Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot: A Study Guide

(revised 2-6-93)

for the Margetts Theatre Production, January 28 to February 13, 1993

Prepared and Edited by Bob Nelson

Theatre and Film Department Brigham Young University
This study guide has been prepared for the use of teachers and leaders of groups who attend the production of Waiting for Godot. We hope it enhances audience enjoyment and leads to greater understanding of the play and its history and meaning. All Rights Reserved Robert A. Nelson, 1993

Nothing is certain.

Contents:
Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot: The Playwright and the Play, by Bob Nelson Is Waiting for Godot an Absurdist Play? by Michael J. Noble The Theme of Entrapment in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas, by Kim Abunuwara Waiting for GodotA Brief Production History, by Nola Smith Samuel BeckettA Short Chronology, by Nola Smith 2 6 10 14 16

Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot: The Playwright and the Play by Bob Nelson
As much as any body of writing this century, the works of Samuel Beckett reflect an unflinching, even obsessive flirtation with universal void. His literary and dramatic accounts of skirmishes with nothingness portray human beings (generally beings, at least, beings more or less human and intact) situated in paradoxical, impossibly absurd circumstances. Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the comfortable Dublin suburb of Foxrock in 1906, on the 13th either of April, which was Good Friday that year, or else of Mayhe and his birth certificate always disagreed on this point. He was the second son of a fairly prosperous, middle-class, Protestant couple: his father was a contractor and his mother a former nurse. Becketts education was conventional. When he was thirteen, his parents sent him to boarding school at the Portora Royal in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. He studied classics, and was also quite successful at cricket, rugby, and swimming. In 1923, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Modern Languages. He was honored for high scholastic achievement upon receiving his BA degree in December 1927. In 1928 he began a literary career as a professor and critic. He tutored French for two terms at Campbell College, Belfast, and later that year he began a two-year exchange fellowship at the cole Normal Suprieure in Paris. While in Paris he met his mentor-to-be, James Joyce, and he began to write and publish criticism and poetry. He returned to Dublin, where between 1930 and 1932 he took his MA degree and lectured in French at Trinity College. For the next several years, he wrote and traveled throughout Europe, finally settling in Paris in 1937. Late one night in January 1938, a pimp named Prudent stabbed Beckett in the chest, puncturing a lung and nearly killing him. Some time after his recovery, he was active in the French resistance during the Nazi occupation. In 1942, to avoid imminent capture, he fled to the unoccupied south where he worked several years as a farm laborer. After the war, he worked for a short time with the Irish Red Cross in Normandy. On March 25, 1962, he married Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, seven years his elder; she had devoted herself to him almost entirely since they first met during Becketts stay in the hospital in early 1938. For half a century, beginning in the 1930s, Beckett wrote novels, short stories, some criticism and essays, and several volumes of poetry. He also wrote thirty-two dramatic worksone for the cinema, five for television, seven for radio, and nineteen for the stage. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature on October 23, 1969just twenty years after he completed his first and longest play, Waiting for Godot, which initially he had such trouble getting produced. As to the date of Becketts death in Paris on December 22, 1989, there is no question. The ultimate oblivion which Beckett and his plays approached inexorablythe grave astride which all are born (Godot

84; all references to the text of the play are to be found in The Complete Dramatic Works)finally claimed him. Ironically, he had spent his last months under constant care, because of severe emphysema, strapped into a straightbacked chair hooked to a device which allowed him to breathe somewhat easier. His voice, however, continued to be heard, as he occasionally allowed his publishers to issue texts in which voices, unencumbered by bodies, situations, or settings, addressed the human condition in the spare and elegant prose of which he was the master. In his last year of life, it seemed as if his physical condition had finally, tragically, achieved the stasis he had sought for so many years through his fictional voices. (Bair xvi) The many hundreds of books and articles devoted entirely or in part to Beckett criticism over the last four decades attest to the nearly unprecedented attention that his relatively brief literary output has attracted. He wrote far fewer words than have been written about him and his writing. In addition, the works themselves, particularly the stage plays, follow a pattern of becoming increasingly abbreviated as his career progresses. His first three stage plays, written and first performed between 1948 and 1961, are his longest. They are many times longer, in most cases, than any of his other sixteen stage plays, written and first performed between 1956 and 1983. (His five television plays, too, written between 1965 and 1982, follow the same patternin their printed form, the last ones are about half the length of the first ones.) Beckett thus ends his [playwriting] career with short works structured around variations of gesture and voice. This shift from major to minor seems surprising, until we consider that his earlier masterpieces have helped us to come to terms with our absurdity. To continue to portray it in monumental terms would now seem grandiose. Becketts later, slight works correspond to the little meaning he has taught us to expect from life. (Astro 24) Becketts first three produced plays are not only his longest but also his best known. He wrote the first two in French before translating them into English. En attendant Godot later became Waiting for Godot, and Fin de partie became Endgame. About the time that Beckett began to be questioned about whether writing his plays in French was some kind of evasive maneuver (see Bair 516-517), he began to write his novels in French and his plays in English. His third play, Happy Days, first appeared in English, and he wrote nearly all the rest of his stage plays in English. Waiting for Godot was first produced at the Thtre de Babylone, Paris, January 5, 1953, in French, as En attendant Godot, and at the Arts Theatre Club, London, August 3, 1955, in English. Waiting for Godot firmly established Becketts reputation, although acclaim was slow to follow. It took theatre critic Harold Hobson to begin to stem the tide of negative criticism; he urged that everyone Go and see Waiting for Godot. At the worst you will discover a curiosity, a four-leaved clover, a black tulip; at the best something that will securely lodge in a corner of your mind for as long as you live (Bair 454). The play also signaled his themes and methods, despite Becketts sometimes embarrassment at its success and his oft professed preference for Endgame. The action of Waiting for Godot is spare, even stark. Estragon and Vladimir, two tramps passing the time together along a barren roadside, wait for someone named Godot, who never comes. Pozzo and Lucky, a master and his slave, appear in each of

the two acts, as does a boy who comes to say that Mr. Godot cannot keep his appointment with them today but will surely come tomorrow. At the beginning of the second act the lone tree, barren before, now has four or five leaves (Works 11, 53)simply to record the passage of time, Beckett assures us (Bair 383). Near the end of both acts, The light suddenly fails. In a moment it is night. The moon rises at the back, mounts in the sky, stands still (Works 50; cf. 86). Beckett scrupulously avoided identifying the Godot of the title. He seemed puzzled and even pleased at the proliferation of interpretations engendered by the plays titlee.g., that Godot is God; or a transposition of the protagonists nicknames, Didi and Gogo; a reference to godillot or godasse, French for clumsy hobnailed boots; the name of an elderly bicycle racer in a certain Tour de France; the one for whom the Rue Godot de Mauroy was named; or the Monsieur Godeau for whom characters wait fruitlessly in Balzacs Le Faiseur (Bair 382-84; Lyons 14-15). Waiting for Godot is one of the earliest and most representative examples of Theatre of the Absurd, a phrase coined by Martin Esslin to describe the anti-realistic post-War drama of such playwrights as Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugne Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Esslin suggested that we may find the philosophical underpinnings unifying the works of these fiercely independent playwrights in the work of Albert Camus. Camus proposes that we see a paradigm for human life in the myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the rock would roll back of its own weight (88). Sisyphus, the absurd hero, is condemned to strain with all his might to accomplish his task, over and over, in hopelessly futile and utterly meaningless labor. The best he can hope for is that rare experience of a consciousness of the absurdity of his plight. At such moments of intellectual clarity, Sisyphus is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. In fact, we and Sisyphus may rise even to tragic stature when we are fully conscious of our absurd condition: Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn....[Such complete awareness] makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men. (90-91) Becketts protagonists in Waiting for Godot experience striking instances of blinding awareness, many of which fly by almost too quickly to note. Near the end of the play, while Estragon struggles yet again with his boots, Vladimir reflects quietly: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? [Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir stares at him.] Hell know nothing. Hell tell me about the blows he received and Ill give him a carrot. [Pause.] Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger 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. [He looks again at Estragon.] At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. [Pause.] I cant go on! [Pause.] What have I said? [He goes feverishly to and fro, halts finally at extreme left, broods.] (Works 84-85)

Besides being theatrically effective, this speech is a Beckett primer, Beckett in microcosm. It touches upon virtually every major Beckett theme: self-doubt, vulnerability; the impossibility of knowing; being doomed to suffer; symbiotic relationships of ultimately isolated individuals; the relativity of truth; the brevity and absurdity of life, which is a tumbling, chilling, chaotic flash of light and confusion between the womb and the tomb; the inevitability of deadening repetition, the opiate of habit; the sense of being coldly and impassively scrutinized; the simultaneous temptation and impossibility of suicide; the utter absence of any reliable basis for hope. Gone, in addition, is any chance that theatre will ever again consist entirely of universally accessible escapist fare. Becketts Waiting for Godot changed the post-modernist theatre forever: Gone are the solid identities guaranteed by a known past; gone also are any certainties about the present. The future, as always, is a deferred catastrophe....[The characters of Waiting for Godot] are not characters in the sense that this notion might have had a sense for earlier playwrights; nor are they symbols or mouthpieces or puppets for the writer. They are our on-stage representatives....And Godot, with his white beard and inscrutable ways? He is your unique, unprecedented and unimaginable end. (Beckett Festival 20-21) Samuel Becketts plays use hauntingly memorable, theatrically powerful images to exemplify his own paradoxical conviction: there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express (Three Dialogues 17). In giving voice to the anxieties of our troubled age, he remained terribly true to his self-inflicted obligation to express. In constantly addressing the most fundamental questions of human existence, he was driven by the imperative to make each new work a venture into the unknown (Kennedy 2). Works Cited: Astro, Alan. Understanding Samuel Beckett. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1990. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Summit, 1990. Beckett Festival: Dublin 1-20 October. Official program book of the Beckett Festival, in conjunction with the 1991 Dublin Theatre Festival. Dublin: Beckett Festival, 1991. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Beckett, Samuel. Three Dialogues, transition 49, 5 (December 1949), pp. 97-103. In Samuel Beckett, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (New York: Prentice Hall, 1965), 16-22; also in Ruby Cohn, Disjecta (New York, 1984), 138-45. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1955. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Anchor, 1969. Kennedy, Andrew K. Samuel Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Lyons, Charles R. Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 1983.

Is Waiting for Godot an Absurdist Play? by Michael J. Noble

Samuel Becketts stage plays are gray both in color and in subject matter. Likewise, the answer to the question of whether or not Becketts work is Absurdist also belongs to that realm of gray in which Beckett often works. The Absurdist label becomes problematic when applied to Beckett because his dramatic works tend to overflow the boundaries which scholars attempt to assign. When discussing Beckett, the critic inevitably becomes entangled in contradiction. The playwrights own denial that there is a philosophical system behind the plays and his explicit refusal to reduce them to codified interpretations suggests, one could argue, that to search for such systems or interpretations in Becketts work is, at best, a fruitless endeavor (Beckett quoted. in McMillan 13). Let me suggest, however, that Becketts own statements and criticisms not be taken as a deterrent to the study of his work. His objections threaten only those interpretations which reduce his work. The challenge for the critic, then, is to evaluate and analyze Beckett in such a way that his works are not reduced but enhanced. The problem with designating Becketts work as Absurdist is, precisely, that this interpretation reduces his work. When a critic describes a work as Absurd, she does not simply mean that the work is outrageous or nonsensical or merely silly. Coined by American critic Martin Esslin, the term theater of the Absurd can be defined as a kind of drama that presents a view of the absurdity of the human condition by the abandoning of usual or rational devices and by the use of nonrealistic form.Conceived in perplexity and spiritual anguish, the theater of the absurd portrays not a series of connected incidents telling a story but a pattern of images presenting people as bewildered beings in an incomprehensible universe. (Holman 2) In the introduction to The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin provides a comprehensive explanation of Absurdist theater. He quotes Albert Camus jThe Myth of Sisyphus: 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, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as 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. (23) Essentially, Camus sees Absurdity as a disparity between man and everything that man uses to. identify self. Eugne Ionescos description of the Absurd concurs with that of Camus: 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 (quoted. in Esslin 23). Again, Absurdity lies in the separation between humanity and its cultural, moral, and ideological identity. Such a denotation of Absurdity does, seemingly, describe Becketts works. However, Esslins application of this idea reveals the terms inadequacy in reference to Samuel Beckett. Esslin categorizes Beckett with the likes of Adamov, Ionesco and Genetall of whom are writers belonging to that group of dramatists Esslin calls the Theatre of the Absurd. The Theatre of the Absurd, in his opinion, strives to express its sense of the irrationality of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought (Esslin 24). He contrasts this technique of the Absurdists with that of Existentialist theatre in which the meaninglessness of existence is presented in the form of highly lucid and logically constructed reasoning (24). Esslin, however, has set up a false dichotomy between these two dramatic traditions. Samuel Becketts work goes beyond either the Absurd or Existential by actually encompassing both. The duality of his plays allows not only for a depiction of the senselessness of lifecharacteristic of Absurdist dramabut also for the emergence of a reasoned, logical understanding of the irrationality of the human conditioncharacteristic of Existentialist drama (Esslin 24). Waiting for Godot exemplifies the double nature of Becketts work because it portrays the human condition through both form and plot. Godot demonstrates Becketts Absurdist characteristics at the same time as it defies the limitations of that same classification. While recognizing the genius of his form, Esslin seems to undervalue the strong plot evident in Beckett. According to Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in beingthat is, in terms of concrete stage images (25). Godot, however, has not renounced the argument, at least in one sense. Though the play does present the absurdity of life in being and form, the argument over the absurdity of the human condition continues throughout the play. The very premise of the play is that of an argument. From the opening lines of the play, Vladimir and Estragon debate and discuss whether or not there is any purpose at all to their existence: Estragon: Vladimir: [Giving up again.] Nothing to be done. [Advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart.] Im beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life Ive tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you havent yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. [He broods musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.] So there you are again.

Though Estragon is primarily concerned with putting on his boots in this scene, Vladimir carries on a rather existential conversation. The audience should not choose, as Estragon does, to ignore this discussion. The existentialist deliberations of the characters cannot be neglected in favor of the Absurdist forms in the playthough such forms do abound. In the above passage, for example, the misunderstanding between Estragon and Vladimir reflects a disparity between language and communication similar to that described by Ionesco and Camus. The repetition implied by the word again also echoes the senselessness of existence. The audience, therefore, may find many of the

qualities of the Theatre of the Absurd in Godot; but this label fails to account for the ongoing issues of existence and life purpose present in the play. Regardless of what closure (if any) one gives this discussion, the strong existential argument of the play cannot be repudiated. Another example of the dual nature of Godot comes from Pozzo, many of whose lines provoke a questioning and exploring of the meaning of life while simultaneously employing an Absurdist form: Pozzo: But[Hand raised in admonition]but behind this veil of gentleness and peace night is charging [Vibrantly] and will burst upon us [Snaps his fingers] pop! like that! [His inspiration leaves him] just when we least expect it. [Silence. Gloomily.] Thats how it is on this bitch of an earth. [Long silence.] So long as one knows. One can abide ones time. One knows what to expect. No further need to worry. Simply wait. We're used to it.

Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir:

Truly, Beckett has not, as Esslin asserts, renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition (25). And, when we place the above passage in the larger context of the scene, an Absurdist divergence between gesture and language becomes apparent. Pozzos short treatise on the coming of night is replete with gestures which have no correlation with the words he is speaking. However, the words are not meaningless, and consequently the play cannot be termed Absurd. An Absurdist would, as Esslin notes about Ionesco, write so that the poetic content of a powerfully poetic play does not lie in the banal words that are uttered (26). One cannot group Waiting for Godot with works in which the words of the play function as mere banalities. To do so reduces Becketts work to something less than it is. Just as the words are not without meaning, neither are the images and actions of the play without significance. Godots fragmented stories, repetitions, and half-finished rituals are not performed randomly like the placement of images in a collage. Rather, these pieces combine to form a pattern like a mosaic, giving order to the seeming chaos. In this manner, Beckett playfully leads the audience towards the very meaning the play denies. The Absurd form and the Existential argument of the play combine in such a way as to strengthen the impact of Becketts perspective of the human condition. The amnesia of Didi and Gogo typifies how form and argument may complement each other. In Godot, the characters have lost their memory of the old rituals, stories and rites of passage. There are many instances in the play in which a story is begun but is not finished. Vladimir, for example, tries to explain the New Testament story of the two thieves to Estragon; but the story is meaningless to his friend. Reality for Gogo lies in the natural worldthe blue oceans in the Bible maps, the tree, the pain of the wound on his leg. Names are also a problem for these characters; not remembering names and events demonstrates a refusal by these characters to recognize the existence of the world in which they live. This recurring amnesia in the play is further strengthened by the existential discussion of the characters:

Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon:

The tree, look at the tree. [Estragon looks at the tree.] Was it not there yesterday? Yes, of course it was there. Do you not remember? We nearly hanged ourselves from it. But you wouldnt. Do you not remember? You dreamt it. Is it possible that you've forgotten already? Thats the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget.

Not only do the characters forget, but they talk about forgetting. The characters amnesia repeats the existential theme reiterated in the half-told stories from the Bible and the unfinished rituals. The repetition is significant and meaningful: without the repetitions of the second act, for example, many of the ritual elements would not be noticed. Something is happening, howeverEstragon and Vladimir are performing their lives. The audience must have Act II in order to perceive this self-performance. Is the audience also experiencing amnesia? If they dont recognize themselves on stage, they dont recognize their own story. Beckett, therefore, is neither exclusively Absurdist nor Existentialist, though characteristics of both may be discovered in his works. Godot is the quintessence of harmony between Absurd form and Existential argument. Is Waiting for Godot an Absurdist play? Noat least not in terms of Esslins definition in The Theatre of the Absurd, though Absurdist traits may be discovered. Because there exists a logical argument in the dialogue of the play, and because the forms, images and symbols of the play underscore this same argument, categorizing Godot as Absurd fails to adequately take into account the plays richness and complexity. Works Cited: Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1955. Esslin, Martin. The Theater of the Absurd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Holman, C. Hugh, and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1986. McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld. Beckett in the Theater. London: John Calder, 1988.

The Theme of Entrapment in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas by Kim Abunuwara
Samuel Becketts play Waiting for Godot has been criticized as a play in which nothing happenstwice. Not only are Vladimir and Estragon, the two primary characters, unable to change their circumstances in the first act, the second act seems to be a replay of this existential impotence. Vladimirs remark Nothing to be done, at the opening of the play, may be said to characterize the whole. Estragon complains that Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, its awful! (Beckett 27). Ostensibly, the play is a series of meaningless conversations on subjects of no importance. One wonders, then, if it isnt true that nothing happens in this play and, hence, if the play has my real artistic merit. But something is happening. The characters are struggling to free themselves from a treadmill of an existence in which they are trappeda struggle that is, perhaps, significantly like our own. Let us first consider the role of time in the play. Vladimir and Estragon want time to pass but are forced to acknowledge that even when it does, nothing changes. In other words, the time they recognize offers them no genuine future. On the contrary, it promises them more of the same: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: We came too soon. Its always at nightfall. But night doesnt fall. Itll fall all of a sudden, like yesterday. Then itll be night. And we can go. Then itll be day again. (Pause. Despairing.) Whatll we do, whatll we do! (Beckett 4546)

If night would only come there would be an end to this day. But that is no hope since another day like this one will follow. It seems, in fact, that time itself is the trap in which Vladimir and Estragon find themselves. But how can we account for that? What does it mean? The characters antagonize one another and demand distractions of each other because they feel threatened by this emptiness of time. The question of how they will fill the next moment obsesses them. When a conversation ends they panic and push each other, groping for a forgotten topic to fill upcoming identical moments: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: That wasnt such a bad little canter. Yes, but now well have to find something else. Let me see. (He takes off his hat, concentrates.) Let me see. (He takes off his hat, concentrates. Long silence.) Ah! (They put on their hats, relax.)

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Estragon: Vladimir:

Well? What was I saying, we could go on from there. (Beckett 42)

They use social relations to fill time like stuffing fills a straw man: Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? (Beckett 44). If time is what traps Vladimir and Estragon then a coherent reading of the play must be able to account for time as a trap. Interpretations of the play which accept our existence as meaningless, fall short of this. Such interpretations agree that as human beings our lives are absurd and trivial and any effort on our part to effect some change is pointless because we are powerless. Traditional philosophical thought has contributed to this reading by understanding our existence on the basis of the isolated ego, or the self. But with the self as a foundation of our thought, all our possibilities must originate in ourselves, and this has a determining effect on our existence So it is no wonder time appears oppressive and restrictive. Egoistic philosophy starts out by empowering the self, giving it priority; but the final result is that we cant escape ourselves. We end up alienated. Thus, egoistic philosophy and the existentialist readings which borrow from it fail to explain the profound notion raised by the play that we are trapped in time. Not surprisingly, then, they cant begin to explore possibilities for escape. Vladimir and Estragons dialogue about waiting for Godot recurs enough to give it thematic importance: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Lets go We cant Why not? Were waiting for Godot! Ah! (Despairingly) Whatll we do, whatll we do! (Beckett 44)

Shortly into the play we sense that Godot isnt coming and we wonder why they continue to wait. The two keep waiting and Godot keeps disappointing them! Finally we figure out that they cant disengage themselves from this activity with its artificial future. Vladimir and Estragon are trapped because, as it is, nothing new can happen. They are in a time that offers no future. As pointed out above, traditional philosophical thought, which has as its basis the priority of the self, results in a time that cant offer a genuine future because all possibilities arise out of the self; all possibilities are the same. Becketts characters struggle to produce something new out of themselves, but it is impossible. A self cant produce anything other than its own possibilitiesan extension of itself. The thought of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is unique in its challenge to traditional philosophy. Levinass analysis of existence highlights the problem of using the self as a starting point and the changeless character of time that results. By way of brief biographical summary, Levinas is a Lithuanian Jew who survived WW II as a French soldier in a prison camp. He was a student of the

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seminal phenomenological thinkers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. What is unique to Levinass own philosophy is that therein he puts first our relationship with each other, not the self. When the isolated ego is the basis of our thinking, the result is that we cant escape ourselves, as we have seen. Levinas suggests instead that, before this problem of alienation arises, we are primarily social beings. According to Levinas, there are two sorts of being: anonymous being, and personal being. In anonymous being, particular beings (like people or selves) dont have identities. To escape anonymity, particular beings assert their existence. This becomes an obligatory process; the threat of anonymous being is escaped by particular beings reidentifying themselves by dominating all others. Once a particular being feels the mastery of being a self, it will continue to struggle to preserve, and possess, and repossess itself. This talk about being evolves into a discussion of time because the process of reidentifying ourselves is the very building block of time. We conceive of the instant as that structural moment when the particular being identifies itself. Every instant is an event of identification in which I reassert myself, and these instants chain together and make up time. It is because of this chaining together of self to self, same to same, that Vladimir and Estragon are in a time with no genuine future. They know and we know that Godot is never coming and yet they keep waiting, because they have no alternative. While each instant represents a kind of mastery, or domination of being, it is also a kind of slavery because the ego cant choose to do otherwise. Its addicted, if you will. Once I have asserted my personal being, mastered anonymous being, Ive inadvertently placed myself in a battle to maintain it in the face of anonymous being. Im committed to claim and reclaim myself. This project, then, becomes time itself and its passage. I perpetuate a time that is a repetition of the same. As a possession that must be guarded, I can never leave my self undefended. I must return to myself over and over again. But Levinas suggests that before we get possession of ourselves and begin the work of selfpreservation, the presence of someone else introduces newness, or alterity. Levinas calls this someone else the Other. Only the Other can save us from the time trap of identification and give us the hope of a genuine future: It is not enough to conceive of hope to unleash a future.[The I] cannot endow itself with this alterity.The I cannot traverse time alone.We are not going to find in the subject the means for its salvation. It can only come from elsewhere (Existence and Existents 89-93). Levinas calls our relationship with the Other the ethical relationship. The ethical relationship is precisely a recognition of our responsibility to care for the Other rather than reaffirm ourselves. An ethical existence therefore frees us before we are trapped by the cycle of re-indentifying ourselves. Vladimir and Estragon could find the salvation they need in their relationship with each other, but they fail to respond to each other ethically and rely instead on distractions. The most unfortunate distraction is their insistence upon the idea of Godots arrival. Another distraction is the business of everyday life. The Levinasian terms temporary salvation or everyday salvation explain what takes place as material beings go about the business of sustaining

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themselveseating, shopping, working, clothing. Busied like this, we are diverted from the fact that we cant escape our existential alienation. Levinas calls this a self-forgetfulness and says it brings only a temporary salvation. This diversion is what Vladimir and Estragon seek in trivial conversation about boots, carrots, etc. But Levinas cautions that everyday salvation takes our attention away from the Other, our genuine salvation. Vladimir and Estragon lose sight of each other in everyday salvation and rather than responding to one another ethically; they use each other as a means of distraction from their predicament. Several times they reevaluate their relationship, wondering whether or not they should part, but in the end they remain together. Estragon wants Vladimir to tell him a joke, and Vladimir tries to get Estragon to remember the events of yesterday. This sort of interrelationship is nothing more than an attempt to numb personal suffering. Usually these attempts are frustrated and the relationship seems to be maintained by default. Ultimately, they use one another only as distractions, rather than recognizing in each other the genuine solution to their predicament. Even when, in the second act, they help a blind and suffering Pozzo, their response is reduced to its value only as a diversion from their boredom. Vladimir questions his days of waiting for Godot and wonders, in all of it, What truth will there be? The characters have looked in the wrong direction for salvation. Their waiting is fruitless and brings only more of the same. But it is in responding to the Other, which involves giving up the control of reasserting oneself, that their hope of real changes, as it promises an actual interruption of their monotonous existence and a genuine escape from egoism. They have invested Godot with the hope of a future, but what they need is to be each others Godot. Hence, Waiting for Godot can be an elusive play about characters tangled in an invisible web. But Levinass critique of egoism identifies and illuminates the plays themes in an unprecedented way. In particular, Levinass reading of time makes the plays theme of entrapment much more intelligible. Becketts play, of which it has been said that nothing happenstwicedramatizes existence without a future, without change or newness. Levinass ethical philosophy can provide the audience with answers to the questions Beckett raisesnamely, what is binding these characters and where can they look for salvation. Works Cited: Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1956. Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic,1978. Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1987.

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Waiting for GodotA Brief Production History by Nola Smith

Samuel Beckett was forty-two years old and living in post-war Paris when he wrote Waiting for Godot as an exercise to help rid himself of the writers block which was hindering his work in fiction. Once he started, he became increasingly absorbed in the play, and scribbled it almost without hesitation into a soft-cover notebook in a creative burst that lasted from October 9, 1948, until he completed the typed manuscript on January 29, 1949. After some revision, he offered the script to several producers, but it was refused. Although Beckett himself gave up hope with the script, his wife was more persistent, and, acting as his agent, she continued to approach producers. Finally, she met with actor/producer/director Roger Blin, who had produced a string of four under-funded and under-attended productions of Synge and Strindberg. Blin was immediately delighted with the piece. Unfortunately, money to produce the play was difficult to come by. Years passed between the writing and the actual production of the work. In the meanwhile, while Blin continued to search for backers, he worked with Beckett to flesh out the play in choosing costuming (Beckett had only envisioned the bowler hats), style, and movement. Blin never asked Beckett to analyze the play, noting that The play struck me as so rich and unique in its nudity that it seemed to me improper to question the author about its meaning. Instead, Blin worked almost instinctively through the three years of sporadic rehearsals. Casting was difficult; even though he was quite certain of his choices, contracts were only drawn up a few weeks before opening. Of necessity he ended up playing the part of Pozzo when an actor found better paying work. Finally he obtained a small grant from the French government, enough to purchase a few posters and tickets, very basic lighting, and one months rent for the Thtre de Babylone. Clad in borrowed or cast off costumes and carrying a discarded prop or two, the ensemble faced the customary preview critics (no fewer than thirty had accepted invitations), on a cold, rainy January 4, 1953. According to chronicler Ruby Cohn, the day did not look like a bright dawn of new theatre. Cohn herself, though not a reviewer, was one of the earliest to see the play, claiming I estimate that some fifty thousand people saw Blins first production, and today almost everyone who was in Paris between January 5, 1953, and October 30, 1954, claims to have seen it. But I really did. Cohn catalogs the reaction of the first critics: Contrary to late legend, the reviewers were kind.The earliest [review] I found closed with regret that the brilliant play and remarkable interpretation would probably attract only a coterie audience. The most mistaken review states: This unusual work by the American novelist seems to be inspired by the miserable condition of famished tramps hunted down by farmers, who abound in the South of the United States. One reviewer explained that Godot was happiness, eternal life, the ideal and unattainable quest of all men. Another critic rejoiced: Samuel Beckett is a subversive spirit; you cant image [sic] how comforting that is. Some dozen reviewers in the daily papers ranged from tolerant to enthusiastic, and the weeklies followed suit. One of them closed wittily: Samuel Beckett paints

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boredom without boring us, sleep without putting us to sleep, despair with merriment, and he mocks theater theatrically. Not surprisinglyat least it doesnt surprise methe American Paris Herald was the harshest: dramatically En attendant Godot does not hang together very well and is repetitious and rather clumsy in making its points. Not a whisper as to what those points might be. (18) Martin Esslin writes that the play became successful with the general public not because most people understood or sympathized with the play, but because of novelty: Was it not an outrage that people could be asked to come and see a play that could not be anything but a hoax, a play in which nothing whatever happened! People went to see the play just to be able to see that scandalous impertinence with their own eyes and to be in a position to say at the next party that they had actually been the victims of that outrage. (quoted in Bair 64) For whatever the reasons and against all expectations, the play surprised Beckett by becoming one of the greatest successes in post-war theatre, running for four hundred performances at the Thtre de Babylone before moving to another theatre. In 1955 Beckett translated the play into English. The play premiered August 3, 1955, at the Arts Theatre Club, transferring September 12 to the Criterion Theatre for a fairly lengthy run. It met with a wide measure of incomprehension, and won the Evening Standard Drama Award for the most controversial play of the year. Indeed, states Esslin, the verdict of most critics was that it was completely obscure, a farrago of pointless chit-chat (Esslin, Preface). Waiting for Godot opened the next year in America at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami. Disastrously advertised as the laugh sensation of two continents, it closed almost as soon as it opened. The play fared somewhat better in New York, where it ran at the John Golden Theatre for fifty-nine performances. The most remarkable performance of all, however, was to occur on November 19, 1957, in the San Quentin penitentiary. Members of the San Francisco Actors Workshop nervously prepared to stage the first live play to be performed at San Quentin in forty-four years. Though he had chosen the play in large measure because their were no women in the show, director Herbert Blau hoped that there would be some meaning, some personal significance for each member of the audience. But he and his troupe were understandably apprehensive as they looked out over the restless crowd of cigarette smoking felons. Renowned theatre historian and critic Martin Esslin describes the scene: How were they to face on of the toughest audiences in the world with a highly obscure, intellectual play that had produced near riots among a good many highly sophisticated audiences in Western Europe? The curtain parted. The play began. And what had bewildered the sophisticated audiences of Paris, London, and New York was immediately grasped by an audience of convicts. As the writer of Memos of a first-nighter put it in the columns of the prison paper, the San Quentin News, The trio of muscle-men, biceps overflowingparked all 642 lbs on the aisle and waited for the girls and the funny stuff. When this didnt appear they audibly fumed and audibly decided to wait until the house lights dimmed before escaping. They made one error. They listened and looked two minutes too longand stayed. Left at the end. All shook." (1-2) Several other articles appeared in the same prison paper. One writer reported that the company

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had held the audience captive in its collective hand from the moment the lights came on the set until the final hesitant handclasp between the vagrants. The lead article revealed its writer's deep insight into the play: It was an expression, symbolic in order to avoid all personal error, by an author who expected each member of his audience to draw his own conclusions, make his own errors. It asked nothing in point, it forced no dramatized moral on the viewer, it held out no specific hope.We're still waiting for Godot, and shall continue to wait. When the scenery gets too drab and the action too slow, we'll call each other names and swear to part foreverbut there's no place to go! (quoted in Esslin 2-3) Although it took much of the world a little longer than these inmates to recognize the value of Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot, there is no doubt that it is now considered a classic. It has been translated into numerous languages, and according to Bair, into more editions than Beckett could recall, far more than all his other plays combined. Waiting for Godot is the play that will continue building his reputation for many years to come. Sources: Bair, Deirdre. "Samuel Beckett," in British Dramatists Since World War II. Ed. Stanley Weintraub. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark, 1982, pp. 52-70. Cohn, Ruby. "Growing (Up?) with Godot," in Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context. Ed. Enoch Brater. New York: Oxford, 1986, pp. 13-24. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Rev. ed. Garden City: Anchor, 1969.

Samuel BeckettA Short Chronology by Nola Smith

1906 1911-23 1923-27 1928-30 Born in Foxrock, Ireland, a suburb of Dublin, to an upper-middle-class Protestant family. By Beckett's own account, his childhood is happy. Attends Irish day and boarding schools. Studies French and Italian, Trinity College, Dublin. Graduates First in Class Dec. 8, 1927. Spends nine months teaching, Campbell College, Belfast, before going to France as exchange lecteur of English at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Writes his first poems, in English. Meets James Joyce, publishes his first critical piece, "Dante Bruno. VicoJoyce," on Joyce's Work in Progress, which will become Finnegan's Wake. Writes his monograph on the French author Marcel Proust. Prepares translations and reviews for several small literary magazines. Culmination of these two years is his first separately published book, Whoroscope, (1930), which he wrote on June 15, in one night. Back in Dublin, assistant in French at Trinity. Deeply depressed, having broken with Joyce over Joyce's schizophrenic daughter Lucia.

1930-32

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1932 1933 1935

Leaves teaching, devotes himself to writing. Desperate for funds, writes More Pricks than Kicks, short stories strung together as a novel. French President assassinated (1933); aliens without valid papers deported. Lives miserably with his parents; miserable in London with mental breakdown. Writes novel Murphy, rejected by 25 publishers. Returns to Paris. Early 1938, walking home at night, stabbed by a stranger, nearly killed. Begins life-long relationship with French pianist Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil; they marry in 1961. Writes poems in French and English, translates Murphy into French. Active in the French resistance against Nazis. Beckett, sought by Gestapo, escapes to a southern France village. Does farm work, writes novel Watt. Returns to Paris. In a productive spurt, writes in French most of his best known works: En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), novels Molloy, Malone meurt, and L'Innommable (Molloy,,Malone Dies, The Unnamable). All published by 1953. Waiting for Godot, Beckett's most controversial and best known work, premieres in Paris, Jan. 5,1953, to good reviews. Beckett an overnight sensation. Translates his own works, writes new ones. All That Fall, a radio play in English, aired by the BBC, Jan. 13. The play Fin de partie (Endgame) premieres in London, Apr. 3, in French. Krapp's Last Tape premieres in London, Oct. 28. Publication of French original of the novel Comment c'est (How It Is). Happy Days,written in English, opens in New York. Beckett shares the International Publisher's Prize with Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Beckett stops publishing longer works; will write over 40 shorter dramatic and prose pieces. Play debuts in German translation at Ulm, West Germany, June 14; debuts London, April 7, 1964. Supervises the making of Film in New York. Publishes the prose piece Imagination morte imaginez First piece for television, Eh Joe, aired in translation in West Germany, April 13, and in the English original by BBC, July 4. Beckett receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. Publishes prose piece, Sans, which appears in English the next year as Lessness. The play Breath premieres June 16 in New York. Not I premieres in New York, Nov. 22. Publication of the prose piece Pour en finir encore (For to End Yet Again). Ghost Trio televised on BBC, April 17. Quad, a nonverbal dance/mime, broadcast by a West German station, Oct. 8. Stirrings Still, a prose text, is published.

1937-40

1940-42 1942-45 1946-50

1953-56

1957 1958 1961

1963 1964 1965 1966 1969 1972 1976 1977 1981 1988

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1989

Beckett dies in Paris, December 22. Sources:

Astro, Alan. Understanding Samuel Beckett. Columbia: U of South Carolina, 1990. Bair, Deirdre. "Samuel Beckett," in British Dramatists Since World War II. Ed. Stanley Weintraub. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark, 1982, pp. 52-70.

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