by CKR
Had Samuel Beckett lived, he would be a hundred years old this year. He didn’t, but there is much writing about him and staging of his plays. One suspects that Beckett would have shunned this.
Beckett was existential rather than political. He reflected a feeling that writing and meaning had reached an end, but he found it necessary to go on. He began writing in the 1930s, as Hitler was rising in Germany and the futility of the Great War was still felt. Shortly after the sequel to that war, he wrote “Waiting for Godot.”
The two tramps Vladimir and Estragon wait for something, despite the destruction the world outside the play has wreaked. Godot is the name of whom or what they are waiting for. An interlude gives us Lucky, flogged by Pozzo, whom all of us have known in multiple guises.
The play was first performed in 1953 and consigned to the realm of Existentialism by those happy toilers who were making our world much more prosperous. Existentialism was where men in glasses and women in black tights gloomily debated the value of…whatever. Nobody was waiting in the real world, having babies, moving up in their jobs, and buying new houses. Existentialist gloom could be attributed to the presence of The Bomb, and one must go on.
As prosperity increased and the children grew up, there was less waiting. John Kennedy was seen as bringing a new vitality to the country that was too soon wiped out. Had we been waiting for this without knowing? Blacks and their allies were no longer willing to wait for civil rights for all, although their marching song said that we shall overcome someday. Both moving and waiting. Eventually, there was no need to wait for pleasure, chemical and biological.
We no longer have to wait for anything at all. The world comes to us through the internet, delayed only by the level of electronics we can afford. With the largest military in the world, we can remove tyrants and see democracy flower. We can watch the Israelis remove Hezbollah in no time at all. We can end terror in our time.
Waiting is for tramps, the slow-witted, who don’t know what they’re waiting for, who can’t afford instant gratification. It provides too much time to think, to irritate each other, to become bored.
Beckett must have read T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which were written in 1943. From “East Coker”:
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.