Authors and After Words

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, the 13th of April, 1906. He could not have had a more ironic or iconic birth date. His family was well endowed and so he attended excellent schools where he showed himself to be a good student, a natural athlete, and an especially outstanding Cricket player. In 1923 at the age of 17, he entered Trinity College in Dublin where he read English, Italian, and French. He earned a B.A. in 1927. He then took a teaching job in Paris where he met James Joyce whose research and writing assistant he became, working on Finnegan’s Wake. In 1930 he returned to Dublin to lecture at Trinity College but left again in 1931, traveled throughout Europe, and wrote poetry, short fiction, and criticism. He returned to Ireland in 1937, saw to the publication of his novel Murphy (1938), had a serious falling out with his mother and returned to Paris preferring "France at war to Ireland at peace." After the German invasion of France in 1940, Beckett took part in the resistance, eluding the Gestapo until his unit was betrayed. He escaped capture and fled with his lover, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, to the south of France where he went into hiding and wrote his novel Watt. At the end of the war he was decorated for his participation in the underground, though he referred to it as "boy scout stuff." He then dedicated himself to writing two novels – Malloy and Malone Dies. From October 1948 to January 1949 he worked on a play in French called En attendant Godot, which was published in 1952. It was produced in Paris in 1953. In 1955, Beckett translated the play into English under the title Waiting for Godot. That year it opened to poor reviews in London but found enough critical support to turn its fortunes around. The play failed in Miami but ran to modest success in New York. Despite these shaky beginnings, Godot persisted over time to establish itself as a modern classic.

My own experience with Godot began in 1956 when Jim Carlson, the drama director at Hamline University in Saint Paul, was asked by the programmers at public television KSTP in Minneapolis to present a television program on "The Theater of the Absurd." I was chosen for the cast and suddenly found myself performing in a reading of Waiting for Godot on live television! I didn’t have the foggiest idea what the play was "about" but still there was a music in the words that felt like meaning. That was enough. Godot made an indelible impression on me through its language and the resonant melody of its truth. I began to learn how an actor needs to trust the ear and the heart and the mind and to give his words time to work. I learned that the intellect has powerful siblings to help sing the world.

Since then, I have continued to study the play; have produced it, and have attended performances wherever possible. Whenever Godot comes up in discussions, I usually speak for the minority when I praise the play. When Beckett received the Nobel Prize in 1969, I felt vindicated. Even now, this play continues to move me deeply. Here is why.

We are the children of the Enlightenment; that flame of courage, insight and humanism in which we seemed to take responsibility for ourselves and the world. Descartes located the center of Being in the mind: "I think; therefore I am." As a result, we sometimes politely, sometimes rudely, removed God to the outskirts of the universe and the imagination only to put ourselves in the center of both. We then made the mistake of replacing theology and mythology with science. Suddenly, the word "myth," that once meant truth, came to stand for falsehood.

Ironically, after all this change, nothing really changed, especially in the way we make enemies and go to war against each other. Oh, but we developed an impressive efficiency in ways of exterminating each other. By the middle of the 1940s, we found ourselves in a ruined world with a poisoned, barren landscape. The ultimate effect of taking all of the mythologies out of the world was to replace them with anti-mythologies that were so virulent as to nearly destroy ourselves and the world. All of this came down to a sense of profound abandonment. So it was that :

In Beckett’s image of abandonment, however, we discover the remains of a memory. The "servant" is called "Lucky" because Lucky remembers. When told to "think" he begins aloud, "Given the existence, as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Watmann, of a personal God…quaquaqua…"

This is the memory of a wider world, a broader universe, a grander vision of the whole – and the loss of same, that permeates Waiting for Godot. The problem that the Absurdist critique addresses in the Cartesian world view, in which human thought is seen as the only creative intelligence in the world is simple. Such Narcissism can only lead to nihilism and its language can only dissolve into the Babel of absurdity. That is the ultimate solipsism of the empty Now; a Now that denies the past and obfuscates a future. Even so, there is this memory…something about belonging, something about context…and some instinctive Truth. Is it any wonder that we continue to listen and wait to hear its echo?