Do you ever read something that just rubs you the wrong way and you cannot shake it?
Once again, I swore I’d be off this damn computer before the midnight hour but too much blog catching/commenting… not to mention that ideas flood this brain for hours after work and Google gets hit every half hour! Odd since I work in a library, but my rule is no personal research unless library related.
(I digress) — tonight in my email was a link to a post via “The Smart Set” on Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot”. (Do not know why I get these emails for most the content is not of interest) Mind you, I am NOT, by any means, a literary scholar/critic/etc., but this post was irritating — it posits that Beckett writes about love! Seriously, to conjecture that it is about love seems a simplified stretch IMNSO.
Am I the only one who considers this ‘love’ premise and asks, ‘can I get a ummmm, yeah…no…” There is no time tonight to really break out the fork and knife, but if you DO know Beckett and would like to enlighten me, please do.
There is hope for a follow-up post, especially since I am almost done with Beckett’s book “Proust,” which critics have stated gives as much insight into Beckett as it does Proust. Taking that knowledge, especially in regards to Beckett’s analysis of Proust’s writing on love and friendship, and the conclusion would be that Godot is not about love, not the love the linked article implies. If anything, it would be the love for the human condition.
I leave you with this…. I don’t believe that any of the key actors really exist…–well, except for Godot, and he is not answering ~
Mark Kerstetter
/ 2013/01/17Well, OK – the problem with this reading is it does not address Pozzo and Lucky or the boy. Who are they? Any account of the play has to address Lucky’s speech. However, I do find the argument refreshing in that I’m sick to death of hearing Beckett described over and over again as “bleak”. I find it hard to separate the play from the period and place in which it was written. Beckett did create a universal situation by removing a lot of things. We don’t know where or when they are, only that they are very old and destitute and this Godot fellow, apparently a landowner and employer, might be able to help them. For me the situation is the whole drama of the thing, and it’s really enough (what would you do – how would you act – if you were old, owned nothing but the clothes on your back, had nothing but a piece of carrot to eat and no prospects but a vague hope about some shadowy figure?). The situation itself is enough for a play. However, I can’t help but think about Beckett and his companion Suzanne, who had to run for their lives from the Nazis into the French countryside. The years in hiding had to have been extremely difficult, and it’s not hard to imagine situations/conversations arising that later went into the play. When I think of Vladimir and Estragon I always think of Sam and Suzanne tramping across the countryside during wartime.
angela
/ 2013/01/17I was hoping you would weigh in with your POV, Mark, as I know you’re a Beckett reader. Your comment hit my email right as I left work, so, I went up the street to B&N and sat and read Endgame for a while for another perspective. I shall buy it this weekend at a used bookshop and finish, but what I found intriguing was it reads like a less funny/ironic Godot. There is certainly a contemplation on the futility of it all. Keeping in mind that she left out some key players, do you feel her sentiment at all re: love? Bleak is not what I would name his work– it IS an apt depiction of the human condition under states of stress. In “Proust”, he writes, “At any given moment our total soul, in spite of its rich balance sheet, has only a fictitious value”. This revelation is part of a summation of the main character’s epiphany regarding Time in relation to understanding death – it took him a year to grasp the death of his grandmother for he has parelled his memory to only her living. As I read Endgame, I cannot help but feel that he is toying with the idea of Time and what defines reality, the soul, and perception. Interesting that you mention his companion, Suzanne, for I wondered about his personal life. (Do you have a good bio to rec, btw)
Mark Kerstetter
/ 2013/01/18No, I would not make the blanket statement that ‘Godot’ is about love. I think it’s about exactly what it appears to be about. But Vladimir & Estragon are clearly old friends, and I don’t find it bleak at all. ‘Endgame’ is another story. I’ve always found that one harder to appreciate. But it just may be that the humor is much darker. One of the characters says, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” It’s certainly about time in the sense of mortality. Throughout Beckett’s writings I experience a sense of the inability to achieve definition. Inability, ignorance, the limits of intelligence, this is the fertile ground of his imagination.
Sorry I can’t discuss his ‘Proust’ with you – haven’t read it. But I can recommend a good biography. ‘Damned to Fame’ by James Knowlson is, as far as I know, the most factual, best researched one available. I would not recommend the one by Deirdre Bair. While it’s a fun read, some of her characterizations of Beckett are distorted and, in my opinion, romanticized. Knowlson may not be as sexy, but I think he’s more factual. Beckett’s letters (2 volumes, so far) have recently been published. I’m slowly making my way through them.
angela
/ 2013/01/18Thanks so much for the background recs, Mark! I shall place in my wishlist cart and ‘to read’ on Goodreads. I hope to do a bit more blogging in 2013 on books, so perhaps a further exploration of Endgames and Proust soon. Endgames has me puzzled though — why do Nagg and Nell (I think those are their names) live in ‘bins’. What does this symbolize? I agree, it is much darker, but pure Beckett tongue. It is interesting for I feel I am reading the interactions of Lucky and Pozzo – that odd servant/slave/master hierarchy.
Carl D'Agostino
/ 2013/01/18Drop this Beckett. Henry II’s Beckett is a far more meritorious character to be of interest.
angela
/ 2013/01/18Oh Boo, Carl, do you not like Samuel?