Happy Days
Samuel Beckett
 Winnie, a woman no longer young, is embedded up to her “big bosom” in a mound of earth, “the Mother Earth symbol to end all other mother earth symbols”. She lives in a deluge of never-ending light from which there is no escape: even the parasol she unfolds at one point ignites, leaving her without protection. We learn that she has not always been buried in this way but we never discover how she came to be trapped so. Beckett’s dramaturgy – indeed his entire œuvre – takes little interest in causality, e.g. Molloy finds himself ‘buried’ in his mother’s bed, in his mother’s room, realizes he has not always been there but demonstrates no particular curiosity as regards the specifics of how he arrived there. It is a strange image. “Strangeness,” Beckett informs us, “was the necessary condition of the play of Winnie’s plight in the play.” During Berlin rehearsals he said, “In this play you have the combination of the strange and the practical, the mysterious and the factual. This is the crux of both the comedy and the tragedy of it.” Winnie passes her time between “the bell for waking and the bell for sleep” by following a very exact daily routine. In this respect, she is reminiscent of the two characters in Act Without Words II. In early drafts, Winnie set an alarm clock but Beckett later gave control of the bell to an unexplained external force like that in charge of the goad and the whistle in the two Act Without Words plays. By contrast Winnie, it has to be said, is not short of words, she is, in fact, a compulsive talker. Winnie begins her day. After the sounding of the transcendental bell, she offers up a half-forgotten prayer and then sets about her daily routine. As she removes the items from her bag a comb, a toothbrush (the writing on which she spends most of the first act trying to decipher), toothpaste, a bottle of patent medicine, lipstick, a nail file, a revolver (which she feels the need to quickly kiss) and a music box she prattles away to her husband, Willie who lives in a cave behind the mound. The routine is raised to the level of ceremony. Beckett’s instructions to Billie Whitelaw in 1979 emphasize this: : The bag is all she has – look at it with affection … From the first you should know how she feels about it … When the bag is at the right height you peer in, see what things are there and then get them out. Peer, take, place. Peer, take, place. You peer more when you pick things up than when you put them down. Everything has its place. Everything is wearing out or running out. At the start of Act I she takes the last swig of her tonic before throwing away the bottle, her toothbrush has hardly any hairs left and the lipstick, to use Beckett’s expression, is “visibly zu ende,” the parasol is faded with a “mangy fringe” and even her pearl necklace is “more thread than pearls”. Winnie functions on the ecclesiastical principle that there is a time for everything and the proper time for certain things to take place is in the daytime, ‘day’ being an abstract notion since there is only constant daylight in this place; she would not think of singing her song after the bell for sleep had gone which is why, when she uses the term, she refers to it as “the old style”. She is the eternal optimist Robert Brustein called her a “hopeful futilitarian” but the available sources of her optimism are being used up and she has to work harder and harder to keep up her positive front which is already wafer-thin when we first meet her. Beckett has described her as being “like a bird” and she makes every effort to rise above her predicament but she keeps getting pulled down. She never questions or explains why she finds herself in the predicament she is in most of us never understand how we wind up in a rut, or stuck in the mud to use similar earthy metaphors but her dream is that she will “simply float up into the blue … And that perhaps some day the earth will yield and let me go, the pull is so great, yes, crack all round me and let me out.” Beckett even pokes fun at his audience through Winnie and her story about Shower/Cooker. Beckett explained this in a letter to Alan Schneider: : Shower (rain). Shower & Cooker are derived from German “schauen” & “gucken” (to look). They represent the onlooker (audience) wanting to know the meaning of things. Willie, for his part, ignores her and what responses he does make are terse and often monosyllabic. At the start of the play she even strikes him a couple of times simply to get his attention. His responses are of less importance to Winnie than the fact that he is there to listen. Always in Beckett’s drama there is someone or something to fulfil this critical function whether it is the Auditor in Not I or the interrogatory light in Play. When words fail her she reverts to the contents of her bag to tide her over, or at least in Act I she does. The two never have anything that could remotely be described as a conversation. He answers a question concerning the correct term to describe the hair on one’s head, confirms he can still hear her again when she reduces the volume at which she speaks over stages, becoming audibly angrier in the process, finally he defines “hog” for her, lavishing a whole two albeit short sentences on her in the process. The most we ever see of him is the back of his head whilst he reads his yellowing paper or scrutinises his postcards. Other than that, his activities are described by Winnie and involve finding his way in and out of his hole, working Vaseline into his privates and sleeping. Winnie offers up reminisces from an idealised past, quotes from the classics in contrast to Willie’s quotes from the popular press, comments on everything flitting from topic to topic, laughs at herself, at Willie and at their predicament. She assures herself: “This will have been another happy day!” a recurrent catchphrase throughout the play when in fact she often seems on the verge of tears. At the end of the day she carefully collects her possessions bar the gun and places them back in the bag. The gun, which has somehow always managed to defy the laws of physics ending up on the top of the bag she decides to leave out. Winnie never plumbs (never dares plumb) the bottom ("The depths in particular, who knows what treasures"), so it is also her hope chest. The items in her bag also have secondary functions, they serve as aides-mémoire. But more, like Krapp’s tapes or Lucky’s bones they provide her with what Mary Doll describes as “touchstones of existential meaning”. Winnie’s perception of these objects connects her to the memories of specific days and important incidents within them. While she is able to discuss these incidents in some detail, Winnie cannot hold on to them or place them within a context. “As Act II of Godot is bleaker than Act I, as Maddy’s homeward journey is bleaker than her setting out, Act II of Happy Days is bleaker than Act I, and Winnie knows it: “To have been what I always am – and so changed from what I was.” By Act II she can no longer imagine any relief, and she can no longer pray, as she did at the play’s start. Although she still intones the phrase ‘happy day’, it no longer triggers her smile.” Whereas in Godot Beckett explicitly states that Act II takes place on the next day, in Happy Days no such assertion is made. Time has simply passed. In the first act she uses the items from her bag to trigger memories. In this act, unable to reach into it, she uses the bag itself, along with the parasol which has, as she predicted, reappeared intact, to the same end. We learn that Willie gave her the bag “to go to market” and the parasol is linked to a memory not too dissimilar to the one that entrances Krapp so, the day out on the punt. Winnie is however sinking inexorably in the slow sands of time and disappointment. In the second act she has almost been engulfed by the mound; only her head is visible, now she cannot move it and she admits to being in pain. Despite the desperation of her predicament, she is confident that this will be another of her happy days. She continues to chatter, but as can no longer reach her bag or turn around, it takes more of an effort to keep up the front. It has been some time since she has seen or heard from Willie but, since she is unable to see over the back of the mound, she doesn’t even know for sure if he is still there though she needs to believe he is: : I used to think that I would learn to talk alone. (Pause.) By that I mean to myself, the wilderness. (Smile.) But no. (Smile broader.) No no. (Smile off.) Ergo you are there. (Pause.) Oh no doubt you are dead, like the others, no doubt you have died, or gone away and left me, like the others, it doesn’t matter, you are there. “In Happy Days the existential condition of the characters is visualized in the mound tightening around Winnie who is sinking deeper and deeper. The nearer she gets to the end, the slower does Winnie sink, and never does the end come to release her from the pain of being smothered in the mound. What Beckett wants to represent is the endless repetition of dying moments rather than death itself. His characters wish to finish life but the end never comes because the clock becomes slower and slower. There is still time, always.” Not unreasonably Winnie’s mound has been compared to Zeno’s impossible heap. {| class="infobox" cellspacing=0 cellpadding=3 rules=rows align="right" font="3" style="font-size:85%; width:270px; margin: 0 0 01em 1 em; border:1px solid black;" |- | Zeno’s heap |- style="height:100px" | If a man were to take a bag of millet and tip half of the load and make a heap, and repeat this procedure day after day, then one day it would be completed if one assumes an infinite amount of time to complete the task (in pure math, the idea of the infinite will allow this). However, because man is limited, he will never be able to finish the task. In fact, the nearer the man gets to emptying the bag, the slower the progress is. The heap becomes "the impossible heap." Without its completion, there is no release. |- |} At the conclusion of the play Willie crawls up to her, “dressed to kill” (a pun reserved for readers) and sporting a “Battle of Britain moustache”. Her response is ironic, not ebullient. When Kay Boyle asked Beckett why Willie reaches up towards Winnie, he replied: : The question as to which Willie is ‘after’ – Winnie or the revolver – is like the question in All That Fall as to whether Mr Rooney threw the little girl out of the railway-carriage or not. And the answer is the same in both cases – we don’t know, at least I don’t. All that is necessary as far as I’m concerned – technically and otherwise – less too little, more too much – is the ambiguity of motive, established clearly I hope by Winnie, ‘Is it me you’re after, Willie, or is it something else? Is it a kiss you’re after, Willie, or is it something else?’ and by the conspicuousness of revolver requested in the stage-directions at beginning of Act II. To test the doubt was dramatically a chance not to be missed, not be bungled either by resolving it.” Her words to Willie are bitter and unpleasant, and she maintains that tone up to the point he utters his one line in Act II: “Win” at which point she cannot hold back: : Win! (Pause.) Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day! (Pause.) After all. (Pause.) So far. The familiar “So far” gives the subtle suggestion of cynicism but it doesn’t stop her bursting into the waltz duet, ‘I love you so’ from The Merry Widow and the play proceeds to its close.