Jonathan Orsi
Of the people who’ve had the sorrowful satisfaction of reading Samuel Beckett, there may diverge two roads of response: revulsion, and rapture. The former unfortunately falls into the limiting approach of literalism; the story begins and ends with the word. The literalist will suffer no inquiry about Beckett’s work, no exploration of his characters and their actions. The literalist need only read the title of Waiting for Godot to interpret the play. There are those of us however, who cannot be so dismissive, who must remain. For those lucky few, those readers of rapture, there is a moment of release. For us, Godot does arrive, we do go on, and the dawn does break. Reading Beckett’s work becomes almost a religious experience. This essay will explore the ideas of how reading, writing, and living become sacred rituals. It will conclude by addressing and answering the question: what’s the point of reading stories that aren’t even real?
Though this essay will focus on the two plays Endgame, and Waiting for Godot, it cannot entirely avoid the abysm of Beckett’s Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) in which the subtleties of writing, and authorial voice are explored. The issue that the literalist audience approaches literature with, and the central question running throughout this novel is addressed at the close of Molloy. Beckett writes, “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” (Molly 170). Here, Beckett confronts a myriad of problems that will arise throughout this essay. For purposes of structure and balance, we will begin with aesthetics, emotion and the readers response to Beckett’s style of writing.
Many seem to be to be hung up on the incessant and impenetrable gloom that surrounds Beckett’s writing. His characters, plot, and language drag on in dreary disdain. Reader’s often allow the bleak and pessimistic prose to invade their own view and opinion of the work. What is crucial to recognize on part of the reader, that these stories are just that—stories. It is not midnight it is not raining. Our association with writing and literature can take us through worlds of events, and galaxies of emotions, but we must always be conscious of the “man behind the curtain”. This disillusionment is a broad and very central theme, but it is important to discuss it in specifics.
The issue of authorial voice becomes quite focal in Beckett’s work. It is spotlighted in the aforementioned passage from Molloy. Attention is brought to several questions. Who is writing? Why are they writing? And why has Beckett brought in a framed authorial narrative? Beginning with the latter question, we see a direct intention on behalf of Beckett to draw attention to the illusion he has created. As with Prospero in Shakespeare’s the Tempest, the creator (that is Shakespeare) fabricates a creative figure who, in turn effaces that which he (Prospero) has created. These artistic surrogates offer to extrapolate our unveiling of the illusion within the play and extend it to the illusion of the play itself. Beckett consistently “drowns his books” throughout his texts. The exchanges between Clov and Hamm in Endgame routinely allude to their presence within a play,
HAMM: if you must hit me, hit me with the axe.
(pause.)
Or with the gaff, hit me with the gaff. Not with the dog. With the Gaff. Or with the axe.
(Clov picks up the dog and give it to Hamm who takes it in his arms.)
CLOV (imploringly): Let’s stop playing!
HAMM: Never!
(Endgame. Act 1)
This disillusionment of the stage gives rise to the humor of the present situation. The panacea statement of, “It was all a joke” is applicable here and throughout Beckett’s work. Our attention to the situation is restored in these humors moments of parody. Beckett even casts away subtlety and offer up lines like,
CLOV: I’ll leave you.
HAMM: No!
CLOV: What is there to keep me here?
HAMM: The dialogue.
(Endgame. Act 1)
Discussing these same nods to the stage presented in Waiting for Godot, Claudia Clausius in her essay Bad Habits While Waiting for Godot states, “ When Didi and Gogo step outside their roles to allude directly to the theater, they admit to themselves and remind us of the drama on stage. The mirror/ window function is inherent in parody; without it parody ceases to exist. For parody to work one must recognize the original and one’s role in it and one must interpret the criticism implied by the distortion” (Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett pg. 132). To accept this concept we must also identify what is being parodied. No doubt the idea of the theater is being scrutinized by Beckett, but on a different level, one that accepts the stage as a representation of life, Beckett also is parodying life itself.
Though extremely minimalized and distilled, Beckett’s plays incorporate the essential elements of life within them. Birth and death—the greatest points of polarity orbiting life, are scrutinized and meditated upon throughout all of Beckett’s work. The term, “come and go” found repeatedly peppered among virtually all of Beckett’s texts, holds between its dualism: everything. Suspiciously the response Satan gives to God during their conversation in the Book of Job, the phrase : “I come and go” is perhaps the purest distillation of life into four words. One can begin by looking at phrase in its passive representation of life on earth, in that we live our lives mundanely and bleak, we wait, we sit, we stand, we come, we go. It can be further applied to a graphic and Beckettesque interpretation that our life is a series of ejaculations and defecations. Beyond these brief explorations there sits yet another metaphor for the phrase. We come and go in life, birth and death. In a burst by the character Pozzo in Waiting for Godot this view is passionately yawped,
POZZO: (Suddenly furious) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then its night once more.”
(Waiting for Godot. Act II)
The reductive view of life presented by Pozzo is perhaps the central philosophy of all Beckett’s works. Beckett continually claws away at the false façade of life and it’s practices. By reducing life to its most base form, we see the unveiled vision of our existence. These plays center around the ideas of decay and decrepitude. After the flesh of body and the flesh of life have withered and rotted away Beckett’s characters still…remain. Now the question arises of how, or why do these characters remain, what’s to keep them there? Hamm’s response of “The dialogue” is perhaps one of the best answers to this question. What Beckett issues here is that our routines, daily habits, our rituals function to keep us in place.
The ritualistic waiting in Waiting for Godot suffers no end. There is no valediction to the actions that these characters undergo; they simply perform them because that is their duty. At this junction, these rituals begin to take on the elemental nature of religious practices. As in any religion faith is often actualized through practice. The practices and methods that surround any religion are away of “living” the faith. This is a topic that needs much attention and has many points of contention, but for purposes of structure and simplicity let us agree most religion requires some level of epistemic faith, actualized through ritual. That is, rituals become an offering or an act of solidarity with a God/Gods in the hope that they (God/Gods) are “watching” and will reward our actions. This is all done however, without any tangible valediction. This is the essence of faith, that in the “end” our actions will be acknowledged. Gogo and Didi perform their own religious practices, so these rituals (theirs being waiting) begin to supplant a God(ot) un-manifested.
For Beckett’s characters who’s extreme pessimism calls into question the credibility of this epistemic faith, ritual carries connotations of humor and parody. Beckett’s character’s, their dialogue and specifically stage directions are so routine they become absurd. At the opening curtain of Endgame before any word has been spoken, Clov’s obsessive ritual literally sets the stage for this plays parody of the routine of life,
“Clov goes and stands under window left. Stiff, staggering walk. He looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left…” (Endgame. Act I).
These opening stage directions exemplify the actions that support Beckett’s plays, In the apocalyptic view of the world that is Endgame these routines, and the exchanges between the character are seemingly all that’s left. Most of the characters proclaim they want to die, or that they want to depart, but out of these habits they remain. At the close of Waiting for Godot this tireless continuation ends without any conclusion,
“ESTRAGON: Didi.
VLADIMIR: Yes.
ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.
ESTRAGON: If we parted? That might be better for us.
VLADIMIR: We’ll hang ourselves to-morrow. (pause.) Unless Godot comes.
ESTRAGON: And if he comes?
VLADIMIR: We’ll be saved. Vladimir takes off his hat (Lucky’s), peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, knocks on the crown, puts it on again.
ESTRAGON: Well? Shall we go?
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.
VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move
Curtain.
(Waiting for Godot. Act II).
This incessant waiting becomes more than an act in life, it becomes life itself. Beckett plays issues that these actions go beyond actions, they are dictations. The repetitiveness presents itself as comic relief and it succeeds in doing so, but there is an underlying level of spiritual reflection at play. Clausius writes,
“In parody, the form and repetition are the content. The Ritual leads nowhere but back to itself, to the need for more ritual; it no longer links man with his origins in the past and his merits in the future…The crisis now is that contact between myth and ritual no longer exists; man is cut off and alone. Ritual now becomes a means unto itself without which life is intolerable” (Burkman 128).
We then of course, ask ourselves several questions both of the characters and of the author. We question the perseverance of the actors to continue, and we question the authors intent of creating those characters, of creating at all. More significantly we wonder what makes these stories of decay and depravity such pieces of beauty. In her essay Beckett and Religion, Mary Bryden muses on this point, asking, “If, then there is no ‘path,’ no ‘remedy,’ no ‘revelation,’ why does a persistent strain of Beckett commentary assign spiritual values to his work? What turns a groan into a miserere, or a sigh of relief into a deo gratias? (Byrden 154). The answer as Beckett seems to insinuate is that no matter the defining term, or the physical act, all actions of life become ritual. As we await the end, or a God of any kind, we perform. The performance on stage is both farcical play for the actors, and a ritualized action for them as well.
Beckett’s own position as an author is his actualized ritual. For a man who once stated that every word he wrote was, “a stain on silence” we must question his motives for writing at all. If philosophy of his plays are implemented we see that Beckett writes because he must, it is inescapable it is his own faith actualized.
Our position as the audience, as the consumers of this literature, begin to manifest into the same form. We read because it is an act of life. We are governed by these actions beyond the point reason and recognition. Reading Beckett’s work, or any literature for that matter hints back on itself as an illusion. In doing so, if (as Nabokov might say) we, “perform that curious mental maneuver” we may in fold this illusion and turn it upon and within ourselves. It is this nearly impossible, yet very simple action of acknowledging the “man behind the curtain” we can draw upon our own lives as a series of illusions. We ritualize, practice and perform all our lives so as to feed the image of a world we create. Reading may be simply one of these rituals, but through it we might be fortunate enough to catch a faded glimpse, to see through a glass darkly.
Work Cited
Beckett, Samuel. Endgame and Act Without Words. New York: Grove Press, 1970.
Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels. New York: Grove Press, 2009.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
Burkman, Katherine. Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Rutherford N.J.: Fairleigh Dickerson University Press, 1987.
Oppenheim, Lois. Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
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