Bibliographic record
Abstract
The topic of this essay, as the title suggests, is Endgame's “dramatis non-persona” Mother Pegg, and how this non-persona functions as the focal point not only of that play in particular (Endgame), but figuratively – or rather, figurelessly: that is, as a function (functionally) rather than a figure per se – more generally in Beckett's work. As early, indeed, as 1935 (when Beckett attended a lecture at Tavistock and thought that he had heard a comment about someone who had “never really been born”), Beckett, in his works, began to delve or dig (“claw,” as he once put it [Disjecta 107]) deeper and deeper into his personae – and “the persona” more generically – in order to come into contact with (if not, in fact, to come to terms with) the non-persona obscured by the persona, the non-being “masked” or “covered over” by being itself (which, thanks to the work of Beckett's contemporary and fellow ‘Parisian immigré’ Émmanuel Lévinas, is, in this article, designated as the “illeity” – ill-seen, ill-said – beyond the individual persona qua “ipseity”). In Endgame, Mother Pegg is this ill-seen, ill-said illeity (non-person) displaced – replaced – by the “personae” present and presented in the play; personae who (as we come to learn in Endgame's diegesis) are presented – illuminated – onstage by dint of a denial: viz. the denying of any light to Mother Pegg. At a critical point in the play, indeed, we are told (by way of the character Clov) that the light which shines upon the stage shines by the grace of a prior disgrace: the death by darkness of an absent other, Mother Pegg (who “died … [o]f darkness” [75], which explains her non-appearance in the play – her “existence by proxy” as Samuel Beckett would say [qtd. in Harvey 247]). This absent other or “être manqué” (Harvey 247) is, I argue, the focal point qua vanishing-point of the play itself and of Beckett's writerly gaze en générale (poetic and dramatic) from the late 1930s or 1940s onward.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".