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Waiting for Godot and the Modernist Roots of the Theatre of the Absurd By Brandon Muri

The shocking plays appearing throughout the 1950s known as Theatre of the Absurd represent the dramatic culmination of European modernism. The early 20th century had been a period of cultural upheaval marked by skepticism and the rejection of ancient paradigms in which the decline of religious faith, the discovery of powerful irrational and unconscious forces in the human psyche, the erosion of Western metaphysical conceptions of morality and truth, the disillusionment in the prospect of social progress in an age of totalitarianism and mechanized warfare, had all contributed to the rejection of the traditional concept of a providentially ordered cosmos. Consequently, artistic culture was forced to adapt to a conception of Nature characterized by paradox and contradiction. Confronted with this radical shift, artists were forced to abandon existing conventions in pursuit of new methods amenable to this new reality as it appeared to the modern consciousness. This revolution exerted a powerful influence on the development of 20th century theatre, as the traditional framework of rational action developed within a self-evident system of values was displaced by the modernist ethic of fragmentation and discontinuity. Rejecting such bedrock principles as Aristotelian unity, innovators like Berthold Brecht brought about a revolution in theatre by redefining the psychological relation between actor and audience. Using a method he called defamiliarization, Brecht hoped to prevent the audiences psychological identification with his characters, shifting the locus of effect from emotion to rational judgment, creating a cognitive experience rather than an escape from reality. Concomitant movements throughout the 1920s and 30s included Expressionism, Surrealism, and Artauds Theatre of Cruelty, all of which contributed to the dismantling of the classical model by transforming the play into an externalization of internal states rather than a representation of human action (Lieberman 86), essentially turning the Aristotelian model inside out. Collectively, these movements questioned the very telos of drama. Whereas the classical conception aimed to teach and delight, the new formulation aimed at an effect akin to Cartesian doubt, inducing the audience to reexamine even their most basic assumptions. These new trends presented an assault upon traditional theatre, particularly the stable cosmos of The Well-Made Play. The most popular dramatic form of the previous century, the Well-Made Play presented a carefully developed plot liberally equipped with stock contrivances (missing letters, mistaken identity, exits and entrances, etc.), inevitably leading to the moment of perepeteia in the obligatory Scne faire. Modernist dramatists rejected the Well-Made formula on account of its cause-and-effect purposiveness and the presuppositionalist system of morality which made them intelligible. Unlike their forbearers, modernist playwrights didnt aim to teach because they didnt trust their ability to know; theatre then became a means of expressing the terror and absurdity of human experience: not as it should be, or even as it is, but how it is felt. Appearing after World War II, the Theatre of the Absurd represented the fulfillment of this movement as its darkly comic reductio ad absurdum, taking the dramatic revolution of the previous five decades to a whole new level.Martin Esslin, the critic responsible for coining the term Theatre of the Absurd, defines absurdity as that which has no purpose, goal, or objective[footnoteRef:1] (Esslin 4). The abandonment of purposiveness and meaning in the Theatre of the Absurd constitutes the purest expression of modernist theatre (considered by many the beginning of postmodern theatre); it defies all preconceptions of matter and form and even accomplishes the alienating effect which Brecht could never successfully achieve in his own highly rational theatre (Esslin 5). By presenting a spectacle of nothing, the Theatre of the Absurd confronts the audience with absolutely nothing: nothing to follow, connect, or predict. It is interesting to note, however, that, staring into this abyss, the audience is confronted not with void, but plentitude: as Beckett has famously said, Nothing is more real than nothing. [1: He adopts the phrase from an essay by Ionesco on Kafka called Dans les Armes de la Ville.]

In Waiting for Godot, Beckett directs the audience toward a positive knowledge of existence without saying anything. Rather than a discrete world in which behaviors are judged according to traditional modes of intelligibility, Godot presents a kind of dialectic, shocking the audience by the conjunction (or disjunction) between the play and real life. In this sense, Waiting for Godot (and Absurd plays in general) accomplishes the inverse of The Well-Made Play; because, while the Well-Made Play presents an imbalance which must be resolved internally in the action, Godot creates an imbalance that is not resolved internally, but externalized in the audience. Against the backdrop of conventional theatre, Waiting for Godot represents irony in extremis. Unlike conventional forms in which everything on the stage exists for a larger purpose, the world of Godot is a world without meaning: bare in both matter and form. And yet the fact that Godot is still making the rounds after more than sixty years is proof that a meaningless play can still be meaningful. The meaning of Godot is communicated diachronically; that is, within the context of the existing language of theatre. With its extreme paucity of action, Godot confronts the theatre goer with an experience of failed expectations: nothing happens, Godot never comes. In this sense, Godot presents a brilliant simulacrum of real life in which desire is continually frustrated by the boring facts of the everyday; but no one goes to the theatre just to see real life; Beckett is doing something more than that. Godots pageantry of aimlessness systematically fails the theatre-goers dramatic expectations. In doing so, Godot becomes a parody of conventional drama, which it subtly evokes, in what might be called the deafening absence of dramatic convention. This disjunction creates a dynamic of signification in which the audience is forced to mediate between three elements: the play that is (Waiting for Godot), the play that is not (traditional play/failed expectations), and what it means (conjunction with personal experience). Beckett uses this technique of saying by not saying to undermine the faade of psychological security, the veneer of our modern, socially constructed world, to expose the vanity of thought.For this purpose, the haunting image of despairing bumpkins hobnobbing around a stage barren except for the lone, skeleton-like tree, creates a situation of powerful metaphorical significance. The characters are so featureless, so context-less, that it is nearly impossible to view them as representations of empirical entities; rather, they appear almost as symbolic abstractions. In his seminal essay on the subject, Esslin argues that the Theatre of the Absurd shares a kinship with the mystery plays of medieval Europe for this very reason because these plays often portray characters and situations too vague and generalized to signify any particular thing. Rather, the complete impotence of Vladimir and Estragon is suggestive of the failure of human thought, in the macrocosm of human existence at large, as well as in the individual mind. To imagine Becketts interest in the chaotic universe of the human mind we have only to think of Becketts Endgame, in which characters concealed in trashcans enact an equally meaningless drama within the confines of a bare room dominated by two small windows. Perhaps, in the world of Waiting for Godot, a world where nothing happens, where nothing seems to be related, Vladimir and Estragon are two activities of the human consciousness at war with the irrational world of the subconscious; perhaps they are meant to suggest the bipartite formulation of human reasonintellect and will. After all, if Pozzo and Lucky are to be viewed (as many critics have suggested) as Vladimir and Estragon writ large, this would describe the master-slave relationship quite well. Pozzo as master defines the power of will without the finesse of intellect; while Lucky, who was once the soul of intellect, seems to possess no will of his own. But one could just as easily argue that the play is about the impossibility of thought at all. Without any plot development or sense of contingency, the play is comprised of discrete activitieswalking, talking, falling downthat fail to resolve into a coherent drama. What this means for Vladimir and Estragon is that they exist perpetually in the moment. Although they have some knowledge of things outside their immediate experiencethey can recite songs and reference the Biblethis is all timeless, abstract data. When it comes to relating events to their present situation they are at a loss. References to past experiences like climbing the Eiffel Tower and picking grapes along the Rhone seem impossibly distant from the subtracted world in which they appear; it seems more likely that these memories are not even their own, or from another life. Perhaps Beckett is suggesting that, because any knowledge beyond immediate experience is dependent on memorywhich is falliblewe possess only a phantasmal relation to anything beyond the present. Thus, only dimly aware of their relation to yesterday and tomorrow, Vladimir and Estragon inhabit a world of inscrutable repetitiveness in which the time passing between the first act and the second could be a thousand years or an hour; and they pass the time like everyone else: walking, talking, and falling down. But then again, Beckett probably would have responded to either of these interpretations with a shrug and a sardonic smile. He notoriously rejected all proposed interpretations outright: because that was the point. Beckett thought it was funny how people could not return from the theatre without some neatly-wrapped explanation. His intention was always to affect peopleto raise questions and spark discussionbut never to tell them what to think or believe. After all, he notoriously didnt believe real communication was even possible. Thus, we are just as unlikely to discover Becketts actual meaning as his characters are to meet Godot; and perhaps that is all Waiting for Godot is meant to express.

BibliographyBeckett, Samuel. "Waiting for Godot." Norton Anthology of Drama. S.l.: W W Norton, 2013. 1010-072. Print.Esslin, Martin. "The Theatre of the Absurd." The Tulane Drama Review 4.4 (1960): 3-15. JSTOR. Web. 22 Feb. 2014. .Lieberman, Adrienne B. "The Well-Made Play and the Theatre of the Absurd: A Study in Attitude Change." Sociological Inquiry 39.1 (1969): 85-91. Print. Parker, R. B. "The Theory and Theatre of the Absurd." Queen's Quarterly 73.3 (1966): 421-41. Print.

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