Images of Beckett - Index of

hands on the wall of his room in the family
home. 50 It has also recently been suggested that
Nacht und Träume recalls paintings of the Agony in
the Garden by Bellini, Mantegna, a copyist of
Correggio and Gossaert. 51
The presence of Christian imagery (both
visual and verbal) in Beckett’s plays does not, of
course, make him a Christian or even a religious
dramatist. Often such images offer a hope of
salvation that is never realised. Often, too, man is
presented as a victim, trapped in his own suffering
in a hostile world with an absent, indifferent, if not
actively malevolent deity. Yet such religious images
leave behind traces of spiritual aspiration, if not
transcendence. And, at the very least, these
frequently hidden or half-hidden echoes of
religious paintings (or writings) suggest far more
than they state, weaving complex patterns of the
explicit and the implicit. In Zeifman’s words, ‘it is
this wedding of the implicit with the explicit that
provides Beckett’s drama with its extraordinary
religious density, the wellspring of both its beauty
and its power’. 52
The positions, postures and gestures of some of
Beckett’s late protagonists recall obliquely figures
in Beckett’s beloved seventeenth-century Dutch
paintings. They sit motionless or freeze their
movements into immobility, moving steadily
towards, yet still resisting, stasis. As visual
parallels, one thinks particularly of late
Rembrandts or late Vermeers – those now
Pierre Chabert and Henry Pillsbury in Fin de partie, 1999
IMAGES OF BECKETT 67