Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
INTRODUCTION
Though difficult and sometimes baffling to read or (even) view, Waiting for Godot is nonetheless one of the most important works of our time. It revolutionized theatre in the twentieth century and had a profound influence on generations of succeeding dramatists, including such renowned contemporary playwrights as Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. After the appearance of Waiting for Godot, theatre was opened to possibilities that playwrights and audiences had never before imagined.
Initially written in French in 1948 as En Attendant Godot, Beckett's play was published in French in October of 1952 before its first stage production in Paris in January of 1953. Later translated into English by Beckett himself as Waiting for Godot, the play was produced in London in 1955 and in the United States in 1956 and has been produced worldwide. Beckett's play came to be considered an essential example of what Martin Esslin later called "Theatre of the Absurd," a term that Beckett disavowed but which remains a handy description for one of the most important theatre movements of the twentieth century.
"Absurdist Theatre" discards traditional plot, characters, and action to assault its audience with a disorienting experience. Characters often engage in seemingly meaningless dialogue or activities, and, as a result, the audience senses what it is like to live in a universe that doesn't "make sense." Beckett and others who adopted this style felt that this disoriented feeling was a more honest response to the post World War II world than the traditional belief in a rationally ordered universe. Waiting for Godot remains the most famous example of this form of drama.
The Life and Work of Samuel Beckett
“I have a clear memory of my own fetal existence. It was an existence where no voice, no possible movement could free me from the agony and darkness I was subjected to.” So says Samuel Barclay Beckett who was born on or about Good Friday, April 13, 1906. He was born in Foxrock, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, in a large house called Cooldrinagh.
Here, in this secluded three story Tudor home, surrounded by acres of gardens, a croquet lawn, stables for his mother’s donkeys and dogs, a hen house, and a tennis court, Beckett and his older brother spent their childhood. High brick walls separated them from the outside world, and ensured them uninterrupted tea parties, piano lessons, and formal dinners.
Their much-loved father took them hiking and swimming. Their mother, against whom Beckett rebelled almost all of his life, took them to church. By the time they were five, the boys were in school. By the time they were 12, they were local tennis champions—aiming all shots at their opponents’ heads.
Before he left for boarding school in 1920, Beckett had already developed into an avid reader. He kept his books on a small shelf above his bed, along with busts of Shakespeare and Dante. At boarding school, he excelled at sports, and received a solid educational foundation. He entered Trinity College (Dublin) in 1923.
There he became an intellectual. He read Descartes, French poetry, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Apollinaire, and discovered the theatre of O’Casey and Pirandello. He was also rebellious and moody. He had a reputation for reckless driving, heavy drinking, and irreverent behavior. In spite of this, he graduated first in his class in 1927 with a major in modern languages.
In preparation for a teaching career at Trinity, Beckett went to France, where he worked with James Joyce, did research on René Descartes, and won a prize for his poem, Whoroscope. He wrote a study on Proust, noting: “We are alone. We cannot know, and we cannot be known;” and “There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication.”
Living by these words, he resigned from teaching once he received his M.A. degree from Trinity in 1931. He had hated it, and his students characterized him thus: “An exhausted aesthete who all life’s poisonous wines had sipped, and found them rather tedious.”
By the time his father died in 1933, leaving him a small income, Beckett’s character had already been formed. Between bouts with physical and mental illnesses that included flus, colds, aching joints, depression, anxiety, boils, cysts, constipation, insomnia, and glaucoma in both eyes, he would live the rest of his life as a writer.
In the next fifty years he would go on to produce an impressive collection of work in a variety of genres. He created essays, poems, short stories, novels, plays, mime, and film. In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In December 1989, after too long a stay in “an old crock’s home,” Samuel Beckett died of respiratory failure at the age of 83. Right before he died, he was asked if anything in life was worthwhile. “Precious little,” he replied.
Before attempting to make any sense out of Waiting for Godot, it is necessary to put some things into perspective. When Beckett wrote this play (from October 1948 to January 1949), he was already more than forty years old. Half of his life had passed. He considered himself a novelist who wrote Godot #1 “as a form of relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time.” It was like a game to him, a momentary release from the real work of constructing fiction. It was not the vehicle he would have chosen to make him famous.
However, once it was performed in 1953, it did make him famous. It inspired an abundance of critical comment, explanation and exegesis in a relatively short time. It became a contemporary classic.
Beckett consistently refused to comment on, or explain his work to the public. “My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.”
Beckett maintained control over his text throughout his life. Originally writing it in French, he translated it for an English-speaking audience, and both translated and directed the German production in 1975. He had it memorized and, when appropriate, changed some of the dialogue and stage direction himself. He wanted to “get it right”, he said. He was not alone in this. Over the years, the material has been scrutinized by experts with their own biases, all trying to get it right.
There is a story in Beckett’s novel, Watt, written in 1942, about a Mr. Ash, who goes to a great deal of trouble to check his watch (one similar to the one that reappears in Pozzo’s pocket) for the exact time. “Seventeen minutes past five exactly, as God is my witness,” he says. However, right at that moment Big Ben, the official clock of Westminster, strikes six. “This in my opinion is the type of all information whatsoever, be it voluntary or solicited,” Beckett’s narrator concludes. If you want a stone, ask a turnover. If you want a turnover, ask plum pudding.”
This story characterizes some of the critics, as well as some of the interpretations of Waiting for Godot. It has been seen as existentialist (depicting man as lost as insecure in a world without God); Marxist (representing man turning away from his capitalist society, and embracing socialism and communism as alternatives to political alienation); Freudian (Vladimir represents the ‘ego’, Estragon represents the ‘id’); and Christian (the play as a parable illustrating man’s need for salvation). Yet, while these theories have some validity, they are all open to debate. They reflect a complex culture but limit understanding of the play. “The great success of Waiting for Godot,” Beckett said, “had arisen from a misunderstanding: critic and public alike were busy interpreting in allegorical or symbolic terms a play which strove at all costs to avoid definition.”
The inspiration for Godot may be found in the work of the late nineteenth-century symbolist playwrights. A description of symbolist drama, written by Remy de Gourmont in 1895, (which was also referred to as “static drama”), seems to have some relevance:
Hidden in mist somewhere there is an island, and on that island there is a castle, and in that castle there is a great room lit by a little lamp. And in that room people are waiting. Waiting for what? They don’t know! They’re waiting for someone to open the door, waiting for their lamp to go out, waiting for Fear and Death. They talk. Yes, they speak words that shatter the silence of the moment. And then they listen again, leaving their sentences unfinished, their gesture uncomplicated. They are listening. They are waiting. Will she come perhaps, or won’t she? Yes, she will come; she always comes. But it is late, and she will not come perhaps until tomorrow. The people collected under that little lamp in that great room have, nevertheless, begun to smile; they still have hope. Then there is a knock - a ‘knock’ and that is all there is: And it is Life Complete, All of Life.
While it may be helpful to examine the roots of Beckett’s work, it is also necessary to mention that a new category was invented by critics of the fifties and sixties to house Waiting for Godot. This category, Theater of the Absurd, was used to describe the new kind of theater that Beckett represented. While Martin Esslin defined it as “striving to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought,” other critics had their own interpretations. They characterized it as having absurd dialogue, characters and situations. It included the work of dramatists as diverse as Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee and Eugene Ionesco.
Some critics referred to Eugene Ionesco as the Grand Master of the Theater of the Absurd. His play, The Bald Soprano, produced in Paris three years before Waiting for Godot, ran for twenty years and was the first example of the “anti-theater theater.” Although it seemed to follow the outline for light comedy by using a drawing room setting, it quickly transformed the clichéd dialogue of two model British families into madness and hysteria. This was absurdity in its typical sense, as hilarious farce.
This was not the kind of absurdity represented by Beckett, whose work was characterized by despair and deprivation. His work more closely resembles Camus’ idea of the Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus. Beckett’s characters live in a world that no longer makes sense, that has no God, and offers no easy answers or solutions. Godot never comes. Kierkegaard (1813-1835), in a more Christian sense, labeled this Despair.
Ionesco once remarked, “I started writing for the theater because I hated it.” Beckett’s thoughts went even deeper. In his novel, Molloy, his character states, “You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.”
Ionesco made every attempt to explain himself and his work to the public. Beckett did just the opposite. He resisted the impulse to explain or categorize his material. In fact, he abhorred all attempts to do so. He wanted form and content to remain inseparable, and the reading or experience of his work to speak for itself.
Although he attempted to be silent on the subject of his own work, agreeing with the French poet Baudelaire (1821-1867), about “the devastating vanity and uselessness of explaining anything to anyone,” Beckett wrote literary criticism. Initially, he did it for the money, and toyed with the idea of making it a career. His essay on Joyce for Our Exagmination, his book on Proust, and his reviews for the Bookman and the Criterion, were all commissioned.
After 1934, however, Beckett’s criticism became more personal. He wrote in defense of friends and fellow artists who were unjustly attacked or ignored. At one point, railing against the idea that art has a primary duty to be clear and accessible, Beckett wrote: “The time is not perhaps altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear.”
In his essay on Joyce, Beckett wrote “no language is so sophisticated as English—it is abstracted to death,” and claimed that the public’s inability to understand information stems from being “too decadent to receive it.” In another instance, he attacked the average reader by writing, “This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation.”
The essay on Proust was Beckett’s critical masterpiece. In it he establishes his own basic philosophy about the inability to understand experience because of the dearth of methods for expression. He blames this on Time (“that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation”), Memory (“yesterday has deformed us or been deformed by us”), and Habit (“the ballast that chains a dog to his vomit”).
Throughout his life, Samuel Beckett also wrote poetry. In 1930, he received first prize in a contest conducted by the Hours Press for his 98 line poem Whoroscope. This poem was based on the life of René Descartes (1596-1650), a French philosopher and mathematician. Although it was praised for its swift and witty language, the poem was difficult to interpret. Beckett was asked to provide explanatory footnotes for it, which he did. Clearly, at that point in his life, he was compliant.
He continued to write poetry through the 1930s and 1940s in both English and French. Then, in 1974, after a break of twenty-five years, he began to publish poetry again.
Before, during, and after Waiting for Godot, Beckett wrote novels. His first published novel Murphy (1938), was one of grotesque but comic action, and included characters such as Miss Rosie Dew, Miss Carridge, Augustus Tinklepenny, Bim and Bom, Dr. Killiecrankie, and Murphy, who takes a job at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. At the end of the novel, Murphy dies accidentally. Although his last request is to be cremated and have his ashes flushed down the toilet of the Abbey Theater, they remain scattered on the floor of a saloon.
From 1942 to 1944, while living in Roussillon, Beckett wrote Watt, which included veiled autobiographical accounts of his life. The main character is a patient in an asylum, who dictates his story to a fellow patient in a confusing language with a distorted chronology. A note in the addendum of Watt gives a sense of Beckett’s paradoxical humour. “The following precious and illuminating material should be carefully studied. Only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation.”
Watt was not designed for a postwar public’s reading pleasure. It did not get published until 1953, and it was immediately banned in Ireland. This did not prevent Beckett, the novelist, from continuing on. His next novel was Molloy (1947), the first of a trilogy that was to include Malone meurt and L’Innommable.
Molloy is presented in two phases with two stories—one about Molloy, and the other about Moran. Both characters suffer from paralysis. When Molloy speaks, it is difficult to know whether events are real or imagined. Boundaries between his conscious and unconscious mind are blurred. When Moran speaks, everything he says is immediately cancelled, and nothing that happens is to be believed. This novel was referred to by critics as an “epic of the absurd,” taking place in a “void” and outlining disintegration—of the heroes, of time, and of life.
Malone meurt was the book Beckett was writing in 1948 when he took his break and created Godot. Apparently Beckett’s friends and family were worried that the introductory sentences in this novel, “I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month,” applied to Beckett himself. They insisted that he stop writing and rest. Whether or not he was heeding their advice, he did humor himself by writing Godot, “to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time.”
Critics assumed that the philosophical underpinnings of Malone meurt were from the writings of Descartes (1596-1650), who wrote about the supposed split between the physical/mechanical and the mental/spiritual universes. There was also the influence of Geulinex (1624-1669), who wrote “Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing;” and Berkeley (1685-1753), who said there is no reality except in the mind.
Beckett, as usual, responded by claiming, “I don’t know where the writing comes from and I am often quite surprised when I see what I have committed to paper.”
His novels end with failure or death, the concept of “lessness is part of them”. They become more and more difficult to follow as the humor is engulfed by tragedy, and the language is used to imitate what is being narrated. When Malone dies, his pencil finally gives out along with his consciousness:
or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his
fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never
or with his pencil or with his stick or
or light light I mean
never there he will never
never anything
there
any more
The last book of the trilogy, L’Innommable, completed in 1950, begins with a character who is neither male nor female, has no nose, and cannot move. All it does is sit in a jar with its hands on its knees, narrating a story which ends with the paradox, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
After the success of Waiting for Godot, Beckett wrote more plays. “The best possible play is one in which there are no actors, only the text. I’m trying to think of a way to write one,” he said.
True to his word, he attempted to eliminate his characters. While Waiting for Godot had five actors, Endgame (1958) had only four. One character was dying, and two others were consigned to ashcans. The stage poem, “Play” (1964), was down to three performers, all stashed away in funereal urns. Happy Days (1961) had a woman buried to her waist and then her head in sand. Her husband remained invisible until he crawled out of his hole to say hello.
Historical Background
Samuel Beckett lived from 1906 until 1989, during which time the world went through enormous social, cultural, and political changes.
Socially, Beckett was born into a privileged Anglo-Irish Protestant family whose household seemed unaffected by the changes around it. However, as a child, he witnessed first-hand the destruction and devastation caused by the Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin.
As a young adult, he was exposed to the leading literary and political figures in Dublin. The pubs overlapped the world created by language and theater. He frequented the Abbey Theatre, home of Irish Nationalism, the Gate, home of experimental European drama, and the Queens Theatre, which was the center for melodrama. Beckett also got a taste of vaudeville; he loved the movies of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, and, later, the Marx Brothers.
When censorship renewed itself in Ireland in the late 1920s, and Beckett’s book, More Pricks Than Kicks, came under attack, the stage was set for his subsequent move to France. He delighted in saying how he preferred “France in war to Ireland in peace,” even though he had been stabbed on a Paris street for no apparent reason in 1938.
Fiercely protective of his private life, especially his relationship and marriage to Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, and not wanting to utter “another blot on silence,” Beckett claimed to be apolitical. However, his actions proved otherwise. He openly attacked anti-semitism, worked with the French Resistance during World War II, and joined an Irish Red Cross unit after the war to set up a hospital in Normandy.
In 1946, he began his most productive period. He wrote in French, perhaps in an attempt to “strip his language to the bare essentials of his vision.” The world had come to a temporary resting point, only to succumb again to the endless recurrent political battles of a “post-nuclear age.” In a world where traditional values and beliefs were under intense scrutiny, life seldom resembled a tidy, well-constructed play. In fact, it may have provided the right climate for Waiting for Godot.
En attendant Godot, (Waiting for Godot), was first presented on January 5, 1953, at the Babylone Theatre in Paris, France, to a packed house of more than 200 people. It had been financed by a small, state grant obtained by its producer, Roger Blin. Although the general public and conventional press winced in confusion over its meaning, it received enough praise from the “right” people to ensure its success.
In her review for La Liberation, Sylvain Zegel wrote: “Paris had just recognized in Samuel Beckett one of today’s best playwrights”. At 47, Beckett had become famous, and the phrase, “Waiting for Godot,” became an everyday expression of political cartoonists throughout the world.
The English version of Waiting for Godot opened in London at the Arts Theatre Club on August 3, 1955. Although the popular press initially dismissed it as “rubbish,” leading theater critics jumped to its rescue. As a result, it managed to play to capacity audiences until May, 1956. When it opened in Dublin, it received more favorable reviews.
Waiting for Godot had its premiere in the United States at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida on January 3, 1956. Reviewers hated it, and audiences walked out. The running joke was that the only place to be sure of finding a cab in Miami was outside of the theater, between acts.
The play got a better reception when it opened on Broadway, in April 1956. It was publicized as entertainment for “thoughtful and discriminating” audiences. In his review for The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Theater goers can rail at it, but they canNot Ignore it. For Mr. Beckett is a valid writer.”
Since then, Waiting for Godot has entertained audiences as diverse as children, prisoners and university students, and has been accepted as one of the classics of the twentieth-century stage.
Of course, it has never been without its critics. Norman Mailer characterized its admirers as “snobs of undue ambition and impotent imagination.” And Beckett himself, called it a “bad” play.
Clearly, Samuel Beckett is not a writer for the general public. His work is for students and scholars. They have created an abundance of literature of their own about Beckett, including The Journal of Beckett Studies, begun in 1976.
In 1988, however, both general public and scholar alike competed for tickets to a performance of Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center, in New York City. Directed by Mike Nichols and starring Robin Williams and Steve Martin, it received enormous publicity. Most noteworthy was the fact that the audience included the extremes of Beckett followers, including those who sat with annotated texts, monitoring every word and every action.
While it may be helpful to examine the roots of Beckett’s work, it is also necessary to mention that a new category was invented by critics of the sixties. This category, Theater of the Absurd, was used to describe the new kind of theater that Beckett represented. Martin Esslin defined it as dealing with “its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought.” It was characterized by absurd dialogue, characters and situations. It included the plays of Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee.
Beckett resisted the impulse to explain or categorize this material. In fact, he abhorred all attempts to do so. He wanted form and content to remain inseparable, and the reading or experience of the play to speak for itself.
Master List of Characters
Estragon (Gogo)—Male vagabond in his later life; once a poet. Now ragged, with smelly and sore feet; longtime companion and friend of Vladimir.
Vladimir (Didi)—Male vagabond in later life; once respectable, now old and in pain, with garlic breath; possibly heavier than Estragon; more domineering and paternal.
Lucky—Obedient, male slave of Pozzo; with long, white hair; dances and thinks aloud on command in the first act; mute in the second act.
Pozzo—Sadistic, pipe smoking bald man who owns land and is a slave owner. Approximately in his sixties; intimidating voice; condescending attitude; in the first act, occasionally uses vaporizer for his throat and glasses for emphasis. Blind and helpless in the second act.
A boy—Timid and respectful. Of no particular age.
Human Condition
In this richly evocative "story" about two men who wait for another who never comes there are so many possible themes it is difficult to enumerate them. Those that are readily apparent include the issues of absurdity, alienation and loneliness, appearance and reality, death, doubt and ambiguity, time, the meaning of life, language and meaning, and the search for self. But one theme that encompasses many of these at once is the question of the human condition—who are we as humans and what is our short life on this planet really like?
We appear to be born without much awareness of our selves or our environment and as we mature to gradually acquire from the world around us a sense of identity and a concept of the universe. However, the concept of human life that we generally acquire may be fraught with illusions. Early in his life Beckett dismissed the Christian concept of God and based his concept of the human condition on the assumption that human existence ends in the grave, that our most monumental achievements are insignificant measured by the cosmic scales of time and space, and that human life without illusions is generally difficult and sad. Vladimir and Estragon live in a world without comforting illusions about human dignity, the importance of work and achievement, the inevitability of justice, or the promise of an afterlife of eternal bliss. They live in a world where almost nothing is certain, where simply getting your boots off or sleeping through the night without having to urinate is a pretty significant achievement. They live in a world where violence and brutality can appear at any time, often victimizing them directly. They live without amenities, find joy in the smallest of victories, and are ultimately quite serious about their vague responsibility to wait for this mysterious figure who may or may not come and who may or may not reward them for their loyalty. It is a life lived on the razor's edge of hope and sadness.
Strangely enough, Pozzo often voices most clearly what Beckett might have called the reality of this world. In Act I, for example, Estragon feels pity for the abused and weeping Lucky, who is sobbing because Pozzo has said aloud that he wants to "get rid of him." As Lucky sobs, Pozzo brutally says, "old dogs have more dignity." But when Estragon goes with a handkerchief to wipe his tears, Lucky kicks him violently in the shins and it is now Estragon in pain. Pozzo then offers this observation: "he's stopped crying. [To Estragon.] You have replaced him as it were. [Lyrically.] The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. [He laughs.] Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. [Pause.] Let us not speak well of it either. [Pause.] Let us not speak of it at all."
As Beckett dismissed what most of us take for granted, he eventually dismissed language itself as a reliable source of security. Ironically, this man of words ultimately mistrusted them. He knew that the word could never be counted on to convey meaning precisely and that linguistic meaning was always an approximation. Thus he shows Vladimir and Estragon spending most of their time dancing around words, attempting vainly to pin them down, to use them as guiding stars as best they can. At the end of the play, for example, Vladimir is struck by Estragon's suggestion that much of what Vladimir "knows" might be as unreliable as Estragon's dreams, and Vladimir launches into a poetic monologue that begins, "Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?" But when he ends this lyrical moment of introspection he simply says, "what have I said?" This is a world where even words fail to wrestle our lives into consistently coherent patterns of meaning, a world where the human condition is radically insecure but where the struggle to find meaning is perhaps the only nobility left for us.
Friendship
It is tempting to see Beckett as a "nihilist,'' as someone who believed that there was nothing of value or meaning in human life, but the friendship of Estragon and Vladimir clearly offers us something positive and even uplifting in the difficult world of Beckett's play. In the unconventional banter of these two men it is sometimes easy to miss the intensity of their symbiotic relationship, but close attention to the theatrical qualities in their exchanges will show that they care deeply for one another and in many ways need one another to survive in their inhospitable world. Beckett, of course, is not sentimental about friendship—he is stubbornly realistic about everything he sees—but on the whole the relationship between Estragon and Vladimir is an important focus for understanding Beckett's most famous play.
In many places in the action Vladimir and Estragon bicker, misunderstand, and even ignore one another, but in other places their relationship is clearly tender, such as in the moment of Actll when Vladimir covers the sleeping Estragon with his coat. But if one were to focus on one moment in detail the most logical place to start might be the entrances of the two men at the beginning of the play. As the play begins, Estragon is sitting on a mound trying to take off his boot. Estragon and Vladimir have been separated overnight, but Beckett doesn't expect us to worry about why they have separated, any more than he expects us to give a moment's thought as to how they first met or how long they have known one another. It is enough to know that they are friends and that as the play begins Estragon is alone on this country road struggling to get his boots off. He finally gives up, saying "Nothing to be done," and at that moment Vladimir enters and responds to his friend's words as if he had been there from the start of Estragon's struggle—"I'm beginning to come round to that opinion," says Vladimir. The ease with which they are together again, as if they never were parted, is indicated deftly in the seamlessness of that second line of the play. Vladimir then says, more directly, "I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever," and though the line is spoken casually the clear implication is that losing Estragon forever would have created a very considerable hole in Vladimir's life. Vladimir expresses concern over Estragon's beating, then quickly shifts into one of his annoyingly condescending roles as Estragon's protector. Vladimir talks, almost as if he simply enjoys hearing the sound of his own voice, while Estragon resumes the struggle with the boot. Eventually, Estragon succeeds in removing his boot and it could easily be suggested that he does so in part because of the mere presence of his friend. It is certainly no accident that just as Vladimir echoes Estragon's opening phrase, "Nothing to be done," Estragon "with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot." The removal of the boot, of course, is mundane. As Vladimir says, "Boots must be taken off every day." But in Beckett's careful art, the removal of the boot with the indirect emotional support of a friend is a metaphor for anything we attempt to do in our lives. In this life we face difficulties in the simple execution of daily affairs and ultimately we must face them alone or in the company of others who struggle as we do.
Style
Theatre of the Absurd
The seemingly endless waiting that Estragon and Vladimir undertake for the mysterious Godot has made Beckett's play one of the classic examples of what is called Theatre of the Absurd. The term refers both to its content—a bleak vision of the human condition—and to the style that expresses that vision. The idea that human life lacks meaning and purpose, that humans live in an indifferent or hostile universe, is frequently associated with Existentialist writers like the French philosophers Albert Camus (Kam-oo) and Jean-Paul Sartre (Sart). But when these two writers expounded their ideas in novels and plays, they generally used traditional literary techniques—that is, life-like characters; clear, linear plots; and conventional dialogue. But with writers like Beckett or the French dramatist Eugene Ionesco (E-on-es-co), the style is not an arbitrary choice but rather a necessary complement to the vision itself.
Beckett and those who adopted his style insisted that to effectively express the vision of absurdity one had to make the expression itself seem absurd. In other words, the audience had to experience what it felt like to live in an absurd world. Thus, the familiar and comforting qualities of a clear plot, realistic characters, plausible situations, and comprehensible dialogue had to be abandoned. In their place Beckett created a play where bizarre characters speak in what sometimes appears to be illogical, banal, chit chat and where events sometimes appear to change with no apparent logic. In Waiting for Godot, for example, this quality is embodied in its most extreme form in Lucky's first-act monologue where he demonstrates his "thinking." For two full pages of text, Lucky goes on like this: "I resume alas alas on on in short in fine on on abode of stones who can doubt it I resume but not so fast I resume the skull to shrink."
Many of the play's original audience members and critics probably came to Waiting for Godot expecting something more traditional than Lucky's speech and were not able to adjust to what they were confronted with. Even today's reader may need a gentle reminder about expectations. As Hugh Kenner suggested at the outset of his book A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett, "the reader of Samuel Beckett may want a Guide chiefly to fortify him against irrelevant habits of attention, in particular the habit of reading 'for the story.'" For, as Martin Esslin explained in The Theatre of the Absurd, "Waiting for Godot does not tell a story; it explores a static situation. 'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.'" Or, as Kenner put it, "the substance of the play is waiting, amid uncertainty. ... To wait; and to make the audience share the waiting; and to explicate the quality of the waiting: this is not to be done with 'plot.'"
Black Humor
Perhaps the easiest and also the most difficult thing to experience clearly in Waiting for Godot is its sense of humor. It's the easiest thing to experience because once one accepts the play on its own terms Waiting for Godot is wildly funny. But the play's humor is also the hardest thing to experience because the reputation of Beckett's play has created another set of expectations—that its dark vision must be taken with utmost seriousness.
However, a quick look at the subtitle of the play reveals that Beckett called it "a tragi-comedy in two acts," and this delicate balance between tragedy and comedy is probably the most essential ingredient in the play. Numerous critics have pointed out that Waiting for Godot is full of pratfalls, classic vaudeville "bits" like the wild swapping of hats in Act II, and the patter of comedians such as this from Act I:
Estragon: [Anxious ] And we? Vladimir: I beg your pardon? Estragon: I said, And we? Vladimir: I don't understand. Estragon: Where do we come in? Vladimir: Come in? Estragon: Take your time. Vladimir: Come in? On our hands and knees. Estragon: As bad as that?
Hugh Kenner has even discovered what appears to be a "source" for the farcical dropping of trousers that ends the play. He pointed out that in Laurel and Hardy's film Way Out West (1937) this dialogue occurs:
Hardy: Get on the mule. Laurel: What? Hardy: Get on the mule
At the end of Waiting for Godot we have:
Vladimir: Pull on your trousers. Estragon: What? Vladimir: Pull on your trousers. Estragon: You want me to pull off my trousers? Vladimir: Pull ON your trousers. Estragon: [Realizing his trousers are down ] True. [He pulls up his trousers.]
Black Comedy is laughter that is generated by something truly painful. When we are led to laugh at tragedy or real suffering like death or the genuinely horrific, we are in the world of Black Comedy. In Endgame Nell says, "nothing is funnier than unhappiness." Beckett leads us to laugh because it may be the only viable response to extreme anxiety. In Waiting for Godot, of course, what follows the "trouser" passage above is the quite serious and even solemn concluding lines of the play—"they do not move."
Historical Context
1. The French Resistance Movement during World War II
Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in the late months of 1948, three years after Allied forces had liberated France from German occupation, and some scholars suggest that his war experience might have served as an inspiration for the play. After German military forces had successfully invaded and occupied Northern France in the spring of 1940, a nominally free French government had been established in the South at Vichy and an underground French Resistance movement arose that attempted to frustrate and undermine German control of France. Beckett joined the Resistance movement in Paris in September of 1941 and helped pass secret information to England about German military movements. When an infiltrator began uncovering the names of Resistance members in Beckett's group, Beckett and his companion (later his wife) Suzanne had to flee Paris and travel into the South, where they eventually found refuge in the small village of Roussillon, near Avignon. In the French version of the play, this village is named as the place where Vladimir and Estragon picked grapes, an activity that Beckett and Suzanne actually engaged in. This has led some scholars to suggest that Vladimir and Estragon can, at least in part, represent Beckett and Suzanne in flight from Paris to Roussillon or the two of them waiting in an extremely dangerous form of exile for the war to end. In Roussillon, Beckett earned food and shelter by doing strenuous manual labor for local farmers, eventually working for a small local Resistance group, and trying to keep his identity hidden from the Germans occupying outlying areas. After the war, Beckett was awarded two French medals, the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Reconnaissance, for his contributions to the war effort.
Indeterminate Time and Place in Beckett's Play
More importantly for Beckett's art, however, is that Waiting for Godot, on the whole, clearly detaches itself from particular aspects of the historical and cultural context in which Beckett wrote in order to universalize the experience of Vladimir and Estragon. And it achieves this universal quality initially by placing the two figures in an indeterminate setting and time. As the play opens, the setting and time is simply described as "A country road. A tree. Evening." In the second act, the description is simply, "Next day. Same Time. Same Place." This backdrop is left unspecified in order to emphasize that the action of the play is a universal "situation" rather than a particular series of events that happened to a particular set of characters.
At one time in our century this waiting could have stood for South Africans waiting for apartheid to end in their native land. More than a half century after the unleashing of atomic energy, this waiting could still represent our fears of nuclear catastrophe. On a more personal level, many know what it is like to wait for news of a test for cancer. But all of these specific situations reveal how specificity can reduce the poetic evocativeness of Beckett's waiting to a mundane flatness. The unspecified nature of what Vladimir and Estragon wait for is what gives Beckett's play its extraordinary power.
The peculiar quality of Vladimir and Estragon's waiting, of course, is that they wait with only the vaguest sense of what they are waiting for and that they wait without much hope while still clinging to hope as their only ballast in an existential storm. But even this narrower description of the play's ' 'waiting" leaves many possibilities for corresponding situations. For example, one of the most famous productions of Waiting for Godot perhaps reveals most clearly how the indeterminate time and place of the play permits it to speak to a wide variety of audience experiences. In The Theatre of the Absurd Martin Esslin examined the famous 1957 production of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin penitentiary. Prison officials had chosen Beckett's play largely because it had no women in it to distract the prisoners, but the San Francisco Actors' Workshop group that was performing the play was obviously concerned that such an arcane theatrical experience might baffle an audience of fourteen hundred convicts. Much to their surprise, however, the convicts understood the play immediately. One prisoner said, "Godot is society." Another said, "he's the outside." As Esslin reported, "a teacher at the prison was quoted as saying, 'they know what is meant by waiting... and they knew if Godot finally came, he would only be a disappointment.'" An article in the prison newspaper summarized the prisoners' response by saying, "We're still waiting for Godot, and shall continue to wait. When the scenery gets too drab and the action too slow, we'll call each other names and swear to part forever—but then, there's no place to go!" Esslin concluded that "it is said that Godot himself, as well as turns of phrase and characters from the play, have since become a permanent part of the private language, the institutional mythology of San Quentin." In 1961, one member of that convict audience, Rick Cluchey, helped form a group that produced seven productions of Beckett's plays for San Quentin audiences from 1961 to 1964. Cluchey later earned his release from San Quentin and had a distinguished career acting on stage and in films, especially as an interpreter of Beckett roles.
Critical Overview
1. After nearly a half-century, Beckett's Waiting for Godot remains one of the most important, respected, and powerful plays in the history of world theatre. Given its radically innovative style and great degree of difficulty, it is no surprise that audiences and critics have generally reacted to it in extremes—either of love or hate, admiration or disgust. Its original director, Roger Blin, recalled in an article in Theater that the reaction to the first production in January, 1953, in a small Paris theatre was "a sensation actually: wild applause broke out from some in the audience, others sat in baffled silence, fisticuffs were exchanged by pros and cons; most critics demolished play and production but a handful wrote prophetically."
Among those who wrote prophetically was the play's first reviewer, a relatively unknown critic named Sylvain Zegel, who proclaimed in a review in Liberation that the production was "an event which will be spoken of for a long time, and will be remembered years later." With amazing prescience, Zegel simply asserted that this first-time playwright "deserves comparison with the greatest." A more famous French critic at the time, Jacques Lemarchand, added an awareness of the play's dark humor, observing in Figaro Litteraire that Waiting for Godot "is also a funny play— sometimes very funny. The second night I was there the laughter was natural and unforced." He added that this humor "in no way diminished" the play's profound emotional intensity. Internationally acclaimed playwright Jean Anouilh (On-wee) was also one of Waiting for Godot's early commentators and in Arts Spectacles simply proclaimed it "a masterpiece." As James Knowlson summarized it in his Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, the play's "success was assured when it became controversial." The critical and popular enthusiasm, though not universal, was widespread, and the production ran for four hundred performances before moving to a larger theatre in Paris.
This process whereby ambivalence to the play ultimately evolved into popular and critical success was repeated when the play moved to London in August of 1955 for its first production using Beckett's English translation. Opening in a small "fringe" theatre (London's version of Off Broadway), "the play created an instant furore," according to Alan Simpson, writing in 1962, and quoted in Ruby Cohn's 1987 compilation, Waiting for Godot: A Casebook. Simpson added that "[a]lmost without exception, the popular press dismissed it as obscure nonsense and pretentious rubbish. However, it was enthusiastically championed by Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan'' (two of the most influential drama critics in London) and the play once again became controversial and thereby successful, eventually moving to a West End theatre (London's Broadway) and a long run. In February of 1956 an unsigned review in the London Times Literary Supplement by distinguished author G.S. Fraser asserted that the play was clearly a Christian morality play. This essay led to weeks of spirited exchange in the Times with some critics countering that the play was anti-Christian, others that it was Existentialist, and others that it was something else altogether. Characteristically, Beckett was mystified by the controversy, saying, according to Knowlson, "why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can't make out."
The first American production of the play, on the other hand, was quite uncomplicated; it was an unmitigated disaster. In January of 1956, director Alan Schneider opened what was to be a three-week preview run of the play in Coral Gables, Florida, near Miami, with popular comic actors and personalities Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell in the lead roles. As Schneider recounted (as quoted in Ruby Cohn's 1967 compilation, Casebook on Waiting for Godot), the production was a "spectacular flop. The opening night audience in Miami, at best not too sophisticated or attuned to this type of material and at worst totally misled by advertising billing the play as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' walked out in droves. And the so-called reviewers not only could not make heads or tails of the play but accused us of pulling some sort of hoax on them." The production did not even finish the three-week preview run, but months later the production did move to Broadway, with a new director and cast (retaining only Bert Lahr as Estragon). In New York, producer Michael Myerberg took a new tack on pre-production publicity, this time asking in his advertisements for an audience of "seventy thousand intellectuals." This time the production was a success, though still drawing divided opinions from critics and audience. The show ran for over 100 performances and sold almost 3,000 copies of the play in the theatre lobby.
There have been so many important productions of Waiting for Godot in our century that it is difficult to even list, much less summarize, them. An all-black production of the play on Broadway ran for only five performances late in 1956, with Earle Hyman as Lucky. There was a West Berlin production early in 1975 that Beckett himself directed. In a production in 1976 in Cape Town, South Africa, Waiting for Godot seemed to suggest waiting for the end of apartheid. In 1984 there was a San Quentin Drama Workshop production involving Rick Cluchey, former inmate of San Quentin and audience member of the famous 1957 San Quentin production of the play. In 1988 Beckett went to court in an attempt to stop an all-female Dutch production, believing as he did that the characters in Waiting for Godot were distinctively male (Beckett and his lawyers lost in court). Also in 1988 there was a production at Lincoln Center in New York City, in which Estragon and Vladimir were played by well-known contemporary comedians Robin Williams and Steve Martin.
According to Martin Esslin in his The Theatre of the Absurd, Waiting for Godot had been seen by over a million people within five years after its first production in Paris and by the late 1960s had been translated into more than twenty languages and performed all over the world. Audiences coming to it without an awareness of its nature or history are perhaps still baffled by it, but the play can no longer be dismissed as it was by Daily News contributor John Chapman, one of its first New York critics, who, as quoted by the New Republic's Eric Bentley, called Waiting for Godot "merely a stunt."
Postmodernism
Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas, rejecting the boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the de-structured, de-centered, and dehumanized subject. Modernism tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history, but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in modern life; art (especially literature) will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn’t lament the idea of fragmentation, destabilization, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let’s not pretend that art can make meaning then; let’s just play with nonsense, for it is nonsense that seemingly characterized us all.
Lyotard (a notable postmodern theorist) argues that all aspects of modern societies, including science as the primary form of knowledge, depend on grand narratives. Postmodernism then, is a critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. In other words, every attempt to create “order” always demands the creation of an equal amount of “disorder,” but a “grand narrative” masks the constructedness of these categories by explaining that “disorder” REALLY IS rational and good. Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors “mini-narratives,” stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern “mini-narratives” are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability. There, then, is more “truth” in these mini narratives if we remember that the postmodern period, like the modern period that precedes it, is essentially defined by the stark inability to see, to feel, know, even smell any semblance at all of collectivity of consciousness, experience, endeavor, and so on.
In postmodern literature we will see the “playing with” the idea that language is transparent, that words serve only as representations of thoughts or things, and don’t have any function beyond that. Modern societies depend on the idea that signifiers always point to signifieds, and that reality reside in signifieds. In postmodernism, however, there are only signifiers. The idea of any stable or permanent reality disappears, and with it the idea of signifieds that signifiers point to. Rather, for postmodern societies, there are only surfaces, without depth; only signifiers, with no signifieds.
Another way if saying this, according to Jean Baudrillard, is that postmodern society there are no originals, only copies—or what he calls “simulacra” (remember Plato’s Forms and his determination that in this world we only see imitations of this Forms). You might think, for example, about painting or sculpture, where there is an original work (by Van Gogh, for instance), and there might also be thousands of copies, but the original is the one with the highest value (particularly monetary value). Contrast that with cds or music recordings, where there is no “original,” as in painting—no recording that is hung on a wall, or kept in a vault; rather, there are only copies, by the millions, that are all the same, and all sold for (approximately) the same amount of money. Another version of Baudrillard’s “simulacrum” would be the concept of virtual reality, a reality created by simulation, for which there is no original. This is particularly evident in computer games/simulations—think of Sim City, Sim Ant, etc.
There are lots of questions to be asked about postmodernism, and one of the most important is about the politics involved—or, more simply, is this movement toward accepting our fragmentation, instability, distance from the past and collective consciousness something good or something bad? There are various answers to that; in our contemporary society, however, the desire to return to the pre-postmodern era (modern/humanist/Enlightenment thinking) tends to get associated with conservative political, religious, and philosophical groups. In fact, one of the consequences of postmodernism seems to be the rise of religious fundamentalism, as a form of resistance to the questioning of the “grand narratives” of religious truth. This is perhaps most obvious (to us in the US, anyway) in Muslim fundamentalism in the Middle East, which bans postmodern books, like Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses—because the deconstruct such grand narratives.
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