length paper I discuss the dramatic techniques that engender cruelty, especially its dehumanizing irony and anti-sentimentalism, thus foregrounding turbulent, uncontrollable forces instead of characters’ psychology.
Winnie fantasizes about darkness and destruction, for the “happy day to come when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours,” [7] but then qualifies her wish for the purgation of a fiery death: “I do not mean necessarily burst into flames, no, just little by little be charred to a black cinder.”[8] She inscribes death into her stabilizing narrative, removing its finality and arbitrariness. Winnie muses, “There always remains something. (Pause.) Of everything.”[9] Her burned parasol will return the next day, her medicine bottle will become whole again, and Winnie herself will never melt, only fade into oblivion little by little, like those “unforgettable lines” she cannot remember. Rather than committing a theatrical act of total rebellion, which is ephemeral, unrepeatable, and singular, Winnie guards against the plague of the theater, theater as an overwhelming, disruptive force and harbinger of chaos, and the suffering of being. In the end, Winnie and Willie fall into silence; the effects of her linguistic violence are irreparable and the play ends with a cruel sense of the impossibility “to break through language in order to touch life”.[10]
Works Cited
Alpaugh, David J. “Negative Definition in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.” Twentieth Century Literature 11.4 (1966): 202-210.
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958.
Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. New York: Grove Press, 1961.
Carey, Phyllis. “The Ritual of Human Technē in Happy Days.” Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Ed. Katherine H. Burkman. London: Associated University Presses, 1987. 144-150.
Gontarski, S.E. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study. Columbus: Publications Committee, Ohio State University Libraries, 1977.
[1] S.E. Gontarski. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study, 17
[2] Antonin Artaud. The Theater and its Double, 79
[3] Phyllis Carey. “The Ritual of Human Techne in Happy Days,” 147
[4] Artaud 31
[5] Artaud 29
[6] Alpaugh 210
[7] Samuel Beckett. Happy Days, 18
[8] Beckett 38
[9] Beckett 52
[10]Artaud 13
