Not I - Beckett

Waiting for Godot - 2

Try watching the play tonight if you still haven't read the text.

Waiting for Godot, with its sparse, nondescript setting and strangely absent "action", was Beckett's first play to be performed. Its starkness and opacity, both in terms of its visual representation and content has helped raise it to iconic status in the literary and theatrical circles today.

Who or What is Godot?

When asked this seemingly obvious question, Beckett's own infamous reply was "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." Beckett's fierce reticence (the man gave one official interview) is of no help to critics and students. When actor Ralph Richardson (who was supposed to play Estragon at the play's premiere) asked Beckett if it was God, Beckett again answered that if he had meant it to be God, he would say so explicitly.

Can Godot be "God"?

When the playwright himself claims to know nothing about Godot, room for interpretation opens up dramatically. Apart from the obvious resonance in the naming, Godot can be said to have other traces of the Biblical God too - The boy who appears at the end of both acts describes Godot as having a beard (God is popularly depicted with a benign beard); Also, it is mentioned that Godot has goats and sheep and in Matthew 25: 32-3, God is described as separating good and bad by separating goats (to the left) and sheep (to the right). Also, God does in a way give "direction" to the lives of Vladimir and Estragon. (How?)

Can this then be called an allegory of post-theistic life? A post WW-2 world where Godot has abandoned us sinners? To subscribe to this view alone would be greatly diminishing its significance. Godot is God, and then some. Religious elements are definitely present, but they are not the end all. The play has philosophical, political implications too.

"Striving All the Time to Avoid Definition"

Beckett drew from Arthur Schopenhauer's (19th century German philosopher) in his essay Proust (1930). Beckett talks about a series of selves as opposed to a coherent, consistent "Self." He claims (though he is probably not the first to) that our desires are necessarily frustrated - "our thirst for possession is, by definition, insatiable." 

This theory can be applied to myself and Johnny Depp or Chocolate - but I digress.

Godot can be said to represent the constant human desire for prospective attainment. When one ambition is fulfilled, desire is automatically projected on to the next thing. 

Is it All this Gloomy?

No. The redeeming features include: the humour. It's biting, dark and more tragic than funny, but it's unmistakably present throughout the play. The relationship of Vladimir and Estragon: despite their arguments, threats to leave each other, they never really do. Also the refreshing theatrical structure of the play. The narrative is tight, the dialogues clipped. 

Themes?

• Other than the above-mentioned concept of Selves and insatiable desire, the play explores the idea of stasis as being exciting. (Important: henceforth marked as A for action)
• It also deals with the unreliability of memory. Eg. "What did we do yesterday" repeated by both characters in Act I.
• Also, the lead characters share in the audience's puzzlement. This is important. (Meta-theatrical, henceforth MT) The audience and the characters are puzzled by different things - the characters about Godot and when he will arrive, whether he will at all and the audience about what this strange, unrestrained play could possibly mean.
• The only guiding principle in all this confusion becomes the wait for Godot - "one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come." This is representative again of both the characters' and our preoccupation with the elusive ultimate desire-fulfilment, at the cost of ignoring the present crises. (MT) Self-reflexive commentaries like this on life abound in this play and Beckett's other works.
• Because of the obscurity of the play, the focus tends to shift from the content of the play to its functional structure. The plot is routed - no clear cause-effect exists (Remember Tintinda's ref. to Marquis de Sade?) - exposition, complication and a neat resolution will resolutely be denied to the audience.
• Beckett is striving for a new grammar of theatre, a new way to express his understanding of life. A distinctly anti-dramatic style. His plays seem to embody boredom, inaction (A) and the line - "Nothing to be done" comes to symbolise the general thrust of his work.

The Theme of Action (A):
When does action happen? When people do things - to be simplistic. When can people do things? When they are free to do so. But in Beckett's world they are not. In Beckett's world, the characters are in absolute uncertainty of themselves and have little or no self-possession. Also, the logical interplay of cause-effect that is inherent in action (an action is caused by something and creates an effect, yes?) is almost entirely absent in WfG. Why does Lucky allow himself to be ill-treated by Pozzo? Why are the two waiting for Godot? Why does Godot never come? Why do they not know where they were yesterday? Endlessly cyclical questions that lead nowhere except to square one.

Vivian Mercier remarked on this play "Nothing happens, twice." While in your current hair-tear state of mind, you might feel inclined to agree with this dismissive statement - it isn't really true. It's not like there is no action at all.

There is a lot of action once Pozzo and Lucky arrive for instance. There is farcical action involving hats, boots, trousers falling off. There are pratfalls (falling on one's bottom) and a lot of Vaudevillian humour.

Speaking of Cyclical: What does the Repetitiveness Mean?
The seemingly repetitive cycle of events, questions in WfG have an important meta-theatrical implication. (MT). When the characters declare that they will come again every night - they are referring to a meta-theatrical, literal truth. These actors do in fact return every night to put up this play!

The cyclicity is also an important comment on the dreary routines that people fall into. "Habit is a great deadener" as Didi or Vladimir says. Another social criticism that Beckett hides in his obscure play.

In What Other Ways is it Meta-Theatrical?
The play constantly reminds the audience that it is in fact a play. Vladimir tells Estragon in Act I "Return the ball, can't you, once in a way?" - as if their very conversation is play, rehearsed and meaningless, only a game.

Also, in Act II, the two characters pretend to be Pozzo and Lucky, drawing to attention play-acting.

In another of Beckett's plays (never performed) Eleutheria, the characters come down from the stage and walk amidst the audience, much like Six Characters in Search of an Author.

The characters also prefigure audience opinions, lampooning them sometimes. Like the lines "This is becoming really insignificant" or the part where they compare their own evening to the music hall, circus, pantomime and so on. They also refer directly to the stage audience when Didi leaves near the end of Act I to relieve himself and Gogo cries out "End of the corridor, on the left." and Didi replies "Keep my seat."

What About Language?
Beckett once declared that language is a "veil that must be torn apart" - in order to reveal meaning or absence thereof, beyond it. Beckett is very critical of soppy language. Expressive soliloquys and high-sounding philosophical abstractions remain suspect.


This is noticeable in the play, in the way Beckett deals with dialogue. The sequences are tight, interspersed with silence. Most of Didi's and Gogo's exchanges happen rapidly, suggestive of the ego-alterego theory (as discussed in class).

Lucky's "think" is a parody of dense, academic rhetoric. Pozzo's farcical elegy, deflated by the constant shift between the lyrical and the prosaic, is another instance of Beckett's critique of emotive language. The sequence between Vladimir and Estragon with the fervent "Say Something!" is important - it reflects the social human's constant need to talk. For Beckett silence perhaps is most meaningful.

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Work Cited: McDonald, Ronald. The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett.

Waiting for Godot

We're starting with Beckett's play tomorrow. Read it here or watch a film adaptation here. Recap of the slides on Beckett we saw today:

A scene from Happy Days

• The use of stark images of confinement: The woman half-buried in Happy Days; the actor strapped to the chair with only her mouth visible in Not I and so on.
• Also: Parents in drums in Endgame.

Martin Esslin came up with the term "Theatre of the Absurd." Marked by formal experimentation. A worldview of post-Nietzsche sensibilities - a godless universe. And the firm conviction that a godless universe is necessarily meaningless, "absurd". Communication therefore always breaks down into nonsensical rambling or utter silence (think of plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf). The presence of black humour. There are horrific, tragic scenes simultaneously staged with vaudevillian humour. Stark visual contrasts - heavy use of symbolism. More here.