I really enjoyed reading this play. It keeps you on your
toes, and takes a lot of brainwork to get through it and detect the author’s meaning
behind the decoy of ‘meaninglessness’. It is an excellent challenge to a simplistic
and dogmatic world view. Do you see the hilarity of borrowing traditions that
others have established for you but really have become defunct for our time? Do
you secretly laugh at the tangle of logic and ideas that philosophers,
theologians, and intellectuals bandy around solely in order to impress each
other with words and concepts that don’t matter in real life? Do you find cliché’s to be exaggerated generalizations
that are often contradictory though consoling. Do you question the role of
logic in emotionally-driven beings? Do you question your part in the human ‘rat-race’,
the meaning of the universe in general, and do question your questioning of the
meaning of the universe? Then this play will play havoc on your brain, and it’s
great fun.
Samuel Beckett wrote plays questioning logic and meaning,
and became associated with what was labeled the “Theater Of The Absurd” with
some other playwrights of the mid-twentieth century. In many ways it is a quite understandable
reaction to the mind-numbing horrors perpetuated on a scale never before as
comprehensively realized and publicized as during WWI and WWII. Restarting the
quest to learn the direction and meaning of history, and our place within it,
might have been a good place to start. ‘Square One’ can make a lot of sense in
the wake of unspeakable tragedy. However, be not deceived you dilettante
readers of absurdism, intentional randomness might be more difficult to produce,
and therefore more intrinsically brilliant, than patent order. There is much treasure
buried in Beckett’s seeming wilderness of thought. This play, is, I believe, genius,
but for many passerby’s and the I-had-to-read-that-for-a-class types it may be
dismissed as nonsense. Right, and Alice In Wonderland was written by a
schizoid. It only goes to show, “To the true alone will the truth be known” (G.
Macdonald).
When it comes right down to it, Waiting For Godot is a naked
commentary on the phenomena of day-to-day life, our habits and customs, and our
normal way of dealing with it. If you’ve ever stopped to ask what it all means,
without quickly slurping some religious truism to smother your curiosity, then
you may have noticed that there is often a nagging feeling of repetition,
banality, and inertia that wells up in the spleen when one begins to question
the meaning of existence like only a human can. Staring this nagging feeling
straight on, and suffering through it long enough to describe it, is, as author
Paul Tillich has put it, a “courageous expression of decay” in that our fear has
been magnified, systematically catalogued, and finally reconstituted in
illustration to discover if our worry is a chimera, or a ‘real’ nightmare. Attempting
to dismiss existential angst is tantamount to denial. The only real way to deal
with it, is to deal with it. Beckett masterfully captures the postmodern
zeitgeist by creating a scene of sickeningly mundane and purposeless existence
which is accepted with minimal struggle by the characters with a passivity, an
act of the will however feeble, which succumbs to the overrated force of drift
in the material universe.
The play begins at a fresh cycle of another day in which the
characters “resume the struggle”, as they will do several times in the play,
simply because they feel they have no other option. Of course, we find later
that they do have options—they could leave, or hang themselves—but they tacitly
decide that to live is better, which tells us that living must not be so bad
after all, no matter how hard Beckett tries to convince us otherwise. The story
revolves around two guys waiting for someone named Godot to arrive. They
actually have no idea as to why they are waiting, who Godot really is, or if he
will ever really come. They get caught up in speculation about their life,
about things they heard about life, about the past, about the present. They
speculate on the meaning of the wisdom they’ve heard in their lifetime from
others, including religious teachings. They find all traditional logic to crash at the end. Even their personal logic begins to reveal fissures
in their normal conversation, and before they know it, they’ve lost their way
back to the original subject that got them talking in the first place. The
dialogue is all over the place, and actually quite funny. I was very surprised
at the amount of humor. The play’s subtitle is “A Tragicomedy In Two Acts”, but
I had underestimated how funny it was going to be. Some of it is vulgar, which
was also a surprise (like the moment one character yells out randomly with “who
farted?”, to which no answer is provided), but it was well-placed and
hard-thought, as strange as it may sound to someone who hasn’t read it. So,
again, the reader has to keep in mind not to mistake satire for actual
nonsense. I especially loved the rambling monologue of the servant named Lucky
which seemed very characteristic of the type of ideas and phrases academics and
professionals use in jostling at the trough for prestige.
In the end, the characters are mildly satisfied with a
pseudo-answer to the meaning of their lives, as people generally are. “What we
are doing here, that is the question.
And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this
immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come.” The
answer practically amounts to ‘because’, which functions as a distraction from
feeling the need to search any further. “We have kept our appointment and
that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How
many people can boast as much?/ Billions./ You think so?/ I don’t know./ You
may be right.” It’s pretty evident that Beckett’s “Godot” is a semi-eponym for
God (“Do you think God sees me?”). Many people are following after, and waiting
for, a God that gives them a sense of purpose, because they would rather have a
pat excuse for existence than none (“We always find something, eh Didi, to give
us the impression we exist?”). How many people are trying to get through life,
waiting for God to come and take them to a better place, because they still
haven’t found any other reason for this world other than the fact that God is
trying to save us from it? “Billions.”
And what is to be said for this kind of attitude that Nietzsche a
century earlier exposed as an ‘earth-wearyness’? The faithful boast in their
faithfulness to a God(ot) they don’t see, and may never see, because it frees
them from having to think further. Author and psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi summarizes the precarious situation of the religious in his
book Flow, “Metaphysical goals may
never be achieved, but then again, failure is often impossible to prove.”Living
Pascal’s Wager has its cons to be sure.
However, the blind religious are not the only ones who
suffer, though they may suffer to a different degree, and I don’t think Beckett
felt that the rest of humanity is much better off. We all employ the potency of
habit which deadens thought and may
save us in the end from over-thinking and over-feeling our anxiety and the confusing
ache of our existential meaninglessness, boredom and inertia. Together, habits and
a convenient stock of ‘reasons’ keep us moving, and offers us bliss through ignorance
regarding our purpose. “It’s so we won’t think./ It’s so we won’t hear./ We
have our reasons./ All the dead voices./ They make a noise like wings. / Like
leaves./ Like sand…All I know is that the hours are long, under these
conditions, and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which—how shall I
say—which may at first sight seem reasonable, until they become a habit.” But
habits and reasons only work so well. The suppressed Question regarding the
meaning of one’s own existence, which the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said
is the very nature of consciousness in that “it’s own being is in question”,
bubbles up again, regardless of the precautions against it. One can’t escape
it, and the effect can be maddening. “You may say [habit] is to prevent our
reason from foundering. No doubt. But has it not long been straying in the
night without end of the abyssal depths? That’s what I sometimes wonder. You
follow my reasoning?” The reply offers only a slight ray of hope, “We are all
born mad. Some remain so.” Nothing in the play frames the grotesqueness of the
human struggle any better than the following lines which is sure to disturb
anyone who hasn’t been too deeply anesthetized by habit: “[We come into this
life] Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly,
the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full
of our cries. (He listens). But habit
is a great deadener.”
The universe is big. The universe has been here for a long
time. The universe will be here for a long time after us. The universe provides
no easy answers to the meaning of my existence. The universe actually seems at
times disposed to resist me and my sense of order. And the universe will not
allow me to change its mind about it. Yeah, so what. I am here, and I am the
center. All things bend their shape around me. I make things small or big, near
or far, here or there, loved or hated, good or bad, me or not me. The universe
may be, but there is no color, no
hardness, no distance, no weight, no motion without me. “Through me it moves
and lives and has it’s being, for it is my offspring.”In Ted Hughes’ poem, Examination At the Womb Door, humanity’s
final triumph is put in sharp contrast.
“Who owns those scrawny little feet? Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.
Who owns these questionable brains? Death.
All this messy blood? Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.
This wicked little tongue? Death.
This occasional wakefulness? Death.
Given, stolen, or held pending trial? Held.
Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
Who owns all of space? Death.
Who is stronger than hope? Death.
Who is stronger than the will? Death.
Stronger than love? Death.
Stronger than life? Death.
But who is stronger than Death?
Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow.
Bam. Mr. Beckett, take two of these with water, and you’ll feel
much better the next morning.
For those who aren’t comfortable with the post-modern
problem Beckett is tackling, I would respond with: are you surprised that we in
our era have different questions to answer than did the Egyptians, Romans, or
early American pioneers? Our world is different, some old solutions have
succeeded while others have failed, and some old problems are continuing while
new ones are being generated all the time. It should come as no surprise that
new questions are being asked. As long as the boundaries of knowledge and
exploration are pushed further back, there will continue to be new problems,
and new thrilling challenges. Isn’t that what life is all about: growth? I
think it feels exhausting to those who are tired and want to settle, but not
all of us are ready to go back to sleep so soon after just waking up from
eternity. I want my eyes open and blood pumping for as long as they can. This
is my time. I don’t want it to go to waste, and books like this help me to keep
asking the questions and pushing forward. For some, Beckett’s characters’ wail
of “I can’t go on like this” feels justified. To others, like myself, the reply
from his friend is a mot juste, “That’s what you think.”
It probably should be mentioned that the absurdist movement,
closely associated with Dadaism in the same period, is an offshoot of
existentialism in general, and does not characterize all existentialist thought.
While the core of existentialist thought centers on the idea that all of the
sense in the world is the sense we
make of it, absurdism explores the limits of logic, even the logic of the
authors of this very exploration itself. The real heart and power of absurdism
is in the protest against the claim of infallibility of any one form or
expression of logic and positivism, while existentialism works towards
establishing the foundation of reliable experience and deeper intuition that
subsume the fluctuating landscape and edifices of human reason. For those
interested, Paul Tillich did a wonderful job identifying the redeeming
characteristics of existentialism and even adsurdism in his inspiring book, “The
Courage To Be.” It is well worth the read.
And for those of you who really dig the play and want to see
how it plays out on the stage, or maybe you’re just a glutton for punishment, here’s
a brilliant performance of Waiting For Godot:
