EN 3268 Tragedy - Lecture 11 Beckett

2. Life & Background

2.1 Born 1906. Irish by birth and early upbringing. Student of European languages. Studied in Paris 1928. Friendship with James Joyce (1882-1941). Lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin (1931-2). Three years in London. Returned to Paris 1937. Begins relationship with Suzanne Dumesnil 1938 (marries her in 1962). Active in French Resistance 1940. Worked on farm 1942-44. Worked with Irish Red Cross 1945. Permanent residence in Paris from 1945. Productive period of writing (in French) 1946-50. Died 1989.

2.2 Biographical article: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Beckett Timeline (with interesting images of places associated with Beckett)

2.3 Principal Works:

      1930     Whoroscope (poem)
      1934     More Pricks Than Kicks (short stories)
      1938     Murphy (novel, pub. 1947)
      1942     Watt (novel, pub. 1953)
      1951     Molloy (novel), Malone Dies (novel)
      1952     Waiting for Godot (play)
      1957     All That Fall (play), Endgame (play)
      1958     Krapp's Last Tape (play)
      1959     Embers (play)
      1960     How It Is (play), Happy Days (play)
      1963-83 Many short later works.

2.4 Choice of French over English

Beckett came to prefer French to English from the 1950s. He found French preferable in terms of the challenge and discipline of writing in that language because, as he told a student writing a dissertation on him, `in French it is very easy to write without style', that is, to write without being distracted into virtuosity, stylistic allusiveness, richness of texture, etc. Beckett generally `translated' his own French into English, but never literally.

4. Creating interpretive contexts for the play

4.1 THE ABSURD

One way of approaching the play is to relate its action and themes to what has become known as the theatre of `the absurd'

Albert Camus (in The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942): `A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile … he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.'

The playwright Eugène Ionesco (in an essay on Kafka, 1957): `Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose…. Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.'

Martin Esslin on the `Theatre of the Absurd':

ATTITUDES: `The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakeable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away …. This sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition is, broadly speaking, the theme of the plays of Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Genet, and other writers… The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being – that is, in terms of concrete stage images …. It is this striving for an integration between subject-matter and the form in which it is expressed that separates the Theatre of the Absurd from the Existentialist theatre (of Jean-Paul Sartre)'.
FUNCTIONS: `On the one hand, it castigates, satirically, the absurdity of lives lived unaware and unconscious of ultimate reality… Behind the satirical purpose … the Theatre of the Absurd is facing up to a deeper layer of absurdity – the absurdity of the human condition itself in a world where the decline of religious belief has deprived man of certainties…. Man stripped of the accidental circumstances of social position or historical context, confronted with the basic choices, the basic situations of his existence: man faced with time and therefore waiting … waiting between birth and death…. It is a theatre of situation as against a theatre of events in sequence, and therefore it uses language based on patterns of concrete images rather than argument or discursive speech. And since it is trying to present a sense of being, it can neither investigate nor solve problems of conduct or morals'.
STRUCTURE: `The Theatre of the Absurd … proceeds not by intellectual concepts but by poetic images, neither poses an intellectual problem … nor provides any clear-cut solution… Many of the plays … have a circular structure, ending exactly as they began; others progress merely by a growing intensification of the initial situation'.
PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT: `The Theatre of the Absurd expresses the anxiety and despair that springs from the recognition that man is surrounded by areas of impenetrable darkness, that he can never know his true nature and purpose, and that no one will provide him with ready-made rules of conduct …. Not despair or a return to dark irrational forces but … modern man's endeavour to come to terms with the world in which he lives'.
SPECTATORS: `The audience is confronted with characters whose motives and actions remain largely incomprehensible…. The spectator is compelled to come to terms with his experience. The stage supplies him with a number of disjointed clues that he has to fit into a meaningful pattern…. The audience is confronted with actions that lack apparent motivation, characters that are in constant flux, and often happenings that are clearly outside the realm of rational experience. … The relevant question here is not so much what is going to happen next but what is happening? `What does the action of the play represent?'
PLOT: `Waiting for Godot shows its two heroes whiling away the time in a succession of desultory … [the play] takes place on a terrifyingly empty open road … consists of two symmetrical movements that balance each other …. groups its characters in symmetrical pairs. Each pair is linked by a relationship of mutual interdependence, wanting to leave each other, at war with each other, and yet dependent on each other'.

4.2 LANGUAGE

Fletcher (95): `The dialogue reflects the often pointless to-and-fro of everyday conversation. The first is the way matters tend to be lost sight of and then picked up again in a desultory fashion later… The second is the habit of annulment …. Beckett's dialogue is characterized by the high incidence of question asking going on'.
Other features: the twisted cliché; misfired jokes; private allusions.
Leslie Kane (The Language of Silence, 1984): `Beckett's drama is characterized by a retreat from the word; physical, emotional, and linguistic entrapment; stasis as a dramatic structure; evocation of evanescence; the motif of waiting; and the centrality of time' (108).
The elements of a language of silence employed by Beckett to dramatize discontinuity and disjunction are:
1 indirect, disjunctive speech; 2 colloquial dialogue; 3 contrapuntal speech; 4 unanswered questions; 5 repetition and echoing;
6 pauses; 7 silences; 8 mute characters; 9 silence as a metaphor for isolation; 10 silence as a metaphor for absence;
11 silence of the playwright.

Anthony Easthope: A word frequently applied to Beckett's work is `poetic'. What the adjective really points to in Beckett's plays … is the extraordinary ability of the language and the stagecraft to imply, suggest, connote, evoke and set off expressive nuances.

4.3 DIRECTING THE PLAY

Antoni Libera: Beckett's way of directing consists of the following elements:

1 Approaching a play as if it were a musical score
2 Bringing out the rhythm of the text
3 A precise designing of the stage movements, as if in a ballet
4 Pacing the acting and speaking
5 Bringing out comic elements : a mix of Irish humour, silent moves type slapstick, music hall routines
6 Bringing out sadness and lyricism… no black gloom.
7 The spirit of German romanticism (note the Caspar Friedrich paintings reproduced below)

4.4 NOTHINGNESS

Democritus: `Nothing is more real than nothing.'
Martin Esslin: Beckett's plays … reveal his experience of temporality and evanescence; his sense of the tragic difficulty of becoming aware of one's own self in the merciless process of renovation and destruction that occurs with change in time; of the difficulty of communication between human beings; of the unending quest for reality in a world in which everything is uncertain... of the tragic nature of all love relationships .… the key to the wide success of Beckett's plays: to be confronted with concrete projections of the deepest fears and anxieties, which have been only vaguely experienced at a half-conscious level constitutes a process of catharsis and liberation …. The pursuit of objectives that forever recede as they are attained – inevitably so through the action of time, which changes us in the process of reaching what we crave – can find release only in the recognition of that nothingness which is the only reality.
Richard Gilman: This is his truest subject: the illusion that our speech and movements make a difference, the knowledge that this is an illusion, and the tragicomic making of speech and gestures in the face of the knowledge.

5. The question of genre

5.1 In what sense is it apt to be reading a play like Waiting for Godot in a course on Tragedy?

What is attempted below is not an `answer', but a series of reflections and questions that you are encouraged to develop and answer for yourself.

5.2 IS WAITING TRAGIC? IS IT A FORM OF CALAMITY? In Aeschylus, Racine, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Eliot and O'Neill, we have observed how the action of each play ends with a form of violence that also represents the decline and fall (and often the death) of the protagonist(s). Beckett's play shows us something quite different: two almost (but not quite) similar acts, each devoted to waiting for an entity that does not materialize. In that sense, the play ends almost (but not quite) where it began: Vladimir and Estragon are not noticeably worse off than they were when the curtain rose on the action, and although the pair of Pozzo and Lucky have come and gone twice (each visit similar and yet also very different from the other), there is no obvious calamity or violent disaster represented by the play. The pair wait at the end as they did at the start, or they resolve to go but have nowhere to go, and that which they wait for does not happen. Its happening (or coming) would resolve the anxiety and tension of waiting. The non-event is the peculiarly inconclusive conclusion that Beckett offers in lieu of a climax or calamity. Can we argue then that the failure of whoever or whatever is Godot to arrive constitutes a form of violence or calamity? Can we regard the action as potentially or latently or incipiently tragic because something desired and wished-for fails of fulfillment? The almost-but-not-quite-repetitive nature of the play's two-part action may be said to represent a form of gradual but definite entropy. Is this entropy tragic? Is the disappointment evinced through the predicament of Vladimir and Estragon emblematic of humanity at a particular epoch in its history of decline?

5.3 WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE COMIC IN THE TRAGIC? Is it apt to think of the play as tragi-comic? A tragedy with comic dimensions? Or a comedy with tragic overtones? Or is it more apt to think of the play as dissolving the distinction that keeps these genres artificially apart in a polarization that is false? Is the predicament of the two tramps comic rather than tragic? Are they `absurd' in several senses of the word `absurd': Are they silly because they lack the initiative to take the responsibility of their lives and choices on themselves? Are they foolish in supposing that if someone or something called Godot came, that would resolve their problems of loneliness, inaction, passivity, and lack of motivation? Are they funny in the sense of two fools who talk in an endless and bizarre rally (reminiscent of the comedy of music-hall routines,vaudeville, puppet-theatre, Laurel-and-Hardy slapstick, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin type of silent cinema foolery)? Are they not funny in their cross-talk, their inanity, their bizarre, eccentric and whimsical fantasy and inanity? Are they heroic in the sheer good-humoured resilience with which they take the blows and miseries of life?

5.4 WHAT OF LUCKY? Is the issue of a tragic predicament to be shifted in its focus from the pair of tramps to Lucky? Do they bear witness? And is that to which they bear witness the fate of Lucky? A fate of enslavement and degradation that mirrors symbolically all that the twentieth century has seen by way of violence, brutality and cruelty (remembering the fact that the play was written just after the end of World War II, when documentary footage of what the Nazi war-camps had practiced by way of atrocity by humans on other humans had already circulated in Europe)? Does Lucky mirror the fate of slaves and the colonized as much as he mirrors the fate of all those that have been persecuted by those with more power and the will to abuse it? Does Pozzo combine the Irish landlord lording it over his peasants with the type of Fascist dictator illustrated by Mussolini?

6. Interesting curiosities

6.1 Godot in Jail:

Beckett's biographer, James Knowlson reports (368-9) that on October 3, 1954, Beckett receives a letter from Luttringhausen prison in Germany, signed "un Prisonnier": "You will be surprised," wrote the prisoner, "to be receiving a letter about your play Waiting for Godot, from a prison where so many thieves, forgers, toughs, homos, crazy men and killers spend this bitch of a life waiting... and waiting... and waiting. Waiting for what? Godot? Perhaps." The prisoner related how he had heard from a French friend about the play that was taking Paris by storm and had the first edition sent to him in prison; he had read it over again and again, then had translated it himself into German... he had obtained permission to put the play on in the prison, had cast it himself, rehearsed it and acted in it. The first night had been on November 29, 1953.
The effect on the prisoners was electric; the play was a triumph. "Your Godot was our Godot," the prisoner wrote to Beckett. He explained that every inmate saw himself and his own predicament reflected in the characters who were waiting for something to come along to give their lives meaning. He then offered his own interpretation of the play, seeing in it a lesson of fraternity even in the worst of conditions: "We are all waiting for Godot and do not know that he is already here. Yes, here. Godot is my neighbor in the cell next to mine. Let us do something to help him then, change the shoes that are hurting him!"

6.2 A real Mr. Godot!

1969: James Knowlson also reports (506) that while Beckett was busy securing his privacy after being awarded the Nobel Prize, he received a brief letter from a M. Georges Godot in Paris, saying only how sorry he was to have kept him waiting.


Source: Penelope Merrit's web site	Source: Penelope Merrit's web site	Source: Penelope Merrit's web site