Contemporary English Literature

Tomislav Pavlović

Lecture 3 – Theatre of the Absurd: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish avant-garde writer, dramatist and poet.
Increasingly minimalist with the passing of time, Beckett’s work is characterised by a bleak
view of the human condition. As a student, assistant, and friend of James Joyce, Beckett is
considered one of the last modernists; as an inspiration to many later writers, he is sometimes
considered one of the first postmodernists. He is also considered one of the foremost
practitioners of the so-called “theatre of the absurd”. As such, he is widely regarded as one of
the most influential writers of the 20th century. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in
literature in 1969.
Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1923 to
1927. Having obtained his BA, he taught briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, following
which he took up the post of lecteur d’anglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
While there, he was introduced to James Joyce. This meeting had a profound effect on the
young man, and Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, in particular by helping him research
the book that would eventually become Finnegans Wake. His first published work was a
critical essay entitled “Dante... Bruno. Vico... Joyce”, in which he defends Joyce’s work and
method from allegations of wilful obscurity.
In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. He soon became
disillusioned with his chosen academic vocation, however. He expressed his aversion by
playing a trick on the Modern Language Society of Dublin, reading a learned paper in French
on a Toulouse author named Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called Concentrism; Chas
and Concentrism, however, were pure fiction, having been invented by Beckett to mock
academic pedantry, as he claimed.
After acquiring his Master’s Degree from Trinity, Beckett settled in Paris in 1937. On
his way home with some friends one night in January 1938, Beckett was stabbed by a pimp in
the street. The blade just missed his heart, but one of his lungs was perforated and he was
rushed to hospital. He awoke to find James Joyce at his bedside with his personal physician
in tow, who was now under instructions to care for the great author’s young friend. Beckett
became, in his own words, “the proud possessor of a pleural barometer”, and his inner organs
became even more sensitive to the climate of the outside world. Beckett’s assailant,
improbably named Prudent, met his victim during his criminal trial and said in polite French
that he did not know why he had done it, and that he was sorry. It was as ludicrous and
bizarre an exchange as any in Beckett’s own writings. During his stay in hospital recovering
from the attack, one of Beckett’s visitors was Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil, a thirty-
seven-year-old French woman whom he had met before socially. They grew very close after
that and began to meet regularly. Suzanne was a very disciplined woman and dedicated
herself to helping Beckett get his work published, and, later, to protecting him from the
prying reaches of journalists, hangers-on and opportunists. Eventually they married in 1961,
in Folkestone, England.
The year 1941 brought news of the death of Joyce and the invasion of the Nazis.
When the German occupation began, Beckett was ostensibly neutral as an Irishman, but he
joined the Resistance. Although he would later dismiss his work with the Resistance as “boy
scout stuff”, the man called l’Irlandais by his fellow Resistance members would be awarded
the Croix de Guerre in 1945 for “extreme bravery”.
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 Having published some poetry, (“Whoroscope” /1931/, an arcane poem inspired by a
biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading at the time of writing, won
him a small literary prize), criticism (Proust /1931/, an often overlooked work, was Beckett’s
first and only published critical study of any substantial length), and prose (including, among
other things, a collection of playful stories entitled More Pricks Than Kicks /1934/ and the
absurdist novel Murphy /1938/), in the years after World War Two his focus shifted to ideas
of the essential, the minimal, the unadorned. French became his written language, and the
problem of expressing – expressing anything – became central to his aesthetic. His novels
Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), written in French and later
translated into English by Beckett himself, trace a very grim but ridiculously circuitous and
laboured path of human life. In these novels – which critics often refer to as a “trilogy”,
though this is against the author’s own explicit wishes, the reader can trace the development
of Beckett’s mature style and themes, as the novels become more and more stripped down,
barer and barer. Molloy, for instance, still retains many of the characteristics of a
conventional novel – time, place, movement and plot – and is indeed, on one level, a
detective novel. In Malone Dies, however, movement and plot are largely dispensed with,
though there is still some indication of place and the passage of time; the “action” of the book
takes the form of an interior monologue. Finally, in The Unnamable, all sense of place and
time are done away with, and the essential theme seems to be the conflict between the
narrative voice’s drive to continue speaking, so as to continue existing, and its almost equally
strong urge to find silence and oblivion. It is tempting to see in this a reflection of Beckett’s
experience and understanding of what the war had done to the world. Despite the widely-held
view that Beckett’s work, as exemplified by the novels of this period, is essentially
pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out in the end, as evidenced, for instance, by the
famous final phrase of The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”.
Along with the most powerful of all post-WWII plays, En Attendant Godot (Waiting
for Godot), first performed in 1953 in Paris and premiered in London two years later, these
novels constitute the key body of his work.1 His fiction evolved by a kind of fundamental
process of reduction, reducing the human and familiar content of the novel form, persistently
questioning the nature of reason, the status of language, the meaning of the word, as well as
the foundation of the fictional act itself and the power of the imagination to imagine.
Adapting to the post-war crisis, intensifying the irony, the intellectual comedy and the
solipsism of human experience, not to mention the waste of reason, they created a startlingly
new absurdist fictional world, which, as Malcolm Bradbury points out, it seemed particularly
appropriate to call “postmodern”.2
When Waiting for Godot first appeared on the stage in the small Parisian Théâtre de
Babylone, the world of theatre was irrevocably changed. Waiting for Godot follows two days
in the lives of a pair of men, called Vladimir and Estragon, who divert themselves while they
wait expectantly and unsuccessfully for someone named Godot to arrive. They claim him as
an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting that they would not recognise him
were they to see him. To occupy themselves, they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play
games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide – anything “to hold the terrible silence at
bay”.
Their waiting is interrupted by the passing through of Pozzo and his heavily-laden
slave Lucky. “A terrible cry” from the wings heralds the initial entrance of Lucky, who has a
rope tied around his neck. He crosses half the stage before his master appears holding the
other end. Pozzo barks orders at his slave and frequently calls him a “pig”, but is civil
towards the other two. They mistake him at first for Godot and clearly do not recognise him
1
Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel 1878-2001, Penguin, London, 2001, p. 301.
2
Ibid.
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for the self-proclaimed personage he is. This irritates him, but, while maintaining that the
land that they are on is his, he acknowledges that “[t]he road is free to all”. Vladimir takes
Pozzo to task regarding his mistreatment of his slave, but his protestations are ignored.
Instead, Pozzo explains that Lucky is attempting to mollify him to prevent him from selling
him. At this, Lucky begins to cry. Pozzo provides a handkerchief, but, when Estragon tries to
wipe his tears away, Lucky kicks him in the shins. Before master and slave leave, Didi and
Gogo, as the original pair also call themselves, accept an offer to have Lucky dance and
think. The dance is clumsy and shuffling, leaving everyone disappointed, while Lucky’s
“think”, induced by Vladimir’s putting his hat on his head, is a lengthy and disjointed verbal
stream of consciousness. The soliloquy begins relatively coherently but quickly dissolves into
sheer logorrhoea, only ending when Vladimir rips off Lucky’s hat.
At the end of Act I (and its successor), a boy arrives, purporting to be a messenger
sent from Godot, to advise the pair that he will not be coming that “evening but surely
tomorrow”. During Vladimir’s interrogation of the boy, he asks if he came the day before,
making it apparent that the two men have been waiting for an indefinite period of time and
will likely continue to wait ad infinitum. After the boy departs, they decide to leave but make
no attempt to do so, an action repeated in Act II, as the curtain is drawn.
Act II opens with Vladimir singing a recursive round about a dog, which apparently
serves to illustrate the cyclical nature of the play’s universe. There is a bit of realisation on
Vladimir’s part that the world they are trapped in evinces a convoluted progression (or lack
thereof) of time. He begins to see that, although there is notional evidence of linear
progression, basically they are living the same day over and over. Pozzo and Lucky arrive
again, with Pozzo now blind and insisting that Lucky is dumb. The rope is now much shorter
and Lucky – who has acquired a new hat – leads Pozzo, rather than being driven by him.
Pozzo has lost all notion of time, and assures them he cannot remember meeting them the day
before, and that he does not expect to remember the current day’s events when they are over.
Whereas in Act I Pozzo is a windbag, since he has become blind he appears to have gained
some insight. His parting words eloquently encapsulate the brevity and futility of human
existence: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once
more.”
After Lucky and Pozzo depart again, the same boy returns to inform them not to
expect Godot today, but he would arrive the next day. The two again consider suicide but
their rope, Estragon’s belt, breaks in two when they tug on it. Estragon’s trousers fall down,
but he does not notice until Vladimir tells him to pull them up. They resolve to bring a more
suitable piece and hang themselves the next day, if Godot fails to arrive. Again, they agree to
leave, but neither of them makes any move to go.
Beckett refrained from elaborating on the characters beyond what he had written in
the play. When he started writing the play, he did not have a visual image of Vladimir and
Estragon, apart from their wearing bowler hats. They are never referred to as tramps in the
text. There are no physical descriptions of either of the two characters; however, the text
indicates that Vladimir is likely the heavier of the pair. The bowlers and other broadly comic
aspects of their personas have reminded critics and modern audiences of the comic pair of
Laurel and Hardy, who occasionally played tramps in their films.
Although it has been claimed that Pozzo and Lucky are simply “Didi and Gogo writ
large”,3 there is a different kind of dynamic at work in their relationship. Pozzo may be
mistaken for Godot by the two men but, as far as Lucky goes, Pozzo is his Godot, another
way in which he is lucky. Their association is not as clear-cut as it first appears, however, for
upon closer inspection, according to Michael Gurnow, it becomes evident that Lucky always
possessed more influence in the relationship, for he danced, and more importantly, thought –
3
Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot.
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not as a service, but in order to fill a vacant need of Pozzo: he committed all of these acts for
Pozzo. As such, since the first appearance of the duo, the true slave had always been Pozzo.4
Pozzo credits Lucky with having given him all the culture, refinement, and ability to reason
that he possesses.5 His rhetoric has been learned by rote. Pozzo’s “party piece” on the sky is a
case in point: as his memory crumbles he finds himself unable to continue under his own
steam.6 Pozzo controls Lucky by means of an extremely long rope which he jerks and tugs if
Lucky is the least bit slow. Lucky is the absolutely subservient slave of Pozzo and he
unquestioningly does his every bidding with dog-like devotion. He struggles with a heavy
suitcase without ever thinking of dropping it. Lucky speaks only once in the play, and it is a
result of Pozzo’s order to “think” for Estragon and Vladimir. Pozzo and Lucky had been
together for sixty years and, in that time, their relationship has deteriorated. Lucky has always
been the intellectually superior but now, with age, he has become an object of contempt: his
“think” is a caricature of intellectual thought and his “dance” is a sorry sight. Despite his
horrid treatment at Pozzo’s hands, however, Lucky remains completely faithful to him. Even
in the second act, when Pozzo has inexplicably gone blind and needs to be led by Lucky
rather than driving him as he had done before, Lucky remains faithful and has not tried to run
away. They are clearly bound together by more than a piece of rope in the same way that Didi
and Gogo are tied to Godot.
Despite the fact that the boy in Act II assures Vladimir that it was not he who called
upon them the day before, the cast of characters specifies only one boy. When Vladimir asks
what Godot does the boy tells him, “He does nothing, sir.” We also learn he has a white beard
– possibly, the boy is not certain. This boy also has a brother who, it seems, is sick but there
is no clear evidence to suggest that his brother is the boy who came at the end of Act I or the
one who came the day before that.
The identity of Godot has been the subject of much debate. When Melbourne
University Professor Colin Duckworth asked Beckett point-blank whether Pozzo was Godot,
the author replied: “No. It is just implied in the text, but it’s not true.” 7 When Roger Blin,
who directed the first production of the play, asked him who or what Godot stood for, Beckett
replied that it suggested itself to him by the slang word for boot in French, godillot, godasse
because feet play such a prominent role in the play. This is the explanation he has given most
often.8 Beckett has gone on record as saying that he regretted calling the absent character
“Godot” because of all the theories involving God to which this has given rise. “I also told
[the English actor Sir Ralph] Richardson that if by Godot I had meant God I would [have]
said God, and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly.” 9 That said, Beckett did
once concede, “It would be fatuous of me to pretend that I am not aware of the meanings
attached to the word ‘Godot’, and the opinion of many that it means ‘God’. But you must
remember – I wrote the play in French, and if I did have that meaning in my mind, it was
somewhere in my unconscious and I was not overtly aware of it.”10
The name “Godot” is pronounced in Britain and Ireland with the emphasis on the first
syllable, /ˈɡɒdoʊ/); in North America it is usually pronounced with an emphasis on the
second syllable: /ɡəˈdoʊ/. Beckett himself said the emphasis should be on the first syllable,
and that the North American pronunciation is a mistake.11
4
Cf. Michael Gurnow, “No Symbol Where None Intended: A Study of Symbolism and Allusion in Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot”, http://www.themodernword.com/beckett/paper_gurnow.html.
5
Cf. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Faber & Faber, London, 1956, p. 32.
6
According to Beckett’s stage directions, “his inspiration leaves him”, idem, p. 37.
7
Cf. Colin Duckworth’s introduction to En attendant Godot, George G Harrap & Co, London, 1966, p. lx.
8
Cf. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990), p. 405
9
Cf. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury, London 1996, p. 412.
10
Bair, op. cit., p. 591
11
Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot.
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 On account of the fact that the play is so austere, elemental, it invites all kinds of
social, political and religious interpretations, placing Beckett himself in different schools of
thought, different movements and “isms”. The attempts to pin it down have not been
successful, but the desire to do so is natural when we encounter a writer whose minimalist art
reaches for bedrock reality. Less forces us to look for more, and the need to talk about Godot
and about Beckett has resulted in a steady outpouring of books and articles. The play exploits
a number of archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy
and pathos.
Beckett tired quickly of the endless misunderstanding. As far back as 1955, he
remarked, “Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can’t make out.” 12 He was not
forthcoming with anything more than cryptic clues, however. Peter Woodthorpe [who played
Estragon] remembered asking him one day in a taxi what the play was really about: “It's all
symbiosis, Peter; it’s symbiosis” Beckett replied.13
Over the years and decades since its premiere, Godot has been the subject of widely
(occasionally – wildly) divergent interpretations, some of them contradicting and excluding
one another, others complementing one another. The following is but a small sample of the
kinds of readings it has been exposed to: political (as an allegory of the cold war or of French
resistance to the Germans),14 Freudian (Bernard Dukore develops a triadic theory in Didi,
Gogo and the absent Godot, based on Freud’s trinitarian description of the psyche in The Ego
and the Id /1923/: Dukore defines the characters by what they lack: the rational Go-go
embodies the incomplete ego, the missing pleasure principle: (e)go-(e)go. Di-di (id-id) – who
is more instinctual and irrational – is seen as the backward id or subversion of the rational
principle. Godot fulfils the function of the superego or moral standards. Pozzo and Lucky are
just re-iterations of the main protagonists. Dukore finally sees Beckett’s play as a metaphor
for the futility of man’s existence when salvation is expected from an external entity, and the
self is denied introspection),15 existential (much of Beckett’s work – including Godot – is
often considered by philosophical and literary scholars to be part of the movement of the
Theatre of the Absurd, a form of theatre which stemmed from the Absurdist philosophy of
Albert Camus; absurdism itself is a branch-off of the traditional assertions of existentialism,
and posits that, while inherent meaning might very well exist in the universe, human beings
are incapable of finding it due to some form of mental or philosophical limitation: thus
humanity is doomed to be faced with the Absurd, or the absolute absurdity of existence in
lack of intrinsic purpose),16 Biblical (much can be read into Beckett’s inclusion of the story of
the two thieves from Luke 23:39–43, and the ensuing discussion of repentance. It is easy to
see the solitary tree as representative of the Christian cross or, indeed, the tree of life.
Similarly, because Lucky describes God as having a white beard, and Godot, if the boy’s
testimony is to be believed, also has a white beard, many see God and Godot as one and the
same),17 homoerotic (the fact that the play calls on only male actors, with scarcely a reference
to women, has caused some to look upon Vladimir and Estragon’s relationship as quasi-
marital: they bicker, they embrace each other, they depend upon each other, and hence might
be thought of as a married couple)...18 The list is by no means exhaustive.
Perhaps the best way to approach it is to bear in mind the implications of Beckett’s
address to the audience on the occasion of a performance of an abridged version of the play
12
Knowlson, op. cit., p. 416.
13
Idem, pp. 371-372.
14
See, for example, Hugh Kenner’s lucid analysis in A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, Thames and Hudson,
London, 1973, pp. 23-38.
15
Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
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in the studio of the Club d’Essai de la Radio, which was broadcast on French radio (typically,
Beckett did not show up and Roger Blin read out the note) in February 1952:
“I don’t know who Godot is. I don’t even know (above all don’t know) if he exists.
And I don’t know if they believe in him or not – those two who are waiting for him. The
other two who pass by towards the end of each of the two acts, that must be to break up the
monotony. All I knew I showed. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me, by a wide margin. I’ll
even say that I would have been satisfied with less. As for wanting to find in all that a
broader, loftier meaning to carry away from the performance, along with the programme and
the Eskimo pie [vanilla ice-cream with a chocolate coating], I cannot see the point of it. But it
must be possible... Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, their time and their space, I was able to
know them a little, but far from the need to understand. Maybe they owe you explanations.
Let them supply it. Without me. They and I are through with each other.”19

19
Ibid.
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