358 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
latter’s death in March 1959, had invited the Adornos to a luncheon
with Beckett at which Adorno took the opportunity to try out some of
the arguments he was going to present in the evening. Unseld recalls
that Adorno maintained that Hamm, the name of the anti-hero, was
derived from Hamlet.^164 Although Beckett flatly denied even having
thought about Shakespeare’s hero in connection with his own play,
Adorno persisted in his view, adhering strictly to his thesis that there is
an objective surplus of meaning that has greater weight than authorial
intentions.^165 It is evident that Beckett’s almost completely static play,
with its pantomime-like elements, held a great fascination for Adorno,
and this arose from his own stylistic ideal. How great that fascination
was becomes clear from the fact that he chose Thomas Mann of all
people, who thought little of Beckett, to be the recipient of his postu-
late of ‘an asceticism with regard to the direct statement of the positive;
a genuine asceticism, believe me, for by nature I am more inclined to
the opposite, namely the unfettered expression of hope.’^166 However, in
his interpretation of the play with the slave Clove and the master Hamm,
the lame and the blind, with their parents vegetating in the ashbins,
there is no sign of this.
Adorno placed Beckett in the tradition of James Joyce and especially
of Franz Kafka: ‘For Beckett absurdity is no longer an “existential situ-
ation” diluted to an idea and then illustrated. In him literary method
surrenders to absurdity without preconceived intentions.’^167 What Adorno
found really convincing about Endgame was the ‘act of omission’, since
‘in the act of omission, what is left out survives as something that is
avoided, the way consonance survives in atonal harmony. The apathy of
the endgame is registered and sounded out with great subtlety. An
unprotesting depiction of ubiquitous regression is a protest against a
state of the world that so accommodates the law of regression that it no
longer has anything to hold up against it.’^168 The shocking desolation of
the dramatic scenes in Beckett in which everything has dwindled to the
point of being mere gesture has its counterpart in the debacle of social
theory. ‘The irrationality of bourgeois society in its late phase rebels
at letting itself be understood; those were the good old days, when a
critique of the political economy of this society could be written that
judged it in terms of its own ratio. For since then the society has thrown
its ratio on the scrap heap and replaced it with virtually unmediated
control. Hence interpretation inevitably lags behind Beckett.’^169 It is
precisely the affront to ‘the cultural spokespersons of authentic expres-
sion’,^170 Beckett’s absolute refusal to provide either political accusation
or metaphysical hope, that makes Endgame the contemporary play par
excellence; it reveals more ‘than would taking a stand with an intent to
expose, as exemplified by Bertolt Brecht or Rolf Hochhuth.’^171 As a
dramatic elegy about the state of the world, it is conscious of its own
impossibility. ‘No weeping melts the armour; the only face left is the
one whose tears have dried up.’^172