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Lois Gordon, author of The World of Samuel Beckett, has written a fascinating and illuminating introduction to Beckett’s great work for general readers, students, and specialists. Critically sophisticated and historically informed, it approaches the play scene by scene, exploring the text linguistically, philosophically, critically, and biographically. Gordon argues that the play portrays more than the rational mind’s search for self and worldly definition. It also dramatizes Beckett’s insights into human nature, into the emotional life that frequently invades rationality and liberates, victimizes, or paralyzes the individual. Gordon shows that Beckett portrays humanity in conflict with mysterious forces both within and outside the self, that he is an artist of the psychic distress born of relativism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300132021 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Reading Godot
By LOIS GORDON
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-300-09286-5
Chapter One
The First Forty Years, 1906-46: Origins of a Vision and FormSamuel Beckett began his creative "siege in the room" shortly after the siege of World War II and produced during that period his greatest works, including Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Decorated for his activities in the Resistance, Beckett had fought against the atrocities of the war, although before that time he had borne witness to nearly half a century of human depredation and suffering. The parameters of his maturation included two world wars, two economic depressions (in Belfast and London), and two civil wars (in Ireland and in wartime France). Beckett observed the gradual spread of totalitarianism across much of the world and unrelenting campaigns of slaughter rising out of religious and ethnic prejudice. He also observed the panoply of human responses to these events: indifference, pettiness, megalomania, bravery, and self-sacrifice. He survived with a profound sense that evil cannot go unattended and that the defense of the good, whether in dramatic or modest action, gives dignity and meaning to life. He approached his personal siege with firsthand knowledge of humanity's rapacious, benevolent, and sometimes ridiculous potential. That his work would extend to the limits of tragedy and comedy, in a form he called tragicomedy, is the result, in many ways, of the vision he gained from his life experiences through 1946.
As an Irish citizen and neutral alien, Beckett did not have to take a position during the war, but, as he told others, he could not stand by with his arms folded and observe the suffering around him. This explanation is of particular interest because when speaking of his happy childhood-"You might say I had a happy ["a very good"] childhood"-he was compelled to add, "But I was more aware of the unhappiness around me." Beckett was an extraordinary man-modest, brilliant, gifted in several arts, loyal to his friends and family, uncommonly honest in his dealings with others, generous in the extreme, and exquisitely sensitive to suffering around him.
As the young child of affluent Protestant parents living in Foxrock, a Dublin suburb, Beckett was not insulated from the world around him by the privileges of his class. On the contrary, he was very much aware of both the civil and world war occurring during his childhood. His uncle, fighting with the British during the Great War, had been severely injured. Issues of alliance, of joining the British in World War I or of defying conscription to join the Irish insurgents at home, were continually debated. After the Easter Uprising, children ran about Dublin, where Beckett was attending private school, carrying Irish flags and singing nasty ditties about the English. Signs throughout the city proclaimed, "We will serve neither King nor Kaiser." The great political leader James Connolly had demanded that the Irish fight solely for their own independence, for "those natural rights which the British government [had] been asking them to die to win for Belgium."
Civil war endured in Ireland long after the Great War ended, with shooting, curfews, ambushes, and murders in the street, and Beckett retained vivid memories of the uprising throughout his life. His father had taken him, when he was ten, to see Dublin in flames; attending school in Dublin, he regularly saw British soldiers carrying guns throughout the city. Newspapers were filled with details of the failed rebellion: the bloody retaliations of the Black and Tans, the subsequent installation of martial law, and the names of the many Irish who were deported, imprisoned, or executed before a firing squad. Connolly and Padraic Pearce had spoken of the need for sacrifice with irresistible rhetoric, and they described the sacred nature of their mission: "Men still know how to die for the holiest of all causes": "the practical brotherhood of the human race." The sacrificial dimension of their calling was clear: "We recognize that of us, as of mankind before Calvary, it may truly be said: 'Without shedding of Blood there is no Redemption.'" The notion of suffering redeemed through camaraderie and altruistic action would resound throughout Beckett's work and life. In Waiting for Godot, each figure repeats, in his own way, "To every man his little cross," aware that salvation arises alone from hearing the "cries for help" addressed to "all mankind" when "all mankind is us."
If the wars constrained Beckett's childhood happiness, so too did upper-class Foxrock. Beggars roamed the countryside, as they did in Dublin, and although Dublin had two "lunatic asylums," in Foxrock the mentally ill were kept at home. One such patient, near Beckett's house, was attended to by a keeper, a word that bothered the children because they knew this as a term used in the zoo. In addition, many retired service personnel lived in the Foxrock area because a war pensioners' hospital had been built near Beckett's house. As a result, Beckett often saw patients in various stages of physical and mental debilitation; one of Beckett's childhood friends recalls the children "witnessing" the torn bodies of veterans daily.
In 1923, after the armistice and establishment of the Irish Free State, Beckett entered Trinity College, which, like his previous school, Portora, had been considerably changed by the recent wars. Courses and lectures such as the well-established Donnellen series recapitulated major issues arising out of the war. How, for example, could an Irishman fight in a world war alongside a Briton, who was his enemy in the civil war at home?
A great number of books on war and morality, science and religion were published during Beckett's Trinity years. Many, like E. B. Poulton's Science and the Great War and J. B. Hunt's War, Religion and Science, undermined righteous prewar ideals and emphasized the waste and despair of the present. The only remaining truths were the emptiness of the old morality and the devastating demonstrations of human bestiality. Perhaps Paul Fussell was correct in his later observation that World War I was the "archetypal origin" of the modern, ironic vision of life, of the bitter reality that wars were made by men.
The Great War ended, but a profound sense of indignity and injustice-alongside ongoing fighting in the civil war-continued for the Irish. The mayhem of the times quashed any residual illusions of Beckett's youth, of a world based on rational systems of rational adults, if not on rational reflections of a divine and just order. In this context, Beckett's remark that he "was raised almost a Quaker" but "soon lost faith ... after leaving Trinity" is distinctly significant.
After Beckett was graduated from Trinity in 1927, he spent what he called a grim term teaching in Belfast-grim not only because of its severe economic depression but because of its terrible bigotry. The Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act had given the Protestant authorities wide and often unjustifiable powers of arrest, search, detention, and internment. There was no doubt that to be Protestant was to be privileged and to be Catholic was to be visibly disenfranchised. Catholics were deprived of their jobs; marches of the unemployed were banned; restrictions increased on freedom of speech. It is understandable that Beckett, a Protestant Irishman who had witnessed a civil war at home, should find this a grim time. Again, brother was fighting brother, anticipating the internecine rivalries he would encounter in France during the Occupation. Here again were issues of religious discrimination that were to become, just a few years hence, the paramount obsession of Hitler's demented crusade. After Belfast, Beckett spent a year in Paris, which became his home in 1938. In the intervening years he lived mostly in London and traveled through prewar Germany. His first trip to Paris involved teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieure in fulfillment of one of his commencement honors at Trinity.
Paris in the 1920s was a dazzling city of frenetic energy and prodigious creativity. Yet for all its gaiety and sophistication, an underlying cynicism and sadness enveloped the city. Numerous commentators attribute its mercurial moods to the spiritual and emotional devastation of the Great War. The grandest of human talents had been subverted to the meanest of human purposes; civilization had turned against and devoured itself.
The war had left the French, like people everywhere, in search of solutions to fill the void left by shattered prewar ideals. Older but still lively radical political communities like communism, socialism, and anarchism appealed to many. Also compelling were the philosophical ideas systematized by Nietzsche, Freud, and the phenomenologists. A number of relatively new aesthetic ideologies, vertiginous mixtures of Left and Right, were attractive as well: Futurism, Dadaism, the soon-to-be-fashionable Surrealism, and even the less political residual Cubism and early forms of Abstract Expressionism. Voices from abroad, of Vorticists and Suprematists, of Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter, gained a following. A revolution in the arts, with entirely new uses of color, harmony, and linearity, might counter the decadence, waste, and distortions of reality-the lies, as Hemingway called them-of earlier works and times.
Throughout Paris, the extremes of the avant-garde imagination were visible, along with the popular forms of Cezanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin. The 1928-29 season included at least four Cezanne shows, and Cezanne was an artist whose pictorial innovations would influence Beckett's stage designs. On exhibition were the Cubists and their Fauve successors, Picasso's new guitars, constructed now of painted metal, rather than paper, the biomorphic and geometric abstractions of Arp and Miro, and Mondrian's slick, intellectual puzzles. Visible as well, even in their many reproductions, were Duchamp's "readymades" and his goateed Mona Lisa as well as Brancusi's highly polished, elegant Bird in Space, at one and the same time abstract and representational. Roger Vitrac and Antonin Artaud, famed for holding the mirror up to the unconscious, founded Theatre Alfred Jarry in 1927. Sergey Eisenstein's experimental cinematography and the avant-garde compositions of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and George Antheil were gaining broad attention. A new arrival from grim Belfast could only feel relief in the dynamic environs of Paris.
The visual and aural imagery of the new arts had a powerful effect on Beckett's work. His photographic memory enabled him, years later, to duplicate in his stage settings and in his productions the design of paintings he had not seen for decades. Techniques of nonlinearity in painting, accomplished through image fragmentation, dream imagery, and the intentional use of blank canvas-like atonal music achieved through the statistical arrangement of notes and incorporation of silence-influenced his use of language, gesture, and stage setting. The findings of the New Science concerning relativity, like those of the new linguists regarding the ambiguity of language, complemented the artistic revolution occurring around him.
The major artistic statements of Paris in 1928 emanated from the Surrealists, and they had a profound impact on Beckett. The Surrealists had found a broad and encompassing salvation in psychoanalysis. To them, Freud explained civilization and its discontents at the same time that he offered a kind of metaphysics for the exile, adrift amidst the recent loss of religious, social, and family values. Psychoanalysis promised an inner coherence to fill the personal or cosmic loneliness of the times. It also validated the "automatic" formulas of the new spontaneous and "pure" art forms.
Primarily devoted to unifying the inner and outer worlds, the artistic goals of the Surrealists, as their spokesperson, Andre Breton, expressed them, were "pure psychic automatism, ... the real process of thought, [without] reason and ... esthetic or moral preoccupation." Many Surrealists published in Eugene Jolas's prestigious transition, which, when Beckett arrived, was chiefly associated with Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Joyce published seventeen installments of Work in Progress (later, Finnegans Wake) there. Beckett soon came to work at and publish in transition.
Many of Jolas's goals in publishing transition were identical to those of the Surrealists. He demanded a "Revolution of the Word" and insisted that the artist create a language to unite personal, inner experience with the social world and cosmos. Pure poetry, he and the Surrealists declared, is "a lyrical absolute that seeks an a priori reality within ourselves alone." In an issue with one of Beckett's earliest pieces, "For Future Reference," transition included essays by Jung and Jolas on the importance of the dream life.
In the "Poetry is Vertical" issue, which included Beckett's short story "Sedendo and Quiescendo," Jolas published the Verticalist Manifesto, signed by nine artists, including Beckett. An interesting blend of Jolas, Freud, and Jung, the manifesto called for the "hegemony of the inner life over the outer life." For Jolas, a unifying mythos of dream and external would reveal the universal self in relation to instinctive, primal consciousness and the transcendent unity connecting all things.
That Jolas's and the Surrealists' primary goal was the "hegemony of the inner life over the outer life" is important in understanding Beckett's later use of unconscious thought functioning. In the trilogy, for example, Beckett set up a universal and "transcendental 'I,'" but instead of identifying a unifying mythos, he focused on the I's "final disintegration" in the very act of measuring itself. Each of his heroes was connected in the novels; in search of an irreducible self or voice, each became the refinement of his previous persona and moved to silence in the impossible quest of reaching the core of inner and outer reality. Only when Beckett began his dramatic writing did he achieve the balance between dream and reality; he also created a transcendent I-although, as we shall see, his conception of transcendence included the inner and outer self, not Jolas's or Breton's mystical, if temporary, synthesis.
As early as 1919, Breton had recognized that the mind has a continuous thought process that exists below consciousness, which Freud had called "primary process." Breton had studied Freud's writings and worked at the Charcot Clinic, where Freud had once been in attendance.
Continues...
Excerpted from Reading Godot by LOIS GORDON Copyright © 2002 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | ix | |
| Introduction: The Form of Madness: A Sensible Mess | 1 | |
| 1 | The First Forty Years: Origins of a Vision and Form | 19 |
| 2 | Waiting for Godot: The Existential Dimension | 55 |
| 3 | The Dream as a Manifestation of Unconscious Language and Emotion: The Conglomerative Effect | 70 |
| 4 | The Conglomerative Voice: Cain and Abel | 86 |
| 5 | The Language of Dreams: The Anatomy of the Conglomerative Effect | 97 |
| 6 | "The key word is ... 'perhaps'" | 112 |
| 7 | Staging the Conglomerative Effect | 125 |
| 8 | Crystallization of a Vision and Form | 144 |
| Notes | 171 | |
| Selected Bibliography | 199 | |
| Index | 208 |