Nothing to be done

“After Waiting for Godot,” George Szanto quotes Darko Suvin in his essay on Beckett’s most famous play, “writing dramas like Eliot or Williams, Camus or latter Ionesco is no doubt still factually possible, but it can no longer be regarded as a significant artistic pursuit.”¹ Such was the extent to which Samuel Beckett’s work managed to transform artistic drama—regardless of the many great works of modernism which preceded his groundbreaking play, everything that followed was in at least some subtle way colored by his influence. Born at the dawn of the twentieth century and coming of age during the rise of modernism, his own years of literary activity span across a transformative few decades, seeing the death throes of the late modernists and the beginnings of postmodernism after World War II. This longevity rendered Beckett something of an evolutionary missing link within literature, bridging the modernist works which sprung out of the first World War to later generations’ postmodernists and encompassing everything in between. As Tyrus Miller notes in his book Late Modernism, due to “the impressive length of [Beckett’s] literary career and his evolving but consistent corpus” a great deal of disagreement and wildly divergent readings of Beckett’s work serve to complicate his classification for those few in academia obsessive enough to fret his historical placement.² Both in form and in subject matter, Samuel Beckett never failed to press the envelope of even later modernism and serve as harbinger to the beginnings of postmodernism which was to follow. Despite the disparate assertions of numberless critics, both Waiting for Godot and the author’s other work simultaneously embrace components of not only late modernism but also postmodernism, landing Beckett the unique predicament of fitting snugly into neither category and carving works like Godot their own literary niche which is part modernist and part postmodernist while being wholly neither.

Despite his novelty of incorporating postmodern elements well before their mainstream adoption, Beckett’s body of work was influenced quite profoundly by the modernists and their namesake literary movement. An archeologist of literary traditions would rejoice in the evolutionary link that is Beckett, the Rosetta Stone containing language and ideas inherited from modernism and converting them into postmodernism. Having worked closely with James Joyce when the modernist author was researching and penning Finnegans Wake, and having himself published numerous critical and scholarly works based on Joyce, Proust, and others, young and collegiate Beckett familiarized himself with the avant-garde modernist movement he grew to supplant. Trademark Beckett themes that crop up in other works include isolation and alienation, both of which are doubtless prevalent in, among others, his novel Malone Dies and play Endgame.³ What is perhaps most interesting about Beckett is that, while these themes are certainly present and centrally engaged across the breadth of his fictional work, they are usually each presented with qualifiers, with subtle tweaks or new perspectives which shift them ever so slightly toward the realm of postmodern thought. Whereas the cultural and historical perspective in modernism was presented in tandem with existential philosophy—the two perhaps not always interrelated but offered as compatible and interplaying components of human experience—Beckett prioritizes history to the point that it “devours existentialism.”³ This is among the first departures from modernism, among the first postmodernist elements Beckett approaches uniquely.

So why this priority on history, why the priority on culture? These components exist somewhere between modernism and postmodernism, as both schools displayed an acute interest in these subjects, and Beckett’s treatment of them borrow from both traditions’ ideas regarding them. However, his deployment of historical perspective, not surprisingly, is somewhat less than traditional. As Szanto interestingly notes,

The genius of Beckett’s work, especially of his drama [like Waiting for Godot], is his avoidance of cohesive narrative content; instead he fills his plays with carefully juxtaposed units of cultural junk. A piece of Cartesian rationalism here, a chunk of Heidegger over there, a dash of pragmatism sprinkled lethally; references to Jesus on the cross at the beginning, man as a thinking reed in the middle, shifts in master/slave relationships, images of ashcans and dung-heaps, objectification of man into recorded voice, a return to the question of suicide at the end; psychology, parapsychology, metapsychology all donate scraps of their vocabularies. But in the end Beckett’s plays are empty plays.³

He uses cultural and historical material as a sort of glue to hold his oft-bizarre sort of narrative framework together, keeping with the play form and instead injecting it with a postmodern arrangement of non sequitur allusions. In place of the narrative and form that modernists often, though certainly not always, prioritized and focused upon, Beckett’s plays provide us with a slew of hodgepodge cultural and historical information, ranging in genre from logical philosophy and social psychology to issues of populist existential crises and wasteland imagery reminiscent of the post-WWI generation of modernist poets. He collects these influences and allusions in a framework of chaos and non-narrative, falling into line with the sentiment of a quote from Beckett which Szanto shares with us, alleging that “the task of the artist now” is “to find a form which accommodates the mess.”¹ Calling the hubbub of daily life and human experience a “mess” is something both modernists and postmodernists could likely get behind, but the search for a fresh form to accommodate it is likely more postmodern than anything, especially considering he chooses a more nebulous antinarrative type of form than many staunch modernists would have felt comfortable approaching.

Within Waiting for Godot and indeed throughout his other work, there exists an acute fixation on and comparison between the present or past human generation and society, which is illuminated first and perhaps best by Pozzo as he expounds that “[t]he tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops.”⁴ This passage rather forcibly suggests the interrelationship and hereditary nature of human generations as they relate to human experience, suggesting that the entirety of the human race shares a common reserve of emotion which is transferred among us each according to his need. This worldview could be argued any number of directions, but it doubtless contains some modernist influences in that synchronized “spiritus mundi” sort of perspective, suggesting the communal nature of humanity across physical and even temporal or generational identities. Pozzo continues, declaring, “Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.”⁴ This rather famous reflection on the human condition relative to historical precedent is a curious one in that it provides a particularly interesting turn from modernist preoccupation towards something more postmodern. Here, even the historical perspective Beckett would often offer and lean on is de-prioritized as irrelevant and inconsequential by the character of Pozzo to the point where the generation’s placement among others isn’t worth discussing further. While he relies on historical and cultural content to dislodge the flow of his narrative throughout, an especially postmodern aim with their disregard for traditional narrative structure, here “Beckett obliterates the meaning that was culture” by presenting it out of context and without any other importance than to stitch his patchwork anti-narrative together.

Especially in Waiting for Godot, whose tragic-comic characters discuss everything from absurdly comic memories and rankings of carrots and turnips to the meaninglessness of life, absurd surrealist themes abound. While these discussions were in part inspired by the modernist movement’s revulsion and existential anxiety following the calamities of war, in Godot and other works Beckett adopts a modernist sort of perspective—albeit with significant and defining qualifiers. While he certainly delves into the surrealism that modernists so often made use of, he also incorporates a more postmodern sense of absurdity that clashes a bit more directly with the purpose-oriented modernist writers. Theodor Adorno writes in his treatise on Endgame which also addresses themes and ideas present across Beckett’s body of work in general that

Absurdity in Beckett is no longer a state of human existence thinned out to a mere idea and then expressed in images. Poetic procedure surrenders to it without intention. Absurdity is divested of that generality of doctrine which existentialism, that creed of the permanence of individual existence, nonetheless combines with Western pathos of the universal and the immutable. Existential conformity—that one should be what one is—is thereby rejected along with the ease of its representation.³

Absurdity represents in Beckett’s work, specifically in Waiting for Godot, a collapse and abandonment of the existentialist mindset which was so prevalent and influential upon writers which preceded Beckett. It is replaced instead with absurdity, the creeping notion that life is without inherent meaning or purpose and that the course of human interaction and experience might just as well be summarized as part of an elaborate cosmic joke. In this way, Beckett’s work chronicles the “obsolescence of the modern,” wherein the “regressive language [of his texts] demolishes” modernism.³

Indeed, this is a play which is almost entirely about nothing. The titular character whose Christ-like reappearance is at first a driving force of the general narrative never does technically arrive, and the characters awaiting him so earnestly are left with questions about their very existences. Is this what Beckett aims to convey, that human experience is inherently some pointless and humorous waiting game for some spiritual enlightenment which might never arrive? It would appear that between its chorus of “nothing to be done,”⁴ while his protagonists carry on discussions of metaphysical import, nothing is decided or achieved. “What we have in this play,” writes Corcoran in his essay on Godot and history, “is a dramatization of the postmodern philosophy and morality. [Estragon and Vladimir’s] lives are a delusion. [Godot] is a pure fantasy or, in Freudian terms, a projection and sublimation of their emasculated, powerless lives.”⁵ The inherent nothingness and meaninglessness here established is proof that Beckett’s play has done away with the traditionally modernist embrace of existentialism and instead replaced it with absurdity. As far as its morality is concerned, the absurdity and non-direction cripples Godot in that respect, as well. Argues Stempel in his interesting article about the transformation of historical content into metaphysical anagogy, “Waiting for Godot is not a moral parable; a parable reaches a conclusion. It is a moral paradox, a problem of conscience which is left unresolved.”⁶ Much like the great deal of historical, psychological, and linguistic clutter Beckett raises across the play to replace classic plot and structure, the moral issues addressed are just as meaningless and inconsequential as the characters’ lives appear to be. “In brief,” continues Corcoran in perhaps the clearest endorsement he offers of the play’s absurdity,

Life has no stable meaning. Language is a game that entertains.⁵

Even when the Bible itself is directly addressed by Estragon and Vladimir at the outset of the first act, the pair is torn on which part of the text is actually meaningful. Estragon, seemingly either unfamiliar with or apathetic toward the Gospel narrative Vladimir is itching to elaborate upon, instead recalls “the maps of the Holy Land,” that they were “pretty” and “made [him] thirsty.”⁴ Here, perhaps most clearly, is an example of his characters focusing more on the signifier—that vessel which is conveying meaning or content—than the signified, the message the Bible would actually entail. Estragon is more concerned with the superficial aspects of the holy text and less with the the stories of Jesus of Nazareth within—whether this is due to his Jewish heritage or some deeper postmodern outlook is uncertain. What is important, however, is that both dueling perspectives are presented by the two protagonists as having equal weight, both the modernist occupation with the symbolism and purpose of the actual text and the postmodern fixation on its superficialities and mode of delivery.

Beckett’s very choice of genre—theatre productions—demonstrates both a commitment to the modern affiliation with structured form and the postmodern interest in performance rather than static, completed work. The author is a strange animal indeed in that he invites this level of intrigue based on his categorization alone. In themes, he makes seemingly arbitrary choices on which modernist threads to pick up and which to tweak so significantly as to render them somewhere closer to the postmodern neighborhood. His structure and form decisions are likewise arguable, falling neatly into neither genre and suggesting that, despite the degree of academic inquiry into sorting and ordering literary output from those few influential decades, the two schools might have more subtle components in common than is generally acknowledged. Further, it may be that Beckett alone displays so many evolutionary adaptations that would make him appear to belong in both camps. “The danger,” Stempel reminds us of Beckett’s own relevant quote, “is in the neatness of identifications”—perhaps the author himself would have disapproved of our scholars’ eagerness to neatly and finally categorize his work. No matter where literary history chooses to place the author, it’s indisputable that his artistic production forever altered the way shrewd readers and writers of great literature approach novels, plays, and widely-held conceptions of late modernism and postmodernism. While some may argue that his work was “[o]bjectively without any polemical intent,”³ it’s hard to argue with Darko Suvin that, following Godot’s publication, from the perspective of those hapless traditional playwrights there was suddenly “nothing to be done.”

Annotated bibliography