BECKETT
Just as Ibsen and Strindberg and Chekhov reinvented theater at the end of the nineteenth century, so Beckett and a handful of avant-garde playwrights did so again in the middle of the twentieth. What are some of the characteristics of this new kind of theater?
What does it all mean? Martin Esslin, who wrote the classic book on the subject, explains: "The Theater of the Absurd forms part of the unceasing endeavor of the true artists of our time to breach the dead wall of complacency and automatism and to re-establish an awareness of man’s situation when confronted with the ultimate reality of his condition. In one of its aspects it castigates, satirically, the absurdity of lives lived unaware and unconscious of ultimate reality… And since it is trying to present a sense of being, it can neither investigate nor solve problems of conduct or morals. It cannot show the clash of opposing temperaments or study human passions locked in conflict, and is therefore not dramatic in the accepted sense of the term…. It presents the audience with a picture of a disintegrating world that has lost its unifying principle, its meaning, and its purpose–an absurd universe."
"The existential experience is thus felt as a succession of attempts to give shape to the void; when nothing can lay claim to final, definitive reality, we enter a world of games, of arbitrary actions structured to give the illusion of reality…. How is it that this vision of the ultimate void in all its grotesque derision and despair should be capable of producing an effect akin to the catharsis of a great tragedy? It’s not the content of the work, what is said, that matters here, but the quality of the experience that is communicated–a mind of merciless integrity in uncompromising determination to face the stark reality of the human situation."
As in Kafka there is a grim humor in Beckett’s bleakest visions. And like another predecessor, the great Russian playwright Chekhov, he "excels in laying bare the nature of life without real hope of improvement or change, and the subterfuges we adopt to conceal from ourselves the worst facts about our condition, in dialogue that modulates with striking rapidity from the sublime to the ridiculous, speech without consequence reflecting action without a conclusion" (John Fletcher).
So this is what the twentieth-century world looks like to Beckett: the grand parade of human aspiration reduced to life at the end of the line: no "moments of being," as in Woolf, no epiphanies, as in Joyce, only waiting and decay. Everything goes: minds, bodies, memories. Culture and logic have become scraps and fragments, detritus, the luggage of the past. And yet we have humor, and camaraderie, and improvisation in Beckett’s absurd world, and the effect can be bracing rather than depressing.
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was born in a suburb of Dublin. Like his fellow Irish writers Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and William Butler Yeats he belonged to the Protestant minority in Ireland, a ruling class that steadily lost status and confidence and finally political power over the course of the long nineteenth century. Like James Joyce, who became his friend and mentor, Beckett went into exile in France. He had taken a degree at Trinity College, Dublin, in Romance Languages, and came to the Ecole Normale in 1928, though it’s unlikely that he had much contact with Sartre and his friends. He wrote studies of Joyce and Proust, short fiction (More Pricks Than Kicks, 1934) and poetry (Whoroscope, 1930 and Echo’s Bones, 1935) and a novel (Murphy, 1938). "The elements of Beckett’s vision could already be found in his grim little 1931 book on Proust, where he evoked the deadening effect of habit as the only defense against time and mortality. He arrived early at an extremely bleak view of life–from the beginning, he saw birth and death as part of a single continuum, and life as a futile stay of execution– and a sense of the peculiarity of his own detached and morbid temperament" (Morris Dickstein).
But if Beckett arrived at his worldview early, he found his voice rather late, after the Second World War. He is perhaps the last of the major modernist writers. He combines Proust’s preoccupation with memory and mortality, Joyce’s linguistic virtuosity and learned whimsy, Kafka’s and T.S. Eliot’s sense of sterility and blockage, with the knockabout farce and bleak environments of Irish playwrights like Synge and O’Casey.
Beckett joined a French Resistance group in 1941, was forced into hiding in 1942, and spent much of the war as an agricultural laborer in the south of France on the run from the Gestapo. The situation of France under occupation fed his imagination: waiting for a code-named agent, who might or might not appear, and trying to pass the time while remaining inconspicuous–this was a common experience in the Resistance. And it’s the germ of Waiting for Godot.
Success and fame came after the war, with Godot (1953), which, like most of his later work, he wrote in French. More plays and novels followed, with an increasing tendency toward greater concentration, sparseness, and brevity. Beckett’s switch from third-person narration in his very cerebral pre-war fiction to first-person narratives, which corresponded with the change from English to French, was crucial for the development of his plays, which increasingly became monologues. His native language had too many resonances for him: writing in French was a strategy of simplification, a way of escaping Joyce’s rich verbal allusiveness. His early work had been full of learned allusions; his breakthrough was the discovery of how much and his characters did not know, how little they could understand or explain. Godot is "a dramatization of what it is like and what it means to exist in a state of radical unknowingness" (Lawrence Graver).
Beckett deals in an unheroic world of flagging energies–the opposite end of the spectrum, one might say, from the proud heroes of Simone Weil’s Iliad. If Weil’s subject is energy, Beckett’s is entropy. "He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past poise or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then, as metabolism lowers, amid God’s paucity not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached" (Richard Ellmann).
"He dealt with human beings in such extreme situations not because he was interested in the sordid and diseased aspects of life but because he concentrated on the essential aspects of human experience. The subject matter of so much of the world’s literature–the social relations between individuals, their manners and possessions, their struggles for rank and position, or the conquest of sexual objects–appeared to Beckett as mere external trappings of existence, the accidental and superficial aspects that mask the basic problems and the basic anguish of the human condition. The basic questions for Beckett seemed to be these: How can we come to terms with the fact that, without ever having asked for it, we have been thrown into the world, into being? And who are we; what is the true nature of our self? What does a human being mean when he says ‘I’?" (Esslin).
The bowler was designed in 1850 by James and George Lock, hatters of St. James’s Street, London, for a Norfolk landowner, William Coke, Earl of Leicester. They were manufactured by William Bowler, across the Thames, and his name stuck, because of its fortuitous association with roundness. Coke wanted a hat that his gamekeepers could wear on horseback without getting it entangled in low branches, and which was round and hard, so that falling objects would glance off it easily. The felt used in its manufacture was shellacked with a process involving mercury (hence the phrase "mad as a hatter"). So the bowler started as a riding hat, and Americans called it a derby because of its popularity with the crowd at the Derby horse race at Epsom Downs, near London. But by some obscure process it soon acquired a popularity that spread upward into the aristocracy, across to the urban middle class, and down to the petite bourgeoisie. The top hat conferred the height and dignity of social standing to its wearer, but at considerable cost in comfort and convenience. The bowler was cheaper and more stable and snug; you could wear it on horseback, in trains, on buses; it was well designed for commuters as well as sportsmen. It conferred dignity but made the dignity seem casual. It brought a certain sobriety to leisure activities and a sportiness to more formal occasions. It expressed a gentility that had become active and energetic while remaining respectable. It became an emblem of modern life.
And it eventually migrated into the music hall, where it expressed the working class aspiration to artisan or genteel status. And from there directly into silent film comedy, with Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. It was Mussolini’s favorite hat, until he discovered in the 1930 that people were comparing him to Oliver Hardy. But Beckett loved Chaplin and Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. He used Keaton in a film called Film (1965). And he modeled Didi and Gogo in part on Stan and Ollie. "Didi and Gogo in their bowler hats, one of them marvellously incompetent, the other an ineffective man of the world devoted (some of the time) to his friend’s care, resemble nothing so much as they do the classic couple of 1930s cinema, Laurel and Hardy, whose troubles with such things as hats and boots were notorious, and whose dialogue was spoken very slowly on the assumption that the human understanding could not be relied on to work at lightning speed…. They journeyed, they undertook quests, they had adventures; their friendship, tested by bouts of exasperation, was never really vulnerable; they seemed not to become older, nor wiser, and in perpetual nervous agitation, Laurel’s nerves occasionally protesting like a baby’s, Hardy soliciting a philosophic calm he could never quite find leisure to settle into, they coped" (Hugh Kenner).
RECOMMENDED:
Martin Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1969)
Lawrence Graver, Waiting for Godot (Cambridge, 1989)
John Fletcher, "Bailing Out the Silence," in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 1987).
Morris Dickstein, "An Outsider in His Own Life, New York Times Book Review, 3 August 1997.
George Steiner, "Leastness," The New Yorker, 16 September 1997.