To and Fro Between Eros and Thanatos: What Where and the Death Drive

This paper tries to read What Where as Beckett’s realistic and pessimistic presentation of the ontological conditions of the human history, which the play defines as investigation, exploitation and quest for the ultimate truth. Its analysis finds that this presentation has important threads in common with the criticism of civilization in the later Freud’s metapsychology, which formulated “an all-embracing, grand theory of the psyche” in terms of the development of the individual as well as the evolution of the entire species on the basis of the maxim that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” What Where enacts this Freudian vision in theatrical terms as its theater version foregrounds the phylogenetic scale with the physical subjections happening among the characters and its television version the interior depth of the mind with the maneuvering of the television images. Another important commonality is that the character Bam is presented as a figure pertaining to Freud’s concept of the death drive. The resulting theatrical picture is a sobering and realistic testimony to the individual and collective human existence that has always survived on questionings about, exploitation of and quest for a different object. This strikes a chord with how Beckett’s characters embody his poetics of ‘senility,’ and leads to the political implications of freedom without hope or meaning, which is the infinite task of Beckett’s senile characters.