Les jeux sont faits: la cultura della superficie. Beckett e il teatro della crisi (Carla Rossi Acadey Press 2023)
INTRODUCTION
The present study proposes a reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame that, while taking into account some of the most significant existing interpretations, considers the possibility of interpreting Beckett’s work literally. This entails discarding allegorical interpretations and maintaining that the play in question is simply a drama to be seen on stage rather than interpreted. By considering the context of Beckett’s work—namely his own statements about his writing—as well as the cultural context of the second half of the twentieth century, when axiological disorientation was reflected in the aesthetic domain, this study introduces the category of “superficiality” as the defining feature of Beckett’s oeuvre.
According to this perspective, Beckett’s work presents its meaning in the mere phonic succession of words, since there is a thematic annulment: even when elevated contents are touched upon (such as pain, love, or death—central themes in Western literature), they are flattened to a banal conversational level. The dialogue of the characters on stage, even when adopting elegiac or lyrical tones, proves thematically uninterpretable, as it is consistently banalised and deactivated—reduced to the level of ordinary, undistinguished conversation, such as talk about the weather.
Thus, what is presented on stage is a conversation about nothing, an exhausting form of small talk among the characters that never breaks through the limits of interiority or depth. This is mirrored by the fact that the play technically lacks an ending in either a dramatic or epic sense: there is no progression of plot, which seems already exhausted from the outset. Beyond the stage, however, there might exist a real action—never shown to the audience—that could correspond to an eschatological model absent from the scene itself, whether one refers to Christian-apocalyptic paradigms or to tragic ones.
Given the multiplicity of interpretations of Beckett’s work—and especially their increasing divergence in recent years depending on critical schools, compounded by the proliferation of philosophical readings, reinforced by the recent publication of Samuel Beckett’s “Philosophy Notes”—this study maintains that a univocal interpretation of Beckett’s text is unattainable. Classical readings by literary and theatrical critics, such as Martin Esslin’s interpretation of Beckett as a representative of the Theatre of the Absurd, are taken into account, yet no label is proposed for his work.
To this end, the study analyses Beckett’s plays Waiting for Godot and, in particular, Endgame. The choice to focus on Endgame, rather than on a less extensively studied work within Beckett’s corpus, is justified by several reasons. First, the theme of the “end” is clearly central, beginning with the title itself. Moreover, the play was produced in 1957, after Waiting for Godot (1952) and in the aftermath of the Second World War. These two texts are therefore considered privileged lenses through which to understand literary and broader cultural phenomena in a period when Modernism was giving way to Postmodernism, and when not only historical, philosophical, and religious certainties, but also aesthetic ones, were wavering. The study argues that these two plays represent a radicalisation of Beckett’s aesthetics, which ultimately admits no escape other than the self-referential act of continuing to write indefinitely.
Referring to the work of the painter Tal Coat, Beckett stated that art should strive toward “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” While caution is required when applying to Beckett’s own art statements he made about other artists, this remark may nonetheless serve as a suggestive point of departure for reflecting on the significance of these two plays within his oeuvre.
One of the central claims of this study is that the two texts constitute “bare letter”, to be read as such: that is, a series of words unfolding on the page and transferred onto the stage, which not only lack meaning but do not even ask the reader or spectator to extract one. This hypothesis is demonstrated through an analysis centred on the concept of the “end” around which Endgame revolves, drawing on philosophical interpretations of Beckett’s work and on close textual reading.
The study is divided into three chapters, each consisting of three sections.
Chapter One focuses on the title Les jeux sont faits, which refers to the crucial thesis that the text can be read technically as a game created by the author—one governed by aesthetic rules that cannot be interpreted by audiences or critics according to social norms or traditional tools of dramaturgical analysis.
The first section examines paradigms of the end and the apocalypse, emphasising how representations of endings on stage evoke meanings interpretable within Christian or tragic frameworks, while also noting the hypertrophic proliferation of interpretations of Beckett’s work across critical schools.
The second section addresses the collapse of linear plots in twentieth-century drama and the presence of Beckett’s “hidden endings.”
The third section argues that, although drama conventionally presupposes action, in Beckett language itself becomes action within an aesthetic-linguistic game whose rules differ from those of social pragmatics.
Chapter Two further contextualises Beckett’s work historically, arguing that literal interpretation amounts to a non-interpretation—reading something that is, if one wishes to use the term, absurd. Beckett’s eschatological concerns converge with post-1945 reflections prompted by the trauma of war and the reassessment of human values. The chapter analyses Anglist criticism, the plot of Endgame, and the concept of “aesthetic cooperation” as a way of understanding the functioning of the text.
Chapter Three offers a close reading of Endgame, demonstrating that the absurdity of the characters’ situation lies not in allegory but in the absence of any meaningful endpoint other than the continuation of sound production until an unexpressed end arrives. Small talk assumes a strategic function as language emptied of content, while Beckett’s post-1945 turn to French is interpreted as an existential displacement into another linguistic world after the collapse of transcendence and immanence alike. Writing continues, and the endgame of chess checkmates its own ending..
REVIEWS
Reviews are translated by the author
Editorial note by Marino Alberto Balducci
[…] The central argument of the present critical volume is “superficiality” in the creative writing of Samuel Beckett—superficiality understood as a distinctive category useful for codifying the nature of certain forms of contemporary human action and communication. These forms are characteristic of a generally desacralised age, in which the individual may become prey to an anguishing laisser-vivre, devoid of ends and purposes, within a reality that is felt to be increasingly deprived of clear points of reference and of shared values. […]
Foreword by Federica Perazzini
[…] It indeed seems impossible that those meticulous descriptions of objects, places, and actions do not allude to something else. And thus, from Illusions to Lost Allusions, we might ironically conclude this brief introduction to Sanges’s monograph, which—with keen critical acumen—he adorns with a title of greater refinement and density, Les Jeux Sont Faits. This formula evokes Wittgenstein’s theory of language games as well as Jean-Paul Sartre’s screenplay of the same title for Jean Delannoy’s 1947 film, but for many it may be nothing more than an echo of the croupiers’ voices at the roulette tables.
Embedded within the tripartite stylistic formula of gambling—faites vos jeux and rien ne va plus (“place your bets,” “no more bets”)—les jeux sont faits is the expression that suspends the wagers of individual players, condemning them to an unbearable stasis while a small white ball, in its swirling motion, determines the fate of their bets. One wins, one loses, one starts again, and so on through an infinity of identical rounds and stakes in which, to quote Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1986), “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Yes, because if the wager is the search for meaning, then we have failed from the outset. It is clear that Beckett has already played his game by launching the little white ball onto a roulette wheel—probably rigged—that continues to spin endlessly, leaving us suspended, with nothing left to say or to wager.
Preface by Maria Truglio
[…] Sanges illuminates the echoes that resound throughout the drama of classical works—texts well known to the extraordinarily learned Irish author (and “not dead,” in the Barthesian sense that Sanges rejects: it is precisely Beckett himself who creates the rules of his game). Leopardi’s A Silvia, Dante’s Belacqua, and the tragedies of Shakespeare, already mentioned above, constitute some of the texts that serve as points of contact. Yet the critic does not intend merely to trace every intertextual thread in order to decode the text. Rather, these echoes are always faint and indicate, each in its own way, the impossibility of effectively activating the feelings or emotions traditionally associated with them.
The example of the Dantean character is instructive here. Sanges asserts that “Belacqua is a fundamental character in Beckettian literature both because he testifies to Beckett’s obvious literary interest in Dante and thus provides the critic with cultural coordinates, and because his condition of ‘sloth’ and stasis appears, from the point of view of biographical anecdote, as a kind of projection of the author into literature; but what truly matters (especially here) is that this static (inactive) character could even function as a fil rouge of the dynamics of immobilized dramatic action” (emphasis added). It is here, in the concept of deactivation, that the central mechanism of the drama is to be found. […]
Review by Davide Crosara, Status Quaestionis 27 (2024): 433-435.
Sanges’s volume offers a careful and in-depth study of two fundamental dramas by Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot and, above all, Endgame; it also provides useful references to Beckett’s contemporary prose works, from the Trilogy to the Texts for Nothing. The author’s intentions are made clear from the outset: the aim is to analyze Beckett’s theatre through the “category of superficiality, understood as the significant figure of Beckett’s work” (Sanges 2023, 25). According to Sanges’s perspective, Endgame and Waiting for Godot are characterized by a persistent and programmatic thematic annulment, one that reduces theatrical dialogue to banal conversation and every tragic aspiration to an “exhausting small talk” (ibid.).
In keeping with this approach, Sanges maintains that any critical interpretation of Waiting for Godot and Endgame is in fact impossible, since the search for a deeper meaning or message would betray the premises of the two texts. For this reason, the multitude of critical orientations that have emerged since the postwar period are carefully surveyed but ultimately rejected by the author. […]
Review by Francesco Muzzioli, Diacritica 51 (2024): 200-202.
[…] One can only welcome, then, a serious and philosophically sharp study such as the one Antonio Sanges has devoted to Beckett: Les jeux sont faits: The Culture of the Surface (Carla Rossi Academy Press). It is an essay of debate and polemic, whose merit lies in pursuing—consistently and while avoiding all influences, even the most authoritative—its own hypothesis, which might be condensed into the single word “superficiality.” Savinio had already alluded to this in his Nuova Enciclopedia, where he stated: “I discover the non-existence of depth,” and again: “Even ‘depth’ is a ‘surface.’” Sanges takes this intuition as the foundation of an approach that regards the rampant dominance of interpretation with suspicion.
“Against interpretation,” Susan Sontag once declared; and in the case of Beckett the issue becomes even more thorny, because the more the writer struggles against Meaning with a capital M, attempting to prevent it from coagulating (always to fail better— that is, worse), the stronger becomes the temptation to lead him back into more “breathable airs,” by attributing to him this very Meaning, whether he wills it or not. The metaphysical temptation (Godot translated as deus absconditus), the existential temptation (the denial of meaning as a crisis of affectivity), and of course the psychoanalytic version all arise here, since the extremism of insisting on continuing to say the nothing there is to say is ideal terrain for the analyst, who draws clues precisely from what is inessential—provided that speech continues. […]
Review by Federico Platania, Samuelbeckett.it
Sanges therefore concludes: “The characters of Endgame, in lyrical or elegiac tones, discuss love, pain, and death, yet without the conversation or reflection ever reaching any genuine depth.” The most effective interpretive key for such a text thus remains the observation of the text’s emergent surface, actively discouraging the reader from seeking a deeper meaning (one cannot help but think of the famous aphorism found among the thirty-seven addenda to the novel Watt: “There are no symbols where there is no intention”). In this sense, Les jeux sont faits may be considered an essay that attempts an interpretive path which, if not entirely unexplored, is at least rarely taken within Beckett studies.
Review (originally published in English, by Filippo Ursitti), Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny.
In Antonio Sanges’ book Les jeux sont faits: La cultura della superficie. Beckett e il teatro della crisi, Sanges challenges conventional interpretative approaches to Samuel Beckett’s works, particularly rejecting the absurd poetic and allegorical explanations. Instead, he advocates for a literal (‘logical’) interpretation grounded in the notion that Beckett’s discourse on nothingness signifies a conscious acknow- ledgment of the failure of poetic language. The key argument posits that a herme- neutics of superficiality, contextualised within an aesthetics of small talk, unveils the true meaning of Beckett’s oeuvre. Sanges distances himself from established inter- pretative schools asserting that Beckett’s works do not necessitate interpretation but are justified by the aesthetic game crafted by Beckett himself. […]