Nick Mount on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett's Waiting forgot Oh premiered on January the 3rd 1953 at a very small theater in Paris called the theater aduba Valon according to Beckett's biographer James Nielson the play became a hit only after and because it upset many among its first audiences at the Paris premiere a group of well-dressed hecklers forced the curtain to come down after Lucky's monologue the play was put on hold for that performance at the London premiere two years later a spectator shouted out in the middle of the play this is why we lost the colonies when Estragon of the same performance in London asked Vladimir if he has any rope with which they could hang themselves somebody in the audience yelled for God's sakes give him some at the opening night of the American premiere which was of all places in Miami much of the audience simply left at the intermission so let's jump ahead into a very different kind of audience for the play this is the 19th of November 1957 this is a story told by Martinez 'ln in his book the theatre of the absurd so a small group of very worried actors 19th of November 1957 are waiting behind a curtain in the dining hall at San Quentin Penitentiary in California they are about to perform the first live play at San Quentin in over 40 years and it is waiting for Godot they chose it mostly because it did not require women actors the difficulty of using women actors inside a maximum secure present so the curtain is about to rise on an audience that is made up of 1,400 of the toughest men on the planet and a young San Francisco theater group is going to perform a highly obscure avant-garde French play in which absolutely nothing happens a play that when it premiered in fort sophisticated theater audiences angered and upset them the director Herbert blah decides that he will try to prepare his audience a bit for what's coming the prisoners so he steps from behind the curtain and he tells them look what you're about to see is a bit like jazz just listen and take from it whatever you can the curtain parts the play starts and according to several witnesses who were there and have written about it 1,400 hardened convicts are riveted in their seats and they remain that way throughout the performance of the play they get it instantly what had bewildered and angered sophisticated theater audiences made immediate sense to an audience of convex at a maximum-security prison why why did the prisoners at San Quentin Penitentiary immediately grasp waiting for God oh well one answer perhaps it was because the prisoners saw themselves in this play that these are men who knew what it meant to wait who knew what it meant to be deprived of everything but waiting that's possible but my guess is you could have shown these prisoners a play about waiting that would have started a real riot not a theater riot a prison riot I think the main reason of those prisoners identified with this play and why they themselves started a theater troupe after to perform Beckett's plays in the prisons is that Beckett's plays are utterly and completely without pretense Samuel Beckett did not have for all of his reputation as an avant-garde playwright simply did not have a pretentious bone in his body and he doesn't have pretentious word anywhere in his writings it pains me to say this more than you will know but that is simply not true of TS Eliot or Virginia Woolf imagine reading the wasteland to those prisoners of San Quentin imagine reading to the lighthouse to those prisoners one of Beckett's early characters asks himself this question was it to be laughter or tears it came to the same thing in the end what I think that means is this that what laughter and tears have in common is that they dissolve pretense they cut through poses laughter and tears force us to take off whatever mask it is that we happen to be wearing and they leave us exposed laughing your cry if only for a moment getting to that moment when the masks are off when everything has been revealed if only for a moment is what drove Samuel Beckett as an artist he was repeatedly attracted to characters who have been stripped of pretense by age or by circumstance if I have my youth or my health or an important job or just a nice car it's a lot easier for me to forget that I'm going to die that I was born like all of you with my mother straddling the grave and Samuel Beckett's unforgettable image but if I've lost all of that if I'm homeless I'm sick or I'm old then very little else is likely to matter to me other than the fact of my mortality I am unlikely to worry too much about dying Fisher Kings if I'm starving it's the same tactic that was used in film by one of Becket's loves and that's Charlie Chaplin use the use the the man stripped of everything to go beneath pose to essence to get to the core of being to a point where the least pretentious the least false is the most true strip everything away from a man what's left is the truth because they wrote without pretense in an unpretentious language Chaplin and Beckett spoke about as close to a universal language as it is possible for art to get its language that is utterly in completely stripped of ornament that's why in the 1930s Charlie Chaplin was the most famous man in the world at his 1931 meeting with Gandhi the crowds were Beatle sized and they're screaming for Charlie not for Gandhi it's why the Little is still the most recognized fictional character in the world he doesn't even need language and that's why Beckett became a celebrity in the 1950s and why even today Beckett has more fan sites on the Internet than any of the authors we are looking at in this series almost all of them run by amateurs not by professional critics real fans one of them to which I would direct your attention just google Waiting for Godot and guinea-pigs Waiting for Godot and guinea-pigs it's a performance of Waiting for Godot by guinea-pigs waiting for gato is the most clear the most truthful play that I know the question is not why the prisoners at San Quentin saw that or something like it the question is why sophisticated theater audiences people who would go to see a new play an avant-garde play at a very small theater by then largely unknown writer did not see that well from martinez l'm the likely answer is there sophistication that is that unlike those prisoners the first sophisticated educated audiences of gato came to it loaded with expectations about what a play should be and do waiting for gato upset those expectations and so therefore upset those audiences to an educated audience the shock of this play isn't so much that it broke with dramatic conventions it's more that it threw those conventions in its audiences well-educated faces for instance Waiting for Godot actually follows all three of the so-called classical unities the three unities for the stage that exists in very fragmented form in Aristotle's Poetics and were turned into rules for the theater much later the play follows uses plausibly connected actions each action is connected to the other the unity of action it takes place in a concentrated period of time Aristotle had said merely in passing that Apple action in the play should attempt to confine itself to a single daylight period that became the rule of the unity of time which the play follows it takes place in a single setting unity of place but even though the play follows those classical unities it follows the rules only to float the very spirit of the rules traditional drama represents action what Aristotle said drama is that is the representation of an action gato is about in action it's about waiting for an action that never happens probably the most quoted line about this play from an earlier Irish reviewer Beckett has written a play in which nothing happens twice time in this play is not so much concentrated the way the unities urge as it is undifferentiated in this play one moment is no different from the next it's all the same suffering it takes place in a single setting but it is a setting that is almost completely removed from the real world it's a place that is nowhere and everywhere at the same time so waiting for gato follows the unity of action in a play without action it follows the unity of time in a play without time and it follows the unity of place in a play that is no place into the lighthouse we still had the bones of plod right the wess ancient faith that plots like problems have resolutions that fathers will say well done to their sons in waiting for gato the play ends exactly as it began both at the first and the second act and exactly the same way they end with the words yes let's go and the stage direction they do not move both acts time has passed that is what Beckett said he meant by the appearance of a few leaves on the tree in between the acts but unlike in Virginia wolves to the lighthouse the passage of time does not bring any kind of resolution any kind of vision the vision that we get in Lily's painting for instance there's no dot there's no answer no deeper resolution for the characters or for us the last page of the play my favorite lines in the play a stir gone I can't go on like this Vladimir that's what you think but the thing is this gato the play did not upset traditional drama so much as it just picked at its scabs this was hardly the first play that educated theatre audiences would have seen to subvert the classical unities it was not even close to the first play that they could have seen that would use dialogue that is punctuated by repetition and by silences they could have learned all that from Chekhov among others there are some obvious causes for the hostility of the plays first audiences things that probably should not be discounted its vulgarity its repetition specific circumstances in the different premiere at the Paris premiere the actor who played lucky modeled lucky after a patient of a friend of his who had Parkinson's disease apparently was a very horrifying performance that may be part of it in Miami the play was rather mistakenly billed as the last sensation of two continents so audiences didn't get what they expected so there may well be specific reasons for these things but I think what really confused and angered educated audiences about Waiting for Godot is its neglect of long-standing and deeply important hierarchies between dramatic audiences and their characters this is a play that was and is build on the title page as a tragic comedy and tragic comedy is pretty much like what it sounds a hybrid of tragedy and comedy comedy traditionally relies on its audience's superiority to its characters right our laughter from above at all of their silly mistakes the hierarchy of comedy tragedy is schizophrenic because on the one hand tragedy demands an audience that is inferior to its hero the hero of tragedy is the best of his kind a king the higher they come the harder they fall so the one hand they are above us but the audience of tragedy is also superior to the hero in one very crucial respect and that is that we know something he does not we know the downfall that is going to become I eat a piss whom all men call great on the first audiences that play when every audience that play hears those words they know what a tip is does not know those lines are deeply ironic because we know more than either piss does we know what's coming and that's called dramatic irony waiting for gato refuses to play by the rules of either of its generic parents if you feel comedy superiority to gogo and didi you have seriously misunderstood the play and probably yourself none of these characters come across as superior to us and certainly not as the best of their kind and most important of all we do not get to watch these characters make their mistakes from above them secure in the knowledge that we know more than they do because we don't there's no dramatic irony in this play no superior knowledge for us as audience now for an educated theatre goer it is perfectly okay for eat abyss the tragic character not to see what is going on not to know it's okay that Oedipus can't see or doesn't know that he murdered his father it's him who slept with his mother but the audience has to know that in tragedy themselves the reason that we have to know more than the hero does is to allow us to experience the cruel pleasure of dramatic irony the certain knowledge that you are doomed and I know it but you don't that's the pleasure of tragedy it's a cruel pleasure as Nietzsche among others have pointed out in waiting for God oh they did not get that they did not get to feel superior to its characters and that more than anything else is I suspect what upset those first educated audiences of the play being forced to remain in uncertainty with no better understanding of life than that's how it is on this of an earth bozos line the convicts at San Quentin on the other hand we're clearly comfortable with that maybe because they had daily evidence the poza was right that that is indeed how it is on this of an earth maybe because they did not feel that they needed to know more about life than a couple of tramps Samuel Beckett I was born in Dublin Ireland into a middle-class Protestant family in 1928 at the age of 22 he moved to Paris to take a teaching job and he became close friends with James Joyce another Irish expatriate in Paris of the time in the late 1920s and 30s he started writing his first separately published work was actually a parody of the wasteland a long poem about Descartes complete with footnotes he wrote an essay on James Joyce's Ulysses he wrote a book of short stories that was not published until many years later his first published novel came out in 1938 was called Murphy he started to make his name in literary circles with Murphy but the following year 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and all of that changed Beckett joined the French Resistance his cell was betrayed to the Nazis and he fled Paris for the South of France where he worked as a farmhand and completed another novel after the war Beckett volunteered in a Red Cross Hospital in the South of France as an interpreter imagine the stories he must have heard a great deal of this play probably reflects a post-war rationing in Paris the exchange is about carrots and radishes often all there was to eat in post-war Paris always being cold there's no heat Beckett in Suzanne the one that became his wife in the apartment they lived in in Paris after the war it had no heat so they built a tent in the living room and they would wear all their clothes inside the tent while they're writing their clothes are constantly worn out its post-war Paris partly under the influence of Joyce Beckett had begun writing with the sense that writers of his time had to find new forms and a new language for a new world that the world had changed as it had fur Eliot and art had to keep up after the war finding a way to break with literary tradition began to seem even more necessary to Beckett the Joyce as you'll know solve this problem by inventing his own language Beckett's solution was in a way even more radical and just as brilliant he switched languages after the war he wrote in French it's partly circumstance the woman that he hid with in southern France Suzanne who later became his wife did not speak a great of English but back at himself said that abandoning the language of English literature freed him from the necessity of style it allowed him to give up excess color style all the baggage of the English literary style what it did I think was it freed him from the weight of literary history his decision to write in French is a kind of willed amnesia that allowed him to simply start over again to start literary history at zero with Beckett after the war he wrote several novels and his most famous play on a Tonga Godot which he translated into English himself as Waiting for Godot the play made him famous he became the name in dramatic and literary circles especially but not only in Paris he won the Nobel Prize in 1969 refused to attend the ceremony and gave away the prize money to charity into France this is my favorite photograph of Becket he died in 1989 so Becket consciously said about forgetting the past by writing in a foreign language in the play that amnesia seems something that has happened to his characters rather than something they chose to do Esther GaN cannot remember from day to day if they've been here before if they've met each other before if God Oh has come or not and Vladimir's memory is not much better it is condition that afflicts everybody in the play when Pozo returns in act 2 he doesn't remember meeting Vladimir and Estragon when the boy returns a little later he doesn't remember they can't even remember each other's names page 19 Estragon speaks to pose oh you're not mr. gato sir bozo I am pose Oh bozo does that name mean nothing to you I say does that name mean nothing to you bozo bozo bozo bozo bozo ah bozo let me see bozo is it pose aware bozo I wants to a family called goes oh the mother had the clap the memory loss here is more than just theirs it's cultural amnesia it's not just personal or individual this is something that has happened to this world this society early in the play Wladimir says Hope deferred maketh the something sick who said that well it's from Proverbs that he couldn't remember that is itself not terribly surprising but a few moments later vladimir says to Estragon did you ever read the Bible Esther on the Bible I must have taken a look at it you don't forget reading the Bible you've either read it or you've not he can't even remember this book not what is in it it's similar in a way to the wasteland where literature and myth have been emptied of meaning or Shakespeare has become just a fragment in a pop song but it's more than that here because the Bible is not just in fragments it's been forgotten almost entirely and it's not just religion that they have forgotten it's all of it the entire Western inheritance culture nature beauty page 38 this is Pozzo he's explaining the twilight oh yes the night but be a little more attentive for pity's sake otherwise we'll never get anywhere look will you look at the sky pig - lucky good that's enough what is there so extraordinary about it qua sky it is pale and luminous like any other sky this hour of the day in these latitudes when the weather is fine an hour ago roughly after having poured forth even since say 10 o'clock in the morning tirelessly torrents of red and white light it begins to lose its effulgence to grow pale pale ever a little paler a little paler until finished it comes to rest but but behind this veil of gentleness and peace night is charging and will burst upon us like that just when we least expected that's how it is on this of an earth Western art loves the sunset it has always loved the sunset this time of day think of the thousands of poems the thousands of paintings the movies that end with sunsets it's a time of peace a time of beauty and stillness the sunset appeals to art because there's a moment in between times the twilight here it's just an opportunity for a performance it's something to pass the time Pozzo says after all of this he says - Vladimir and Estragon how did you find me it's a performance the beauty is gone the meaning forgotten any attempt at meaningful speech in waiting for gato is broken fragmented it's more pauses than words again it's a bit like Elliot's world recall proof rocks complained that it is impossible to say just what I mean but it's much more than that here it almost seems painful for Becket's characters to articulate what they're thinking to speak they stutter they sigh they lapse into silence in the absence of any kind of meaningful speech they opted instead for nonsense speech page 84 Vladimir speaking to break the silence do you oh pardon carry on no no after you no no you first I interrupted you on the contrary ceremonious ape Punk chilliest Pig finish your phrase I tell you finish your own that's the idea let's abuse each other vermin abortion more peon sewer rat curate critic oh now let's make it up go go dee dee your hand take it come to my arms your arms my breasts off we go how time flies when one has fun they play games to fill up the time they speak like this as Lattimer says so we won't think speak to avoid thinking words fill up the silence in the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo using chatter to fill up the dreadful silence and that might be partly why back in himself moved increasingly towards an art without words one of his later plays is called breath 1970 the lights come up on a stage that is strewn with garbage the audience hears a cry and then an inhale then they hear an exhale and another cry and the lights go out and that's it an entire human life in 40 seconds that's how long it takes to stage breath it's a cheap play for the actors even if words don't work even if language does not work in this play the characters in waiting for gato still long to hear the word they're still waiting for gato despite everything they're staying and they're waiting for him still hoping that something anything at all will happen to pass the time page 12 act 1 Vladimir what do we do now master on wait yes but while waiting what about hanging ourselves hmm did give us an erection an erection with all that follows where it falls Mandrake's grow that's why they shriek when you pull them up did you not know that let's hang ourselves immediately it's the same reason he suggests committing suicide merely to pass the time and it's the same reason I think that Vladimir keeps looking inside his hat there's never been anything in there before but who knows maybe this time there will be something in there it's the reason that they so want lucky to speak to pass the time but also on the off chance that something meaningful will come out of Lucky's mouth but when lucky does speak in his famous and terribly difficult to perform monal hook all that comes out is gibberish it's half forgotten scholarship fragments of pseudo knowledge all of which adds up to absolutely nothing lucky speech is a great deal like the factory scene the factory in Charlie Chaplin's modern time that that Factory in modern times is tremendously busy everybody's busy making something but nobody watching the film has any idea what the factory actually makes what the product is it's just noise and machines moving without producing anything mostly what Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for is God oh who is God oh well he's the person that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for after Beckett won the Nobel Prize he got a postcard from a Monsieur George Gatto in Paris and he wrote Beckett to say how sorry was that he kept him waiting all these years when the director of the first American performance of the play asked Beckett who or what Gatto meant Beckett said if I knew I would have said so in the play now for a great number of readers and audience members Gatto is God and the fact that he never shows up is a comment on the disappearance of God and religion from the post-war world for one of the prisoners at San Quentin Gatto is Society for another one of the prisoners Gatto was the outside world I think Gatto is a general symbol in the sense that Virginia Woolf's lighthouse is a general symbol that is it does not have a particular symbolic referent it means different things to different people to me what gutta means is any belief system that promises a complete explanation god yes but also da also the sacred scriptures the lily believes are inside mrs. Ramsey also science anything at all that promises a complete explanation or answer to life that's what we're waiting for what really matters though in this play I think is not who or what God Oh is it's the fact that we're all waiting for God Oh see action helps us to ignore time it's easier to ignore the passage of time if you're busy if you're pushed about by causality waiting forces us characters and audience to confront time to be aware of its passage to remember as the play forces you to that we are all born with our mothers astride the grave now we tend to forget this because the secret to life is just to keep on going just to keep on doing what we do out of habit if nothing else page 104 Wladimir a stride of a grave and a difficult birth down in the whole lingeringly the gravedigger puts on the forceps we have time to grow old the air is full of our cries but habit is a great deadener so Becket himself said much earlier in a book that he wrote on Marcel Proust 1931 habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit lovely image breathing is habit life is habit rarely does one experience the moment when the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being that is what Samuel Beckett is aiming at always dim at did aim at not the dramatization of action of all the things that we do out of habit but the dramatization of a condition the suffering of being that's suffering is one reason why this is quite often called an existentialist play it says so on the back of the Grove edition that this is an existentialist play I don't think so at heart I do not think this is an existentialist play at all the basic principle of existentialist ethics is that we are what we make of ourselves in jean-paul sartre famous phrase existence precedes essence existence precedes essence what is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence it means that first of all man exists turns up appears on the scene and only afterwards defines himself thus there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive it man is nothing else but what he makes of himself such is the first principle of existentialism but if existence really does precede essence man is responsible for what he is what such a means is that the only person who is responsible for your actions for the life that you make is you there is no predetermined path there's no such thing as human nature and that is what existentialist angst is the realization that you are completely on your own that there is no one else no god but nothing else either to whom you can defer meaning and responsibility for your actions waiting for God oh shares that existential angst there is no superior knowledge for the characters no God for us or the characters no answers it's not just that God oh never speaks never gives an answer like da or well done God oh never even shows up so Waiting for Godot represents something that is very close to the existentialist spirit the existential condition which is hardly surprising since they both grew out of the same soil and that is occupied France but the play is not existential issed if you see the difference because it does not share the hope that Sartre found in the wreckage and that is humanity's radical freedom to find our own answers to create our own essences to make ourselves early in the play Wladimir tells Esther gone a story from the Bible story from the Gospel of Luke sorry about the two thieves Wladimir two thieves crucified at the same time as our Savior one our what our Savior two thieves one is supposed to have been saved and the other damned safe from what hell I'm going he does not move and yet how is it this is not boring you I hope how is it that of the four evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved the four of them were there or there abouts and only one speaks of a thief being saved come on go go return the ball can't you once in a way I find this really most extraordinarily interesting Estragon comes back a few moments later look the evangelists don't agree and that's all there is to it Vladimir but all four were there and only one speaks of a thief being saved why believe him rather than the others Esther God who believes him Wladimir everybody it's the only version they know Astra God people are bloody ignorant Apes three different takes on this story okay the classic Christian interpretation of the story that you just heard in fragments is by st. Augustine st. Agustin says that the story of the thieves means this do not despair one of the thieves was saved do not presume one of the thieves was damned that's the lesson for Agustin this story is a lesson in the wonder and the uncertainty of grace the gift of God's love that you cannot presume but you also do not need to despair to an existentialist like Sartre that is nonsense this thief chose to be a thief and that's why he's hanging up there on the cross most important to an existentialist there is no mysterious force like grace deciding in advance our essence deciding that some of us are saved and some of us are damned now what does the story mean to gogo and didi not much it is just another story to pass the time Esther on barely cares enough to listen and Vladimir is more interested in why only one of the four apostles tells the story then and why one thief was saved and the other was damned the story simply has no relevance to their lives Vladimir even has to struggle to remember what the opposite of saved is he can't remember what damned is Estragon and Vladimir do not have st. Agustin's faith that there is a meaning behind the apparently random events of life but they also uncrewed Lea do not share sorrows conviction that they can themselves decide that meaning so all they do is suffer and play games to fill up the void waiting forgot oh does not show humans controlling time freely shaping their own destiny the way an existentialist should it shows humans enduring time what we're life what we're like I should say when we've got nothing left but time which is to say all the time I can't go on like this says Estragon that's what you think says Vladimir that is what Theodor Adorno said was the only consolation in Beckett's plays the only fragment of hope that is left in these plays stoicism toughness survival I can't go on like this that's what you think yes you can beginning with martinez l'm a very long line excuse me of critics and classroom teachers have attempted to diffuse Vladimir's bombshell by saying that he and esta GaN are not good existentialists that is that this is a critique of them that Vladimir and Estragon are avoiding both the possibility and the responsibility of their freedom and Sasha's terms they are behaving in bad faith but the problem with reading Waiting for Godot as a criticism of its characters existentialist or otherwise is that it makes us the audience superior to those characters it makes the play depend on not only what it does not have but what it dogged ly and determinately rejects and that's dramatic irony the giving of more knowledge to us than the characters inside the play if the play did endorse existentialism if it was as it is repeatedly claimed to be an existentialist play that would mean that one religion one explanation has survived and the play is about the loss of all explanations all answers including existentialism not just the outdated answers but also the fashionable answers that's what I meant by Becket being utterly without pretense that he could turn his back on the fashionable as well as the dated waiting for God Oh is not about God oh it's about waiting the first word is the word that matters it's not about answers it's about enduring without answers I can't go on like this that's what you think these are the last words the Beckett ever wrote from the stage from a play called what we're 1983 time passes that is all makes sense who may I switch off thank you

Channel: Nick Mount

Views: 115,262

Rating: 4.9179811 out of 5

Keywords: Samuel Beckett (Author), Waiting For Godot (Play), Godot (Fictional Character), Existentialism (Literary School Or Movement), Nick Mount

Id: 1ddsl5nPfAc

Length: 48min 14sec (2894 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/leafy11]

My prof first year! Every lecture left me in awe :)

[u/Thistatementisfalse]

I love Nick Mount's lectures. Excellent ones on Lolita, The Waste Land, and To the Lighthouse out there as well.

[u/jarjartwinks]

why they gotta pronounce it GOD-oh.... ugh FML

[u/[deleted]]

This was really great - thank you for this.