Ils ne bougent pas: Waiting for Godot and the Absurd

Citation preview

UNIVERSIDADE DO VALE DO RIO DOS SINOS - UNISINOS UNIDADE ACADÊMICA DE GRADUAÇÃO CURSO DE LETRAS – PORTUGUÊS / INGLÊS

TALES VIEIRA COLMAN

ILS NE BOUGENT PAS: Waiting for Godot and the Absurd

São Leopoldo 2020

TALES VIEIRA COLMAN

ILS NE BOUGENT PAS: Waiting for Godot and the Absurd

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso apresentado como requisito parcial para obtenção do título de Licenciado em Letras Português/Inglês, pela Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos – UNISINOS Orientadora: Proª. Drª. Andrea Ferras Wolwacz

São Leopoldo 2020

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“Why is life a perpetual preparation for something that never happens?” (W.B. Yeats, 1970)

RESUMO

O presente trabalho de conclusão centra-se na peça teatral do autor AngloIrlandês Samuel Beckett, chamada Esperando por Godot (1953), uma obra representante do Teatro do Absurdo. O trabalho tem como objetivo analisar os três movimentos que compõem a peça. O primeiro sendo a espera, representada pelo tempo em que os protagonistas passam aguardando Godot. O segundo sendo a ação, representada por tudo o que acontece enquanto Vladimir e Estragon esperam por Godot. E o terceiro sendo a repetição, que se faz presente no segundo ato e auxilia o espectador a compreender melhor a dinâmica entre os tempos empreendida por Beckett. Esses três movimentos são analisados traçando uma comparação com a história da Irlanda, sendo o primeiro ato da peça análogo a grande fome (1845-1849) e o segundo ato ao período que culmina com ‘the Troubles’: a luta urbana dos Irlandeses vs Britânicos pelo controle do norte da ilha. Godot seria, assim, uma representação da unificação Irlandesa. Para auxiliar na escrita do trabalho, fez-se uso de revisão bibliográfica como metodologia, a partir de obras sobre a vida de Beckett, partindo de sua infância como parte da elite AngloIrlandesa até o término da escrita de Esperando por Godot, no ano de 1949; análise da bibliografia sobre o teatro do absurdo e suas origens filosóficas e, por último, uma revisão sobre a história da Irlanda focada na grande fome e nos eventos que culminaram no período conhecido como “the Troubles”. Palavras-chave: Samuel Beckett. Esperando por Godot. Teatro do Absurdo. IrishStudies.

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ABSTRACT

The present research focuses on the play written by the Anglo-Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett called Waiting for Godot (1953), a work inserted within the Theatre of the Absurd. The text aims to analyze the three movements that comprise the play. The first is the waiting, represented by the time that the protagonists spend waiting for Godot. The second is the action, represented by everything that happens while Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, and the third is the repetition, which takes place in the second act and helps the viewer to better understand the dynamics between the times depicted by Beckett. These three movements are analyzed by drawing a comparison with the History of Ireland. The first act of the play is analogous to the great famine (1845-1849) and the second act to to the process that will lead up to the period known as 'the Troubles', the Irish vs. British urban struggle for the control of the north of the island. Godot would thus be a representation of the Irish unification. To assist in the writing of the present research, a bibliographic review was used as the methodology, starting with works about Beckett's life, from his childhood as part of the Anglo-Irish elite until the end of the writing of Waiting for Godot (1953), in the year 1949; an analysis of the bibliography on the Theater of the Absurd and its philosophical origins and, finally, a review on the history of Ireland focused on the great famine and the events that led to period known as “the troubles”. Keywords: Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. Theatre of the Absurd. Irish-Studies.

SUMÁRIO

RESUMO

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ABSTRACT

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1 INTRODUCTION

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2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY

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3 BECKETT

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3.1 BECKETT AND PARIS 4 THEATRE OF ABSURD 4.1 ABSURD

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5 WAITING FOR GODOT

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6 CONCLUSIONS

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REFERÊNCIAS

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1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, it is assumed by most people that everybody belongs to a nation. Even when talking about refugees, they are always mentioned together with their country of birth. This contemporary notion tends to conceive the nation as a static and isolated entity, with well established borders. Yet, it is a fact that people do not necessarily live within the same borders for their whole life. Actually, most of the present borders are recent features, emerging as late as the 90s. No, you are not reading the wrong paper, in order to talk about Beckett and the Absurd, it is required to keep in mind the arbitrary character of national borders. Not only the geographical boundaries, like the sea that divides Europe in continental, France, Germany, Netherlands, etc. and insular borders with the United Kingdom and Ireland, but also the cultural one. And talking about borders, there is a people that never recognized the limits of the borders; I am talking about the Irish people and their huge diaspora all over English-speaking countries and, to a certain extent, non-English speaking countries as well. But, how absurd it is for someone to belong to a nation without living in it? What are the limits of belonging within a culture? Are we trapped in the culture that we were raised in, even after living abroad for years? Well, this idea seems absurd. The concept of the absurd will be discussed later on, but as we start, it is important to know that the absurd was and still is used by writers and philosophers as a mirror that reflects our daily lives. It has as its main goal to show the reality as it is, as meaningless as one can imagine. While showing our daily activities, the absurd makes the reader, or the audience in case of plays1, reflect upon their own life and the meaning behind their everyday actions. In order to search for the absurd, one does not need to look for fictitious actions, but instead to have a look into one's daily routine: the absurd of waiting in traffic to reach a certain destination, the absurd of being sick, the absurd of living on our minimum wage, the absurd of big tech companies selling our private data and mostly, the absurd of waiting. Since the absurd is a reflection of our own reality, the best way to analyse the Theatre of Absurd is to use the plays as part of the biographies of the dramatists. 1

Theatre of Absurd.

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The absurdist plays are not stories about fictional worlds, like Harry Potter (1997) or the Hunger Games (2008), instead, they are about this world, the one that we are living in right now. They are about our daily lives. They are actually a clear reflection about something present in our reality and even if sometimes the object which the Absurd discusses is not visible, it is always there, or better, here, with us. The absurd carries within a description of a feeling, a personification of the anxiety of a certain moment or emotion that can occur in our reality; that is why the absurd is not about supernatural entities, but about ontological realities. Unfortunately, the academia says that a research must have a certain number of pages, so boundaries must be established beforehand. The first is that while analyzing the Theatre of the Absurd, the present work will be exclusively about the French-Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett. Even though other plays written by him might be mentioned throughout the next pages, the focus is on Waiting for Godot (1953). When telling about Beckett’s personal life, the work will only cover his years prior to the writing of Waiting for Godot (1953). The second boundary is that while analyzing the multiple meanings in Waiting for Godot (1953), the work will deal mostly with the Irish exile and the waiting, and the contrast between these two movements, to leave and to stay, leaving behind any Marxist or Psychological literary criticism. The justification to write this paper under the umbrella of Irish Studies is because even though "Samuel Beckett may have preferred to live in a France at war rather than in Ireland at peace." (KIBERD, 1996, p. 471), Beckett’s divorce with Ireland was never complete. He, like most scholars mentioned in this work, is a former alumni of Trinity College in Dublin, and carried Trinity's influence throughout his life and his plays. Also, his friendship with the renowned Irish writer James Joyce helped us to insert Beckett within the canon of Irish Literature, regardless his plays being written first in French and only later translated to English by himself. Nowadays, the most prominent scholars dedicated to Beckett are also Irish, related to Trinity College or at least have a close relation to Ireland. Apart from the reasons mentioned above, the fact that one of the characteristics of the Irish is exactly the huge size of its diaspora, Beckett living abroad is then another reason to put him together with the Irish. Even if his life was marked by his moving, his plays reflect exactly the opposite, the standing condition of human lives, the waiting for somebody or something to happen. Although this waiting is usually associated with the Paris

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occupation by the Nazis during the Second World War, this paper will present reflections upon how far this idea of waiting can be traced within the Irish culture, and how the absurd was not born during the war only, but together with the concept of nations and immigration. To be in movement is also to be standing, to be waiting for something, if you move, you expect an outcome and you wait for it. But how to deal with movement in a period of time when all we can do is wait? Our everyday tasks are mostly focused on waiting, waiting for somebody, waiting for a new movie, waiting all week for the short weekend, working while waiting for retirement. We can assume the history of Humankind and the nations are the history of waiting, and with this in our minds we can think about Ireland as the nation where waiting is reflected throughout history; therefore, waiting influenced Beckett’s plays on continental Europe, even if only at subconscious level. To write about the history of an author is not always the easiest task. Even though Beckett was not as secluded as J. D. Salinger, it is a fact that the dramatist was not as open as Ionesco, or others Absurdists of the same period of time. Letters, interviews and personal details about his life were mostly opened to the public only after his death in 1989. His most famous play, Waiting for Godot (1953) has multiple meanings and in the next chapters, the play will be explored not only as a mirror of Beckett’s life, but also as a mirror of the Irish history and, in a broad sense, the European cultural common background. The open interpretation of the play is not a source of confusion but indeed is one of its best features because it has been used to expand its audience across different nations and languages, since the play deals with the Human waiting, a concept shared by all human beings. Whenever it is staged, the response can be different, but it is never null. Nor Irish, nor British and not even French, Beckett is a walking contradiction that for sure contributes to his plays as will be shown later on. Allow me to be subjective for a while, I chose to work with Samuel Beckett because he was the first non-gothic Irish writer that I read in my life, and the most meaningful one, changing how I used to see life and especially helping me going through the everyday routine. Before Beckett, I was used to reading Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu and Patrick McCabe; those were the Irish writers that taught me about Ireland, the Emerald Island, the rain and the Celtic heritage. I was sure that to work with Gothic literature was the best way to write about Ireland’s history and

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heritage. But that would be too easy and simplistic; the work would also be giving a fictional mood of the Irish tradition, based purely on the imaginary of a metalhead whose only Irish is a lost last name2. In order to go deep into what Ireland is, I had to choose a most realistic Irish writer, and the choice was easy because when I think about reality, the first thing that comes to my mind is: How absurd life is. I must confess, before 2020 I knew almost nothing about Beckett’s personal life. His plays were never my bedside average reading. I seldom go to plays and prior to this research, Beckett was more a name that I used to drop during informal conversations to sound smart. His only plays that I had read before were Happy Days (1961), Endgame (1957) and Waiting for Godot (1953). Being from an analytical tradition, the existentialism of the continental philosophy was something that I had no interest before my arrival at the University. With that said, I am going back to the impersonal language that such work requires. Back to Beckett, he wrote his plays firstly in a foreing language, namely, French, and then translated them to English. For citizens of monolingual countries, such as most English-Speaking countries and some Romance countries as well, the concept of writing in a foreign language is a distant one. The case for a native English-speaker writing in French is even more unearthly. Why? How? These are the questions that usually arise when monolinguals face the fact that Beckett wrote most of his plays in French. This feature is not the most important one, but without doubt, a worthwhile fact to tell when writing about why Beckett. The second feature is how his plays always provoke an answer from the audience or from the readers if you never had the chance to see it staged. It does not matter your social class, your gender, your political convictions or religious beliefs, everybody has an answer for Beckett’s plays, even if they never ask anything directly. If it is true that the actors and the translations might change the details of the play, its core values always communicate something to the audience. It is impossible to think about anyone who, when faced with Beckett’s work, does not reflect about something. The open meaning given by the onlookers, instead of emptying any intrinsic value within Beckett plays, actually do the opposite, enhancing all possible interpretations. One can extract a multitude of symbols, allegories and features

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My last name is Colman.

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without ending further interpretations. How subversive Beckett’s writing really is, not only on an existentialist level, but also on a linguistic one. The way his syntax works, his choice of words, is all a huge puzzle whose final form cannot be assembled in a simplistic way. Leaving the theoretical approach of his writings behind, another point is his personal life, his condition of an almost exile in France, almost because his departure from Ireland was not based on political persecution, as will be mentioned later on. Beckett had an affluent family, had a good childhood and could easily climb the cultural and academic context of Ireland back then. This move from Ireland to abroad is the third aspect that makes Samuel Beckett the best choice for such work. The goal of this final paper is not answering all the questions that can arise from a Waiting for Godot (1953) analysis, primarily, because as mentioned above, Beckett’s plays are endless in their interpretations. Therefore, we will use a holistic approach, starting with Beckett’s life prior to the composition of Waiting for Godot (1953) and then undertaking an analysis of the play in its movements: the exile of Beckett (moving) and the Waiting for Godot (1953) (Waiting). This research seeks to help readers understand the origins of this moving and waiting movements in Irish cultural history and also on Beckett's personal life, always putting into perspective the diverse historical facts that resemble these movements, as long as they have happened prior to 1943, the year of final writing of Waiting for Godot (1953). In order to follow a proper academic design, this work is organized in six chapters, each with a limited number of pages, theme and with its own goals. The first, the one that you are reading right now is the introduction, where, in broad strokes, the main idea of the work is presented together with its objectives and justification. The goal of this chapter is to provide the reader with information needed to proceed reading and also to introduce the thematic of the Absurd, Beckett and Ireland. The next chapter is literature review and methodology. Usually in scientific works those are different chapters but since the methodology used in this research is bibliographical research, the chapters are presented together. This way the reader is able to know more about the authors quoted in the work and why they were chosen. The next chapter in the sequence is chapter three, where information about Beckett's background is given. The writings about his personal life start with his Anglo-Irish childhood and go until his return to Paris after the war, showing, in the meantime, his period studying at Trinity College of Dublin as well as his time spent

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with James Joyce in France. Chapter four is about the Theatre of the Absurd, starting with its origins with Martin Esslin’ book that combined the philosophical concept of the Absurd with the plays produced at that time in France. This chapter will also present Absurdist philosophical roots, based on the work of French-Argelian philosopher Albert Camus. Once the concept of Theatre of Absurd is given, chapter five is dedicated to the bulk of this work, the analysis of Waiting for Godot (1953) thinking about the two movements that take place in the play: the moving and the waiting. This chapter will deal with the Irish roots of these movements making a comparison of the Irish immigration background and Beckett’s play. The last chapter is called conclusions and as you can guess by its title, it is the chapter dedicated to the end of the paper. In it, readers will find a wrap-up of the main ideas given throughout the whole work. It is also the space dedicated to sections about the current state of Ireland, writers influenced by Beckett and suggestions for further research on Waiting for Godot (1953) that were not covered in the present academic work.

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2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY

In order to produce the present paper, the methodology that will be used is the bibliographical research method, quoting and working with several influential names of Irish Studies, Irish literature and Irish history. The idea to base the project, preferably, on Irish writers, is used as a way to justify and insert the work within the realm of Irish Studies. The scholar most quoted in this research is Andrew Gibson, a familiar name for readers interested in English speaking Literature, and especially those that are interested in the works by James Joyce. Gibson is a former alumni and researcher at Oxford University, having taught English and Irish literature in different universities through his career. The justification for awarding Gibson the central position when it comes to the present work is because of the importance of Gibson for Beckett studies. He is the editor of a journal called Limit(e) Beckett1 and was also appointed as Associate Member of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading2. For the present paper, his 2009 biography titled Samuel Beckett was selected as the main source of information about Beckett’s personal and public life. Another authorities in Beckett quoted are the Irish poet Anthony Cronin with his biography named Samuel Beckett: the Last Modernist (1999). The last biography used is the The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014); even if this publication was less quoted than the other two, it is the most complete work about Beckett published yet. The book was written by S. E. Gontarski, an important name for Irish Studies and Beckett Studies. Gontarski is a professor of the English Department3 in Florida State University. Two other books about Beckett that do not fit the traditional bibliography category were also used. The letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1: 1929-1940 (2009), edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, both active scholars of Irish Studies4. And Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936-1937 (2011) by Mark Nixon. Nixon is professor at University of Reading

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THE ROYAL HOLLOWAY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, 2020 Ibdem, 2020 3 FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2020. 4 EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, 2020. 2

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and thedirector of the Beckett International Foundation5. These two last books are collections of letters and other Beckett personal notes and provide a good insight of the writer's personal life. The only Samuel Beckett play used in this research is Waiting for Godot (2011), the edition released by the publishing company Grove Press. When discussing the theatre, the first book quoted is Poetics (335 BC), the Ancient Greek treatise was brought here with emphasis on its distinction on Comedy vs Tragedy, also to point out how old the art of Theatre is. As the academic work goes on, Martin Esslin is quoted, since it was in his book The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) that Esslin coined the term Theatre of the Absurd. The other autor that writes about the absurd and Beckett is the American Michal Y. Bennet in his book Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (2011). When discussing about the absurd, one needs to write about the philosopher that gave birth to the absurd as a philosophical concept, and also as a literary trait, Albert Camus. The two Camus’ books used were his novel L'Étranger (1942) and his philosophical treatise The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Apart from Camus and beyond the absurdist philosophy, the German philosopher Nietzsche is used to write about repetition; his book The Gay Science (1888) is quoted as a way to present his philosophical concept of eternal return to our readers. Back to the Irish studies character of this academic work, five different writers were used to discuss the Great Famine; they are: the British historian Christine Kinealy with her book named The Great Irish Famine (2002); the artist Niam Ann Kelly with Imaging the Great Irish Famine: Representing Dispossession in Visual Culture (2018);

the Irish historian and professor at University College Dublin,

Cormac Ó Gráda with his economy book about the famine called The Great Irish Famine (1989); The controversial Seamus P. Metress that wrote The Great Starvation (1845 - 1852): An Irish Holocaust (1996) and Mary C Kelly in Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History: Enshiring a Fateful Memory (2014). These works are very important for this thesis. The sections about Ireland are the ones with the most writers because its subject has been written and discussed by a large number of academics and who used different perspectives. Since the present work is within the Irish studies, the

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UNIVERSITY OF READING, 2020.

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name of Declan Kiberd is used and his book Inventing Ireland (1996) was the first Irish studies reading reviewed for this research. The Fordham University professor John P. McCarthy is quoted with his classic book Ireland: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present (2006), one of the most complete works on Irish history. The contemporary Irish cultural historian Terrence Brown is mentioned after his Ireland: A social and cultural history 1922-2002 (2003). The name of Nicole Anderson Yanoso appears when discussing the Irish-American tradition; his recent book, The Irish and the American Presidency (2017) being a success. And the last book used on the subject of the Irish is Rethinking the Irish Diaspora: After the Gathering (2018), by Johanne Devlin Trew and Michael Pierse. Apart from the books mentioned above, the research also used a large number of academic essays available at the JSTOR database. Most of them were about Beckett's time at Trinity College of Dublin and his influences. At the end of this research there is the complete list of references. By now, the two articles that are worth mentioning in this chapter are John V. Luce, Samuel Beckett's Undergraduate Course at Trinity College Dublin (2011) and David Berman, Beckett and Berkeley (1984), both essays are about Beckett and his time studying at Trinity, bringing information that was absent from the biography books consulted on Beckett’s life. Also, newspaper articles, mostly from the Irish Times were used in order to confirm minor information such as locations and dates. In order to gather more information about Beckett, and up-to-date information, websites such as the Trinity College Dublin, the data of the Central Statistics Office, BBC, Worldometer, blogs and online dictionaries were also used in the present work. Of the websites used, the most important one was the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, used to check dates of historical events and also to confirm information about writers like Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. The last important thing to notice about the bibliographical research is that political treatises quoted on the text were found online, the 1916 Proclamation having one website produced by the newspaper the Irish Times while the 1948, The Republic of Ireland Act, can be found in the Irish Statute Book website. In order to better organize the research, the theoretical discussion for each source mentioned here is explored in their respective chapters. This way, the reader does not have to go back-and-forth in the text during the reading act.

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3 BECKETT

Samuel Bercklay Beckett was born on 13 April 1906. It was a Friday, but not any Friday, it was Good Friday. “The idea that he had been born on Good Friday, the day of the Saviour's crucifixion, pleased him, more especially since Good Friday happened in 1906 to have been Friday the thirteenth.” (CRONIN, 1999, p. 1) His family state, where Beckett spent his childhood, was named Cooldrinagh; the name means 'the quiet place of the black thorn'1 in Irish and was located on the corner of Brighton Road and Kerrymount Avenue, in the neighborhood of Foxrock, a middle-class suburb in the southside of Dublin. His heritage was the typical Anglo-Irish, his family was a part of the Protestant elite class and his father, William Beckett “was an affluent, successful building contractor.” (GIBSON, 2009, p. 25). His mother, Mary Jones Roe Beckett, was a nurse and, when compared to the openness of William, had a very different personality; she "was religious, moody, turbulent, demanding" (GIBSON, 2009, p. 26). Beckett’s relationship with his mother is strongly marked with an antagonism between each other. Nevertheless, even with their contradictory relation, it is said that during his childhood he used to attend the Tullow Church2 with his mother. Beckett went to Earlsfort House School, a French bilingual school located in Harcourt St and in 1920 and, at the age of 14, he went to Portora Royal School, a boarding school located in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. The school founded in 1608 had famous pupils3 like Oscar Wilde, the Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier, the Anglican hymnodist Henry Francis Lyte and even Neil Hannon 4, the front man of The Divine Comedy, a famous Northern Irish pop band. Beckett stayed in Portora until 1923. Now, before we proceed, it is important to mention how Beckett, since his childhood, was isolated from our traditional view of Irish society. Ireland was a poor country, but being a child of the Anglo-Irish class, he lived in a Tudor-style mansion in the suburbs of Dublin. In a Catholic country his family was Protestant. While most 1 2 3 4

BECKETTS HOTEL LEIXLIP, 2020. THE IRISH TIMES, 2019. THE RAMBLING WOMBAT, 2017. WILIS, 2014.

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of the population was talking about independence and the colonial struggle, Beckett had the Union Jack5 flying proudly in his backyard. He was part of an elite that he never fitted in. In the year of 1923, after finishing his studies in Portora Royal School, Beckett moved back to Dublin, this time to attend the famous Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Trinity was founded in 1592; it was part of an English plot to enlarge the Colonial presence on Emerald Isle. The clerical thought that:

[…] the establishment of a university was an essential step in bringing Ireland into the mainstream of European learning and in strengthening the Protestant Reformation within the country. (TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, 2019).

Trinity College is, since its foundation, the most important educational institution in Ireland. Most of the Irish cultural elite studied at Trinity. When talking about the Irish literature, it is important to mention, among Trinity’s famous Alumni6 the name of the Gothic writers Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, classical writers like: Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, J. P. Donleavy, John Millington Synge, and William Trevor. Also, contemporary Irish writers such as Anne Enright, John Boyne, Eoin Colfer, Sebastian Barry and Sally Rooney have studied there. These are just the most popular names and related to the Irish Literature; when talking about other arts, the list of former students is even longer. Samuel Beckett enrolled in the four years course of Modern Languages7 and he learned French and some Italian. It is also said that he had a good command of German8, and French was, without doubt, his most popular language after his native English. Doireann Lalor writes that Beckett also had plenty of entries in his notebook in Italian and German. His studies at Trinity9 are best summarized in the article of John V. Luce titled Samuel Beckett's undergraduate course at Trinity College Dublin (2001). About the article, what is worth mentioning is the name of the two most influential figures of Beckett at Trinity. Even though biographers might disagree on which one had the 5

NIXON, 2011. TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, 2019. 7 LUCE, 2011. 8 LALOR, Doireann, 2010. 9 TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, 2015. 6

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most influence on Beckett’s life, most of the academics mention the name of the philosopher A. A. Luce and the Romance languages teacher Thomas RudmoreBrown as Beckett’s influences. Starting with Arthur Aston Luce, also known as A. A. Luce, Irish readers may know his name due to his fame on the Island as being the most prominent Berkeley scholar, he was the third member of his family to study at Trinity 10. A veteran of the first Word War, his classes were mostly about the Irish philosopher George Berkeley and his Empiricism gave the young Beckett nourriture11 about ways to portray the human condition in his plays. Berkeley was not a dramatist or literary writer; most of his writings were treatises aiming at the reality of material substance. His analysis of immaterialism soon became a study of to be and to exist.12 The importance of the perceiver, for both Berkeley and Beckett, are elements that should be studied further in a future work. The influence of A. A Luce in Beckett is dubious, we are not sure if their relationship was based on a shared admiration of Berkeley or not since a letter to the Irish philosopher David Berman in 1983, Beckett writes that he "... was not influenced by Luce's worn on Berkeley."13 This revelation was made public by David Berman in an article showing all the relations of Beckett and Berkeley and made the whole controversy even more ironic. To this day there is still not a final say on whether Beckett was influenced by A. A. Luce or not. The most recent biography of Beckett written by Andrew Gibson in 2009 does not mention Luce's name, not even once. Instead, the name mentioned by Andrew Gibson as a major influence on Beckett's time at Trinity is the name of the academic Thomas Rudmose-Brown, a professor of French in the Modern Languages department. Rudmose-Brown was a specialist in Racine’s theatre. According to the biographer Andrew Gibson "The claim that ‘Rudmose-Brown made an intellectual out of a cricket-loving schoolboy’ does not seem unduly extravagant." (GIBSON, 2009, p. 30). Brown is mentioned in Gibson’s book as a noble, snob, and French aficionado teacher, just like Beckett and most of the upper and middle class of the island back then; moreover, he was also a Protestant. The professor was active in Beckett’s life

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BERMAN, 2014. Nourishment. 12 DUIGNAN, 2014. 13 BERMAN, 1984, p. 43. 11

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and career until his death in 194214. Different from A. A. Luce who is known all over educated circles in Ireland; the name of Rudmose-Brown is often mentioned only in two contexts: his years teaching Romance languages at Trinity College or regarding his relationship with Samuel Beckett. It was Rudmose-Brown, who, impressed by Beckett's linguistic abilities, indicated him to be an exchange lecturer in English for École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.

3.1 BECKETT AND PARIS

Nowadays if you want to be in theater, you must be in New York or London; if you are into Hollywoodian cinema, Los Angeles; for Country-musicians, Nashville and for Techno DJs, Berlin seems to be the ideal hub. Back in the beginning of the last century, the most important city for writers and dramatists, as well as philosophers and bohemians was Paris. Sartre was born there, so was Molière, Voltaire, Émile Zola, Balzac and many other French writers. But our focus here is about the ones that were not born there but who chose the “city of lights” as their city and home, as their stage for many plays, novels and poems. According to Esslin (1961, p. 22):

Paris is an international rather than a merely French center: it acts as a magnet attracting artists of all nationalities who are in search of freedom to work and live nonconformist lives unhampered by the need to look over their shoulder to see whether their neighbors are shocked.

The Belle Epoque certainly proved the potential of the city to develop and inspire great authors. It was during The Belle Epoque that the first well-known Irish writer left the Emerald Island to Paris; he was Oscar Wilde15. After his infamous trial and his sentence of two year of hard labour, he decided to flee the Island 16. Wilde arrived bankrupt in Paris in 1897, and only wrote one book while living in France, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). He died on November 30, 1900 at only 46 years old.

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LITTLE, Roger, 1984 BECKSON, 2018. 16 United Kingdom. 15

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The cause of his death, according to Karl Beckson, biographer for Encyclopedia Britannica, was an “acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection”. Only two years after Wilde’s death, the city once again became a home to an Irish writer, this time it was James Joyce17, who went to Paris in 1902 in hope to be a part of the poètes maudits. As the story goes, we know that he had to go back to Dublin a few months later mostly because of his mother’s health, May Joyce, who died in the summer of 1903. Joyce’s short stay in Paris was not in vain, it left in the writer a good impression on the bohemian lifestyle and its modern urban environment. The UC Berkeley English-literature researcher Catherine Flynn wrote in an article for the Irish newspaper Irish Times that Joyce found in Paris "a place where the human body resists these calculations and offers the possibility of other experiences." A proof of this can be found among Joyce’s Epiphanies written between 1901-1904. He wrote about Parisian women in a very erotic way, describing them as

They pass in an air of perfumes: under the perfumes their bodies have a warm humid smell. No man has loved them and they have not loved themselves: they have given nothing for all that has been given them. (1946, PG. 32).

It was only in 2002 that the National Library of Ireland made public a notebook that Joyce kept with him during this first visit to Paris. Catherine Flynn describes the content of this notebook as: “Joyce wrote an essay on aesthetics that declares that “proper” art excludes desire and loathing.” We can assume that Joyce was in shock with the urban environment of the French capital. Paris18 had 2,714 millions of inhabitants in 1901 while Dublin 19 had only 400,000 inhabitants. Actually, after the famine of 1840s the whole island20 had only 3.2 million inhabitants, almost the same population of the city of Paris, excluding the Parisian Banlieue. Joyce left the city in 1940, during the German-ocupation, to die in Zurich, Switzerland in January of 1941.

17

EDER, 1982. DEMOGRAPHIA, 2003. 19 CENTRAL STATISTICS OFFICE, 2020. 20 BRILLIANT MAPS, 2015. 18

20

By the time Joyce left the city and the German-ocupation started, Beckett was already living in Paris. Actually, Beckett was first presented to James Joyce in 1927 by the Irish-poet Thomas MacGreevy. Beckett was sent to Paris in order to be the substitute of MacGreevy to teach English at École Normale Supérieure. But, as Andrew Gibson explains: "He arrived to find MacGreevy still occupying his room." (2009, p. 42). It was MacGreevy that introduced Beckett to the High Culture of the city and the galleries of “rive gauche”. Gibson describes the atmosphere that Beckett found after being introduced to James Joyce. Joyce’s friend in Paris "put themselves at his disposal, kept him company on his outings, went on errands and performed little tasks for him.” (2009, p. 43). According to Marilyn Brouwer (2019), the relationship between Beckett and Joyce became estranged when Lucia, Joyce’s daughter, fell in love with Beckett but he rejected her. Lucia was schizophrenic, she was Joyce’s only daughter and, according to an article by Annabel Abbs (2016) published on Irish-newspaper The Irish Times, she was left in an English mental asylum for 50 years and she even spent some time as a Jung’s patient in Switzerland. After Lucia's affair, Beckett left Paris in 1930 and returned to Dublin. It was only seven years later that he would settle in Paris again. His arrival in Paris was not the best start for the author; in the first weeks of January, he was stabbed by a pimp named Prudence while hanging out with friends on fourteen arrondissement. According to Gibson, "He was taken to hospital where the Joyces and other friends pampered him." (2009, p. 96). It was also during his time bedridden that he met Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, his future wife. "She was to be the most important woman in Beckett’s later life." (GIBSON, 2009, p. 97) After his recovery and back to his normal life, Beckett stood with Joyce until 1940. It is also around this time that Beckett started to write his first poems in French. His new persona as a French writer and citizen became evident in 1939 when he wrote "If there is a war, and I fear there must be soon, I shall place myself at the disposition of this country” (FEHSENFELD & OVERBECK, 2009, p. 656). Beckett was right about the war, the German occupation of Paris started in June, 1940. The aggressions combined with the food shortage soon provoked two different resistance movements, one was the “national resistance” headed by De Gaulle and the exiled French right-wing political class, and the other was the

21

communist resistance, with different grassroots antifacist organization working underground within France. One of these left-wings organizations was called Gloria SMH, the organization created by Jacques Legrand and his wife Gabrielle Picabia. The group worked with the British resistance.

“Picabia and Legrand ran an operation that gathered

information about Nazi operations and movements, smuggling it into the unoccupied zone, and then transmitting it back to the Allies via radio.” (GONTARSKI, 2014, p. 155). Beckett's job within the organization had nothing to do with the practical urban warfare that some prominent members of the Resistance movement were doing on the streets, his main task was more intellectual, his duty “was to process information provided for him by agents, putting it in order, condensing and translating it so that it could then be miniaturized and sent on to London.” (GIBSON, 2009, p. 102). Shortly after Beckett’s work started, the nazi infiltrated Robert Alesch betrayed the group. Beckett and his wife managed to escape the Gestapo, but other members did not have the same fate. His friend, Alfred Perón, who had, together with Beckett, translated21 from English to French, Joyce’s book Anna Livia Plurabelle (1928), was sent to Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria with other members of the organization. The couple went to Roussillon while waiting for the war to end. Nevertheless, the escape to the unoccupied city was not the end of the war experience for the couple:

They worked on farms, grubbed for potatoes, kept up with the news of Vichy and the war as best they could, and avoided German patrols. They were never far away from a world in which betrayals, denunciations and arbitrary violence were the order of the day. (GIBSON, 2009, p. 102)

We can assume that for Beckett, to be hidden in the French countryside, working on farms during a wartime was the utterly Absurdist condition, specially for an Anglo-Irish raised in the rich area of South Dublin. His time in the tiny town was not idle for he continued working for the resistance against the Nazi. “[…] he participated in low-level Resistance activity: storing munitions on his rented property

21

MICHAUD, 2017.

22

and retrieving supplies and weapons dropped by Allied planes in the nearby mountains.” (MICHAUD, 2017) His stay in Roussillon, which started in 1942 and ended in 1945, gave Beckett enough time to write Watt

22

(2009). The book is not popular, and scholars only

recently started to write more about it. It is about a man named Watt "who seeks the meanings (“What?”) of the people and objects he encounters, never succeeds in meeting his employer, Mr. Knott, who does “not” appear in the novel."23 The book has an early absurdist influence, also the first idea of a character absent whose existence is part of the plot. Life was back to normal in Beckett's place, the couple went back to Paris in November 194424 and the next year Beckett travelled abroad for the first time since the war, going to England and then to Ireland for a short stay. It is important to mention that if the post-war in France was disturbed by political fights, judgements, and the purge, it was also a period that gave France a new shared perception of the importance of its own culture and language. This period of time may have benefited Beckett, helping to insert him as a French-dramatist. He even received a medal "As one of those deemed to have contributed most to liberation through participation in the Resistance, he had himself received the Croix de Guerre, in 1945." (GIBSON, 2009, p. 117). It was also during post war that a group of dramatists started to work on a new kind of play, The Theatre of the Absurd, which is the subject of our next chapter.

22

CULLINANE, 2012. Watt, Britannica, 2020. 24 Gibson, 2009. 23

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4 THEATRE OF ABSURD

Before we start our meditations around the concept of Absurd, let’s first peruse the first term included in this chapter title, the Theater. The etymology of the word Theater comes from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (place to see), the noun derived from the verb θεάομαι (to view, to watch)1. The fact that the word, as we use today, has such ancient roots serve as a reminder to us of how old plays really are. To assume that plays started with the Greek Tragedy is to reach a level of Eurocentrism that would be inadmissible to any post-colonial writer, and also would probably be historically wrong. Notwithstanding, the word used to describe the art, together with the format that are still used today, has been proved to be almost the same since the Greek Tragedy, a proof of that is that Sophocles plays such as Oedipus are still being staged without major changes. The oldest book concerning theatre is Poetics, written 355 BC. The writer is the well known Plato’s pupil Aristotle. Even if the work might be about Lyric Poetry, most of the survival fragments concern the Tragedy. It is probably the first literary essay ever written and, by extension, also discusses plays. For us, what matters the most is not the Lyric Poetry or the Epic one, but the distinction that Aristotle wrote about Tragedy vs Comedy. For Aristotle: "Comedy is (as we have said) an imitation of inferior people - not, however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful." (ARISTOTLE, 1997, p. 38). This definition of comedy keeps up-to-date if we think about the most popular comedy shows on TV or blockbusters movies. Even if, nowadays, part of the comedy production is becoming wiser with sketches and parodies being used as a way to denounce what is wrong in society, the Greek roots of imitating inferior people are still visible in more popular productions of the genre. By contrast, about Tragedy, Aristotle wrote that

Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions. (ARISTOTLE, 1997, p. 83).

1

WordSense.eu, 2017.

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Observing the adjectives used by Aristotle, when describing Tragedy, it is indubitable that the Greek philosopher prefers Tragedy over Comedy. That was the case for the Ancient Greek intellectual society as well "because it was not taken seriously, little attention was paid to comedy at first." (ARISTOTLE, 1997, p. 83). It is wrong, or at least doubtful, to claim that every play, starting in Ancient Greece until nowadays, can be inserted in any Aristotelian category, namely, Tragedy and Comedy. For instance, many Beckett’s experimental plays would not fit the traditional description of Tragedy or Comedy; it is the case for Beckett’s works such as: Act Without Words (1957) or Breath (1969), whose characteristics require the creation of new categories. Even if we could make an effort and try to apply Aristotelian categories to 20th century plays, the outcome would be a heterogeneous assembly of plays together within the same framework, even if they had nothing in common among them. In order to find a solution to this problem, throughout the years, the artistic community fashioned new forms of classifing plays like Farce, Theatre of Cruelty and Musical, just to name a few. Among these new forms the one that has to do with Beckett’s works, the best is Theatre of Absurd, especially when talking about Waiting for Godot (1953).

4.1 ABSURD

The term Theatre of the Absurd was coined by the Hungarian-British critic Martin Esslin and is perhaps his most popular creation. It first appeared in his book titled The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), published eight years after the premier of Waiting for Godot (1953) on French stages. The main dramatists mentioned in the book are Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Adamov and Jean Genet. Esslin starts his book with Waiting for Godot (1953) being staged at the infamous San Quentin penitentiary, one year before the first presentation of Johnny Cash in the jail that made the state prison famous country-wide. During Beckett’s play, actors of the company of the San Francisco Actors' Workshop were invited to stage Waiting for Godot (1953). According to Esslin, the choice for the play was made "largely because no woman appeared in it." (ESSLIN, 1961, p. 1).

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Little is said about its actors' performance. What was really meaningful was the audience's response to the play. Esslin quoting the local newspaper said that

[…] the convicts did not find it difficult to understand the play. One prisoner told him, "Godot is society." Said another: "He's the outside." A teacher at the prison was quoted as saying: "They know what is meant by waiting... and they knew if Godot finally came, he would only be a disappointment. (ESSLIN, 1961, p. 9)

People usually assume that inmates are devoid of any ability to interpret or appreciate “high culture” such as plays, but the San Quentin presentation showed exactly the opposite, prisoners identified themselves with Vladimir and Estragon. A new meaning of the play was discovered, Waiting for Godot (1953) was also about the inmates. The evidence of this universal meaning hidden within the play is the fact that Godot can be presented to both inmates in San Quentin and the upper classes of Europe. This fact gives us the first clue of what Absurd is. Now we know that it does not distinguish classes or conditions, the Absurd is shown as intrinsic to the human condition. Esslin did not create the term Absurd, as we will see below. Also, the human condition is better explained in the intersection of philosophy and literature. It is an intersection because one cannot classify what is literature and what is philosophy easily. Nobody would have doubts to say that Critique of Pure Reason (KANT, 1781) is a philosophical work while Salem's Lot (STEPHEN KING, 1975) is a literary one. Nevertheless, when we try the same classification with books such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra (NIETZSCHE, 1883) the difference is then arbitrary. Nietzsche wrote a fictional history with characters. Why then is his book philosophy and not literature? Jumping to the philosophical basis of the Absurd, there is a common misconception, made by non-specialists, to insert the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as a part of the absurdist movement. None of his plays are absurdists per se. What happened is that, as the most prominent French Existentialist, Satre’s influence on absurdist writers and philosophers was massive, especially when we envisage the Absurd as a part of the broad existentialist2 movement that came to light in France right after the end of the Second World War. It was Sartre’s essay named 2

This is a point of discussion, some philosophers point out that the Absurd is related to the nihilist tradition and has little to do with existentialism.

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L'existentialisme est un humanisme3 (1946) that brought the existentialist tradition to a new generation of readers and spread its concepts for people outside the intellectual circles all over France in the 40s, and later abroad. It is not a coincidence that the four dramatists used by Esslin to describe the Absurdist movement were all living in France, writing plays in French-language to the French audience. A curiosity is that only Jean Genet was born and raised in France, Ionesco was originally from Romania, Adamov was Russian and Beckett Irish. The creator of the Absurd as a philosophical movement, and also as a literary trait, was the Nobel-laureate Albert Camus. It was in 1942 that the French-Algerian writer published the two books that gave birth to the Absurdism as a philosophical and also literary movement, notwithstanding the fact that in the literature the Absurd label seems to have been used only to describe Camus fictional books. With the line "Aujourd’hui, maman est morte..." (CAMUS, 1942, p. 6), Albert Camus, with only 29 years old4, started the Absurd. “Mom died today” in a free translation, indicates the death of Meursault’s mom. The plot does not start with a “once upon a time” or a description of the environment, instead, it starts with a shocking fact. Even if at first glance, it looks like an abnormal event, the death of one’s mother is a universal phenomenon that will affect everybody, except in tragic circumstances when the son/daughter died before their mom. This shows us the first step to understanding the Absurd in literature. While magical realism works with everyday facts combined with exaggerations and paranormal phenomena, the absurd is raw, for it is brutal in its way to portray daily events. It does not need to transcend the everyday in order to frighten readers. As mentioned in the introduction, the absurd in this sense is more like a mirror to everyday events. The one who believes that life has no intrinsic magic, has never wondered about human nature and meaning. What is the meaning of death rather than to give answers, but the Absurd only delivers questions. In the same year, Camus published his first philosophical essay called Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942). In order to outline his Absurdist model, Camus begins with a nihilistic point of view, only to arrive in the idea that life has no intrinsic meaning.

3

The essay was first translated to English in 1948 by Philip Mairet and Carol Macomber, and was printed as a book titled Existentialism and Humanism, by the English publishing house Methuen. 4 MCCARTHY, 2004.

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A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. (CAMUS, 1942, p. 6).

The essay is about the Greek character Sisyphus, son of Aeolus and father of Glaucu. In Greek culture he was known as the "founder of the Isthmian Games, a festival of athletic and musical competitions in honour of the sea god Poseidon" 5. What made his name worthwhile to name the essay about Absurdism is his myth. Sisyphus, through a series of movements, cheated Death. When Death arrived to take him, he simply chained Death. With Death chained up no one died for a while in the world. That was his first movement, a strong dichotomy of moving (Sisyphus actions) and waiting (the Death tied up). Then, once Death was free again, with the help of Ares, goddess of war, they proceeded to punish Sisyphus. This is his second movement on cheating Death. He was killed and sent to the underworld, but had to come back to earth since his wife had not buried him. Once back on earth he stayed for a few more years before his final death. After his final death, having dodge Death twice, he was sentenced to roll a rock until the summit of a mountain just to see it rolling back to the bottom again. His punishment was eternal movement but without any kind of progress or changing. Then, what is the purpose of movement if nothing changes? Needless to say why this myth is very popular among philosophers, especially the existentialists. What is life if not a boulder upon the hill, right? Well, a philosophical aspect of the myth that has a lot to do with Waiting for Godot (1953) is the Nietzschean concept of die Ewige Wiederkunft6. One of the most famous ideas, it appeared in an intelligible way is his book called The Gay Science7 (1883) In the aphorism 341 Nietzsche wrote:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it 5

BRITANNICA, 2019. Eternal Return or Eternal Recurrence. 7 The original title is Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. 6

28 you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust! (NIETZSCHE, 2010, p. 466).

The name of the Nietzschean concept is pretty much self-explanatory, because it is the belief of the same thing happening over and over again, it means a terrible nightmare of endless repetition. We will not get into the philosophical outcome of this idea, for the present work, it is enough to know that this repetition is not a contingent of the Absurd, but indeed a notion that may or may not occur together with the Absurd. If you are familiar with Waiting for Godot (1953) you can start to see the parallelism on Sisyphus and Becket’s play. Sisyphus pushes his rock to the top of the mountain, only to see it rolling down again, Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, only to wait for him again. Both are representing the same concepts. When we are waiting in line, or during a traffic jam, we are Sisyphus; when we are trying a new hobby, or starting a new career, we are just like Sisyphus. The influence of Camus and his ideas of Absurdism presented in Le Mythe de Sisyphe were so influential to Beckett that the academic Michael Y. Bennett starts his work entitled Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (2011) saying that: "Waiting for Godot is a recast myth of Sisyphus". (BENNETT, 2011, p. 3).

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5 WAITING FOR GODOT

The exact date and what Samuel Beckett was doing when he wrote Waiting for Godot (1953) is unknown, or, at least, judged not worth mentioning by those who wrote about the play before me. The closest reference that can be found is in Beckett’s biography written by Andrew Gibson that states the year of writing as late 1948 and early 1949. We know for sure that he was living in Paris and wrote the play there, but what other activities he was doing during the writing process are largely unknown. Using Beckett’s biography prior to 1948, which was previously summarized in chapter four, we can speculate that the German occupation of Paris, and his escape to French countryside are the main inspirations for the play. Luckily, the play mirrors multiple meanings and we are able to place possible Becket’s motivations in multiple factors. Nevertheless, the goal of the present chapter is not to create presumptions but to draw a parallel about the Play and the Irish history. It was only four years after the ending of the writing process that the play was first staged, in 1953, having its premiere in Paris at Théâtre de Babylone 1. The French actor-director Roger Blin was put in charge of the production. Waiting for Godot (1953) was the work that promoted Beckett's career as a dramatist in France, and also abroad. Prior to Waiting for Godot (1953), his name was almost unknown.

In the early 1950s, those who showed interest in his work or sought to promote it were French or Paris-based. After Godot, the names of non expatriate Americans begin to loom large in the Beckett story (...), Germans started taking an interest, too. English responses were more mixed. (GIBSON, 2009, p. 128).

The play consists of five characters, all males. The two protagonists are Vladimir and Estragon. Act 1 starts with them waiting for Godot. While waiting, a master named Pozzo shows up with his slave called Lucky. They are going to the local market where Pozzo is going to put Lucky for sale. Lucky is clever, he can dance and when ordained to ‘think!’, he performs a long monologue. Lucky is tied with ludicrous long rope. Pozzo and Lucky then leave and the duo of protagonists go

1

GIBSON, 2009.

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back to the waiting for Godot. A boy appears and tells them that Godot will not come today. “Maybe tomorrow” (BECKETT, 2011). They decide to leave. Then, they stay. End of the first act. The second act is when the repetition2, die Ewige Wiederkunft3, becomes obvious to the audience and the absurdity of the play reaches its peak. The second act takes place on the day after the first act. The act opens with the duo once again waiting for Godot. While waiting, a blind master named Pozzo and his brainless and now mute slave named Lucky show up. As yesterday, they are going to the market to put Lucky up for sale. Lucky cannot perform his monologue since he is mute, and also dumb. This time, Lucky is tied up with a ludicrous short rope. They cannot remember the other characters, even if Vladimir seems to recall everything that happened in the first act, Estragon does not share the previous day memories with his partner. A boy shows up once again, just like Pozzo and Lucky, the boy also cannot remember the protagonists, but Vladimir remembers everything. Just as yesterday, Godot is not coming either. Vladimir and Estragon contemplate suicide, but the lack of a rope undermines their plan. They decide to leave. And then, they stay. End of the play. Before we proceed, a few things worth mentioning in the play is that while Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky and the boy perform the second act unaware of the first act, Vladimir remembers everything. He is the only character mindful of time and temporality. It is for Vladimir that the action of waiting for Godot, once again, seems absurd. Estragon is certainly not happy with the waiting and is conscious that this is not the first time that they are waiting for Godot, but since he is not mindful of the events that happened during the first act, the absurd is more distant from him. The repetition that takes place during the second act is a mirror of how our daily lives are. As days go passing by, the main activities remain the same while minor details are always changing. For instance, let’s assume that you take the train every weekday to reach your workplace. When thinking about the week, you can easily assume that the commute is always the same. But what happens when you try to observe the details of each day? When trying to notice the minor daily differences apart, you might realize that the weather is not the same everyday, and that the 2

Repetition is being used in this chapter within its English common usage, it has nothing to do with Deleuze concept of repetition Différence et Répétition (Difference and Repetition), 1968. 3 Nietzche’s eternal return / eternal recurrence.

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person standing next to you on the wagon is likely to change everyday as well. However, back to a broad view of your life, you are doing the same action as always, just commuting on your way to the office. So, the absurd is always a reflection of the broader, more distant, view. To meditate about the roots or the effects of the repetition of daily life is not under the scoop of the present work. For us, it is enough to understand that repetition is an integral part of our lives and that most of the time repetition does not stand for things being exactly the same, it just means that we are unaware of the minor changes because our mind is focused on the conclusions that always remain the same. Whether it is raining or not does not change the fact that every workday you commute to the same office, to reach your company’s office to work is your conclusion. For Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for Godot is their conclusion. That is the reason why Estragon does not need to remember the first act or pay attention to the details because his mind is only aware of the act of waiting for Godot. If Pozzo is blind or not, does not change the fact that the duo is only on the stage to wait for Godot. The play can be divided in three different moves that take place all at once during the plot. The first is the most distinguished, it is the waiting part, the one that academics usually research and quote the most; it is in the title of the play and, without doubt, is the main inspiration for the plot. The second is the moving part, not so popular or studied, rarely noticed by the audience. Even if the plot is about waiting, the characters are always performing actions and chatting with each other. Things are always happening on stage, and these changes are what create the notion of time. If there is no action and everything remains the same we cannot have a notion of time. Time is intrinsically related to us being mindful of changes. The final move that is present in the play is the repetition that, just like time, also needs an action. For this reason, we will classify the repetition as part of the moving part, in contrast to the static movement of waiting. Our first subject of analysis is the waiting part of the play. To write about the waiting is to write about a non-action, a lack of movement. It is also a matter of absence, of what or who is missing. We can only wait for something that is not present. The main aspect of Beckett’s cleverness, and one of the best traits of Waiting for Godot (1953), is that the main character of the play, Godot, whose name is featured in the title, is precisely the only character whose presence on the play is

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never materialized. We do not have an actor playing Godot, we have no idea how he looks like or how his voice might be, but we are sure that the play is about Godot. If questioned, each audience member would give a different description of how they imagine Godot. The play is not about what-it-is, but about what-is-not. Vladimir and Estragon are not the first people to wait for somebody, or for something. The waiting is an integral part of humankind and is present in many cultures, each with a different degree of waiting. Each person is waiting for something. You must be waiting for this chapter to end, just as I am waiting to finish writing it. To analyze the subjective characteristic of waiting would be to dive into psychological concepts that one might find boring and little useful for the play analysis proposed here. Therefore, we need to leap from the particular to the public and think about the waiting in historical events throughout history. Then we have a methodological problem to solve: What is a waiting moment in terms of history? Since there is no such a thing as a steady movement in people's lives, in history the waiting might as well appear to us as a changing. For instance: a revolution can mean the waiting for something better. But Waiting for Godot (1953) is not about a revolution. It can be, but for the purpose of the present work, we will take the play as: about what happens while we are waiting for something. With that idea in mind, we can proceed to analyze historical events throughout Irish history that summarize this movement of moving while waiting. Refugee is the English term used to designate people that are forced to flee their home country because of a war or a humanitarian crisis. One refugee is someone who lives abroad while waiting for a certain outcome to happen in their home countries. A refugee might be waiting for the end of the war or the end of the humanitarian crisis. The same word can also be applied to early Irish immigrants. Although it is not easy to stipulate a specific date for the begining of the Irish Diaspora, some touchstones can be observed. We can organize the Irish immigration in two broad acts, mirroring Waiting for Godot. The first act would be the tragedy, while the second would be the repetition. In the play of Irish immigration, Godot, the absent character whose absence resumes the plot, would be the concept of the 32 counties. The idea of an Irish unification, as proclaimed by the Young Ireland founder Thomas Osborne Davis:

33 So, as I grew from boy to man, I bent me to that bidding My spirit of each selfish plan And cruel passion ridding; For, thus I hoped some day to aid, Oh, can such hope be vain? When my dear country shall be made A Nation once again! (DAVIS, 1840)

The first act would be the Great Famine. The event helped shape Ireland’s culture and its impact was felt in different levels of the Irish society: economic, political, memory and identity. Ireland was under British colonial rule when the famine happened. Actually, it was not a single event but a chain of multiple events, both political and biological. Before we start with what happened between 1845 and 1849, it is important to know that when America was ‘discovered’, more than its gold, the element that changed Europe forever was the potato. When imported to European countries4, the potato rapidly became the main basis of the European diet, especially in England and Ireland. British historian Christine Kinealy in her book, The Great Irish Famine (2002) states that: “Potatoes, which grew prolifically, even in poor or rocky soil, provided over 50 per cent of the population with an adequate and healthy diet.” (KINEALY, 2002, p. 18). In political history, Ireland was already waiting for its Godot. The 1789 rebellion5 propelled the ideas of Ireland as a free independent nation island-wide. Just like the boy that has a duty to tell Vladimir and Estragon that Godot is not coming in the play, the Irish had to face the Act of Union. The act signed after the rebellion created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Irish lost their own parliament and were forced to a small number of seats in the British Westminster parliament. It was a huge setback for a country that was starting to create an identity on their own and whose population “accounted for almost one-third of the population of the United Kingdom” (KINEALY, 2002, p. 18). The island had more than 8 million citizens. As a comparison, nowadays the Island has fewer than 7 million inhabitants6, split in two, the larger part represented by the Republic of Ireland and the small northern part of Ireland, a province of the United Kingdom. Imagine 4

Namely: Ireland, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany and later to the Nordic countries. The United Irishmen were defeated when the French navy could not land in time to help them because of the bad weather. 6 News Letter, 2016. 5

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having one third of the population of the kingdom and still be managed as a colony, such a fact can be explained when dealing with African or American colonies, distant and emerged in hierarchical powers established from the metropolitan states. But if we remember that Ireland is the island next to the United Kingdom, and the Irish looked exactly the same as their British counterparts, the colonial past of Ireland seems even worse. Besides Ireland’s political unrest, in the year of 1845 a second tragedy hit the island, and just like the political problems caused by colonial rule, it stayed for a while and changed Ireland. The tragedy was a fungus that advanced towards Europe and destroyed most of the potato crops of the continent.

A fungal spore called Phytophthora infestans caused repeated potato blights, infesting crops through the second half of the 1840s. John Feehan notes that though the crop partially failed in 1845, the nearcomplete decimation of the 1846 crop left many without seed tubers to plant for the following year. (KELLY, 2018, PG. 2).

The obliteration of the Irish crops had an effect on the whole nourishment of the Island since the Irish ate more than just potatoes, actually “only one-half of average output ended up in human stomachs” (GRÁDA, 1989, p. 24). But in Ireland potatoes were used as pasture for animals, without the crops soon the Island started to lose its animals as well, ending the local production of food. During the first year of the blight, almost nothing changed on the island. The Irish understood that the 1845’s crops were gone but the population remained optimistic that by the next year, 1846, the season would be abundant once again. Unfortunately, the season of 1846 was even worse than the previous year and a crisis that was supposed to stay for just a short period of time extended for four more years. During the potato blight disaster, not all years were the same, some years were better than others: "It was not as bad in 1847, but the use of so much of the seed potato for food the previous winter prevented an adequate number being set for harvest." (MCCARTHY, 2006, p. 88) Professors like Seamus Metress named the Great Famine poor answer from the authorities as “the Irish Holocaust”7. This view might be a little too conspiratorial,

7

METRESS, 1996.

35

since the crisis started with a natural disaster8 and, at the beginning, had little relation to Ireland’s political situation. Nevertheless, we cannot deny the fact that the lack of public policies to mitigate the effects of the blight played a huge part on the long duration of the crisis.

Admittedly the British authorities did not respond with the vigor that ought to have been expected from the world’s then strongest power to immense suffering in a neighboring island under its political authority. Also, Britain’s insufficient response was partly prompted by prejudice against the people who were suffering. (MCCARTHY, 2006, PG. 90).

After the end of the crisis in 1849, Ireland was no longer the same island. The demographics of the country had changed in drastic ways, "over one million people died and an even greater number emigrated during a six-year period, thus cutting the population by over 25 per cent." (KINEALY, 2002, p. 2). These changes shaped the Irish people and its effects are still felt today. Ireland has never had the same populational level again. The population of the island was 8 million before the Great Famine, and in the year of 2020, more than one hundred seventy years after the crisis, the population is still less than 7 million9 inhabitants. The waiting for things to get better was also the birth of the Irish desire to move, to wait abroad. It was the Great Famine that inaugurated the concept of the Irish Diaspora. An example of such diaspora is that, apart from Ireland, another country that was deeply changed by the Great Famine was the United States, which saw an influx of new immigrants from the island. “[A] movement of over a million and a half men and women to North America over the Famine years of the 1840s and 1850s" has been recorded (KELLY, 2014, p. 10). The first acts end here. The Great Famine was yesterday, now it is the second act. After the Great Hunger, the relationship of the Irish and the British became even more estranged. The desire of a free Ireland, composed of the whole island under an independent republican government, was growing once again. More than ever, the Irish started to be aware of their own colonial condition and the implications of being a colony.

8 9

Phytophthora infestans WORLDMETER, 2020.

36

Godot, a united and independent Ireland, was just around the corner. But the Irish had to wait. The next years of Irish history were marked by a growing animosity between the Irish-Catholic, pro-independence, and the Anglo-Irish elites, members of the Anglican Church and loyal to the British Empire. In April 1916, the Eastern Rising took place. The revolt is regarded by the Irish as the birthdate of Ireland as a republic. The impacts of the Eastern Proclamation10, the document that proclaimed the island as an independent republic was soon felt, "Some Anglo-Irishmen were unprepared to accept the position of isolated impotence or exile that seemed their lot in the new political dispensation." (BROWN, 2003, p. 46). Soon after the Eastern Rising, the Anglo-Irish community started a massive exodus to the Northern part of the Island11, where the British support was still strong and they could preserve their social positions. As mentioned before12, Beckett's family was part of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, he was ten years old when the Eastern Rising happened and certainly grew up aware of the political crashes happening between the independent Irish working class and the Anglo-Irish elite13, who was still the predominant economic and political force on the island. Being Ireland a colony that almost borders its metropolitan state14, it was hard for the Irish society to break up all the relations with the British. Trinity College Dublin, as the academic place for the elites and a heir of the British empire, remained a place for the Anglo-Irish until as late as 1970, when the Catholic Church lifted a ban15 that had previously, for more than 100 years, forbidden its Catholic members to attend the Protestant institution. Throughout the twenty century, it became clear to the Irish people that a united country, an independent republic formed of all the 32 counties, would not arrive soon. Godot is once again missing. The Irish had to keep waiting for something

10

THE IRISH TIMES, 2017. Northern Ireland, a province of the United Kingdom. 12 Mentioned in the third chapter. 13 The Anglo-Irish elite created the cultural movement known as Irish Revival, focused on the revitalization of the Celtic heritage, the Irish language but without any meaning to start a revolution or to gain independence from the British. “Indeed, W.B. Yeats, its primary propagandist, believed that the cultural movement was even a substitute for political activity.” (BROWN, 1991, p. 517) 14 Nowadays, Ireland borders the United Kingdom because of the Northern Ireland province. 15 THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1970 11

37

that they were not sure if could be achieved or not. While waiting, the numbers the Irish Diaspora kept growing:

While the pre-1922 Irish nationalist historical narrative had blamed that experience on the history of extirpation and persecution attendant on British imperialism, Ireland and Northern Ireland’s continuing haemorrhaging of youth, from the 1920s to the mid1990s—and again during the recent recession. (TREW & PIERSE, 2018, PG. 1).

It was during the 20 century, and because of its Diaspora, that Ireland’s culture and tradition became mainstream. Symbols such as the shamrock, the colour green and the pub culture started to spread. As part of the symbols, the world saw the growing popularization of the Irish music, both the traditional and contemporary new genres. Celtic Rock is best represented by the Diaspora bands Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly while the Celtic Fusion was popularized by groups such as The Corrs and the singer Enya. The Irish Diaspora not only shaped the Irish identity, both abroad and within the country, but also shared the waiting for a united Ireland with those still living on the Emerald isle. The Republic Act of 194916, signed by the Taoiseach John Aloysius Costello and promoted by Sean MacBride, Minister for External Affairs, exactly 33 years after the Eastern Rising, ended the Irish Free State and broke up with the Commonwealth. The act created the Republic of Ireland proclaiming that "It is hereby declared that the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland." (THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND ACT, 1948). The Republic of Ireland became, just like the USA, a former British colony without any hierarchical relationship with the United Kingdom. Soon, new problems arouse. The Republic was formed by twenty-six counties, while the remaining six counties formed Northern Ireland, a province of the United Kingdom. The tension then concentrated more on the Northern part of Ireland, in towns like Belfast and Derry,cities where Irish-Catholics were being mistreated by the British local authorities and the Anglo Irish. The dream of a united Ireland, together with the mistreatment of the Irish citizens created a conflict between the Irish Republicans, Catholics who wanted to join the Republic and the Ulster loyalists, the

16

THE IRISH TIMES, 1999.

38

Anglo-Irish loyal to the United Kingdom. "The Troubles17, as the sectarian conflict in the North of Ireland came to be known, drew particular attention in America." (KELLY, 2014, p. 148). During the episode, which lasted from the end of the sixties until 199818, the participation of the Irish Diaspora was extremely important for the actions happening in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army, known as the IRA, fought using mostly guns shipped by the Irish Diaspora living in the United States. Abroad, the most famous institution involved in the Troubles was the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID). "This organization had been founded by the Irish immigrant and nationalist Michael Flannery in the spring of 1970. Flannery had fought the British during the 1919-21 war of independence." (YANOSO, 2017, p. 52) The main function of NORAID during the Troubles was to provide financial support to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), gathering money to help the cause for a united Ireland19. In 1987, the Washington Post published an article about the group in which T.K. Jones, the journalist that signed the piece, published parts of fundraising letters delivered by NORAID. One of them states that “We are fighting a guerrilla war and will continue to do so. We, the members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, will fight and die until victory is ours. Remember, the Irish Northern Aid Committee is the only organization in America that supports the Provisional IRA." (WASHINGTON POST, 1987). The conflict ended in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. By the end of the conflict, the geopolitical changes were insignificant. The six counties of the north remained a British province. The city of Derry, an iconic location of the Troubles, is still called Londonderry by the British. After more than three thousand deaths, the Irish, both in Ireland and abroad, once again, had to face the absurd that is to fight an endless war. Both sides lost during the troubles. The signing of the peace agreement was a way for both sides to surrender. It was more a sign of hopelessness than a resolution for the conflict. Much has changed since the Great Famine. Now, the former British colony is a high-developed Republic. These changes occurred little by little, but the conclusion

17

The Irish sectarian conflict started in 1922 with the Sectarian Strife. The name "the Troubles" is a reference to the period of the conflict that started in the 60s and ended only in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. 18 Date when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, ending the conflict and leaving things as they were before. 19 A project started by the IRA in 1922.

39

for the Irish is a united Ireland, an Ireland of the 32 counties that is yet to come. If the Irish population are Vladimir and Estragon, their Godot is the Irish reunification. Just like in the play, the second act ends here. "They do not move. Curtains." (BECKETT, 2011, p. 66).

40

6 CONCLUSIONS

To write a final chapter of a work whose previous pages state that there is no such a thing as an ending is a demanding, even controversial, task. It is important not to take the title of the chapter, named conclusion, as the exhaustion of Waiting for Godot (1953) or the Absurd. The title is just a formal requisition for such work, and while this paper is ending on the next few pages, Beckett’s legacy will stay with us as well as the absurd that will continue to rule our daily lives as long as we are breathing. Thinking about it, just like Sisyphus tried to avoid death, Estragon and Vladimir also were inserted on an endless plot, whose end is never attainable, but always around the corner, always almost there. With this endless waiting, Estragon and Vladimir will never die. The condition of being alive is exactly the condition of keep waiting. Since death is an abrupt change, the eternal recurrence, the repetition is what keeps us alive. The only possible major change is death; all other changes are just minor changes that happen to us while we are waiting for our personal Godot. Each one of us is waiting for something or somebody, which is the universal meaning that we were discussing on the previous pages of this paper. After that minor meditation, we can now understand why a final chapter is required, but also, why it is usually a repetition of what has been written before, because the only real change is the ending; it is also because that is what the formal rules of academic work dictates as obligatory elements. Some people might believe that the final chapter aims to end, to finish the paper. Actually, it is exactly the opposite. The main function of the conclusion chapter is to make sure that the meaning and effects of the paper can keep going on after the reading is over. When a reading features the absurd in it, the endless nature of it is enhanced. After being aware of the absurd, chances are your life will never be the same. Working just like a magick1 spell, the awareness of the absurd keeps haunting you in your daily activities whenever you are working, studying, running, driving, eating, and especially, waiting. From now on, you will always, once in a while, think about the absurd while reflecting about your daily activities.

1

The word Magick is used in the heathen context, in opposition to the common English magic that has multiple meanings.

41

The

current work was

written influenced by the current trend of

multidisciplinary works, thus, each chapter is focused on a different element of the research. The third chapter is about Beckett’s biography, covering his life from the Anglo-Irish childhood up to the end of the Second World War, the period when Waiting for Godot (1953) was written. Chapter four is about the Theatre of Absurd and its philosophical implications, quoting the British-Hungarian critic Martin Esslin, Aristotles, and the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus. Later, in chapter five, this work compared the play Waiting for Godot (1953) with the idea of the Irish unification. The fact that these three different subjects were treated equality in the research is in consonance with the holistic view that was proposed in the introduction. This holistic view is also a reference to the nature of Waiting for Godot (1953), and how its meaning can change according to the audience. For each person there is a different representation of who the absent protagonist, Godot, really is. For the present work, chapter five states that Godot is the Irish unification, the Republic of Ireland with its 32 counties. Currently, only 26 counties are members of the Republic, with the other six being a British province called Northern Ireland. In this research, the main emphasis within Waiting for Godot (1953) was given for the dual nature of nature, represented by the two related actions of waiting and moving. Starting from these two actions, without forgetting their relation with the absurd, chapter five divided the history of Ireland in two moments: act one is the Great Famine while the second act isevents that lead to the Troubles. In both acts a lot of movements take place, especially represented by the Irish Diaspora, that even living abroad, moving, was at the same time waiting. The option to work with this part of the Irish history, and to see in Godot the Irish reunification was made not only because they created a good match to the movements of the play, but also because it is an issue that is a part of the Irish collective consciousness. This is the collective waiting of the Irish, both the ones living in the Republic and the Diaspora. Moreover, the idea to insert Beckett close to his native Ireland is not original. What can be more Irish than a writer who lives abroad? That is why Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett can be viewed together, as part of the Irish literature. This is because the three of them lived in Paris, and from abroad, helped shape Ireland’s culture. A more detailed justification on why Beckett was chosen to be the main dramatist of this research was answered

42

during the introduction. Even if the absurd is also present in Oscar Wilde and his trial, or in James Joyce, it was Beckett that inserted the absurd in his plays, thus creating a collection of plays that can be used as a mirror of different actions and real-life events. Also, Beckett’s influence in academia is growing even stronger, showing that his plays are more actual than ever. A proof of such success is the fact that Waiting for Godot (1953) is still being staged for different audiences across countries and in multiple languages. The endless representations of Godot made the play suitable for adaptations; the most recent one that is getting attention is directed by the New York City native Antoinette Nwandu and used the same two acts, set Vladimir and Estragon as two black characters, Pozzo is a rich white guy and Lucky is a police officer. Their Godot is a new, different life a life away from poverty and systematic racism that the two characters undergo during the play. The play is named Pass Over (2017) and shows us how useful Waiting for Godot (1953) is when using the absurd to denounce social conditions. The adaptations kept the memory of Beckett and the use of his plays active in the popular culture. The same is true for the academic view of Beckett, a proof of how actual and relevant Beckett is for today’s literarary studies is that his most complete biography, named Beckett (2009) and written by the Oxford scholar Andrew Gibson was published twenty years after Beckett’s death2. After writing about Beckett, one is led to ask some questions: What if Beckett was born in France? What if he was the child of a working class Irish republican family? What if he decided to never leave Ireland? These questions can be asked to highlight all the characteristics that make Beckett and this research relevant nowadays. Who is your Godot? With that question you, the reader, is invited to reflect upon the implications of your life. Everybody is waiting for something or somebody, and this process that starts in the subjective mind can become a cultural trait, being shared by a common community. For the sake of keeping the present work atemporal, contemporary events are not mentioned, but if you happen to read the same work ten or fifteen years from now, chances are Beckett will still be actual and the absurd will still be an integral part of the human condition. The only subject that can change during the next few years is the theme of the Irish Unification. The future of the Irish immigration, the movement, and the 32

2

Samuel Beckett died in 1989 in December, 22.

43

counties of the Republic, the Godot that the Irish are waiting for, is yet to come. The history of Ireland as waiting and the repetition gave to the island major changes through the twenty century revolts and conflicts. Nowadays, the Emerald Isle has a new position as the mediator, the bridge between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The Brexit events are still unfolding and, currently, the one thing we can say about a United Ireland is that: "Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow." (36, Beckett, Waiting for Godot) As a further development of the present work, one can advance in multiple directions. The most tempting one is to use the centrality of Beckett’s play to study other philosophical positions, like the one expressed by the German Existentialist Martin Heidegger, who uses Waiting for Godot (1953) to analyse what its characters can tell us about the Dasein. Another philosophical position that can be used is the one defended by French philosopher Deleuze in his book titled Différence et Répétition (1968)3, to study how the repetition is portrayed and its meaning in Waiting for Godot (1953). Utmostly, if one is not interested in the philosophical questions, there is always the chance of using a more formal approach when reading Waiting for Godot (1953); an area that lacks more studies is the syntax analysis of the play, as for example, how the word order contributes to the meaning and the motivations behind Beckett’s usage of such word order when writing Waiting for Godot’s dialogues. Following the same lines, one could also study the vocabulary used in the dialogues to see why those words were used and how they help to set the mood of the play.

3

Translated to English by the Australian Philosopher Paul R. Patton, and released in the EnglishSpeaking market in 1994 under the title Difference and Repetition, published by Columbia University Press.

44

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