Dave Schaafsma's review of Waiting for Godot (original) (raw)

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Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot
by

269235

“Let's go."
"We can't."
"Why not?"
"We're waiting for Godot.”

Samuel Beckett, though known for being one of the bleakest writers ever, was a big fan of American film comedians, including the sadsack Buster Keaton. Here’s a short film, 21 minutes long, “the Goat:” (Oh, come on, just look at it for a minute!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6kE2...

And here's another short film where Keaton and Beckett collaborated! (Thanks, Ean!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjdXi...

but also Laurel and Hardy, who I have always thought were a kind of model for the hapless and lovable Didi and Gogo. Here’s a 20-minute L&H film, “Helpmates” (1932) in case you had never heard of them or doubt there is a connection: (see above, watch a minute, and I also note there's a new film based on them just released)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YPhY...

And there also is a hat exchange scene in the play that almost surely owes something to the famous Marx Brothers' “mirror scene” which, if you haven’t seen it, takes 3:21 to see some genius old-time comedy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_fmU...

Oh, the play, you ask? One of the classics of world literature, probably the single text that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature, a play that he calls a tragi-comedy, and it does seem to ride on that razor edge between comedy and tragedy. Written in 1948, just three years after the end of WWII, with bombed cities all around (as now in Ukraine) it features two tramps, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) who mainly just, yup, sit around and wait for Godot. And talk with each other.

“They also serve who only stand and wait” (Milton)? Maybe, but in this play it is not clear who Godot is, or why they are waiting for him. Some speculate Godot is really God, but Beckett denied this, said he had no idea why people would think that, and I may just believe him. There is some discussion of religion in the play, though, as a way people try to make sense of the world.

The setting is spare, with a single bare tree on the set. What do they do? They mainly talk to pass the time:

“Words, words, words. . .”

And I like the playfulness:

Yes, let’s abuse each other!
Moron!
Vermin!
Abortion!
Morpion!
Sewer-rat!
Curate!
Cretin!
Critic!
Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.
Well, that passed the time.
It was passing, anyway.
But it made it pass more quickly.

So they converse. They are friends, and they pluckily support each other in their poverty and bleak circumstances. They also meet Pozzo and his slave, Lucky, where we see a contrast to their supportive relationship, a power relationship, one of cruelty. An allegory of choices for us? Fascism vs. the Allied Forces that defeated it? Maybe! But Gogo and Didi persist and prevail, together. Not much happens, but they present an image of steadfastness in the face of serious challenges. Inspirational, I say. Or, since they only wait, and do not leave, it could be seen as hopeless, as a kind of nihilist stasis! Dystopian allegory, a precursor to Cormac McCarthy's father-son story, The Road?

One thing the play is about, I think, is how they got to this dystopian desert of a place. One thing it is about is language, which we sometimes see as the flower of humankind, yet in all its glory it did not help us prevent the Holocaust. Another thing the play is about is rationality, or thinking, the very foundation of science and technological accomplishment, that also did not prevent Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And so Beckett makes absurd fun at times here of this much-revered human process, thinking, and what it (in 1948) has amounted to, in part demonstrated in Lucky’s unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, which it turns out is absurd.

But this play finally presents two equally possible directions for humankind:

Hope: “Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. . . To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!”

Or despair: “Nothing to be done.”

Does Beckett choose? Does he make a final judgement? Have we descended as a human race into evil, at last? Here he seems to say it could go either way: “The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors.”

More fascist tendencies now, climate apocalypse, millions of refugees in increasing numbers and desperation, Putin and all the insane political extremism everywhere, and so on. You decide. Because you need to decide to act and not just talk. Or maybe you just ignore everything and keep doing what you do, in a kind of paralysis.

Though I personally think he does finally choose hope, in the very image of friends Didi and Gogo.

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Reading Progress

August 26, 2012 – Shelved

September 19, 2012 – Shelved as:plays

February 2, 2019 –Started Reading

February 3, 2019 –Finished Reading

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