Modern Mind

itself, and the demands it makes on the audience, it is one of the last throws of modernism. It was cleverly summed up by one critic, who wrote, ‘Nothing happens, twice!’ 56 This is true enough on the surface, but a travesty nonetheless. As with all the masterpieces of modernism,
Godot’s
form is integral to the play, and to the experience of the work; no summary can hope to do it justice. It is a post-waste
Land
play, a post-O’Neill play, post-Joyce, post-Sartre, post-Proust, post-Freud, post-Heisenberg, and post-Rutherford. You can find as many twentieth-century influences as you care to look for – which is where its richness lies. Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps, are waiting for Godot. We don’t know why they are waiting, where they are waiting, how long they have been waiting, or how long they expect to wait. The act of waiting, the silences and the repetitions, conspire to bring the question of time to the fore – and of course in bewildering and intriguing the audience, who must also wait through these silences and repetitions,
Godot
provides an experience to be had nowhere else, causing the audience to think. (The play’s French title is
En attendant Godot
; ‘attending,’ as in paying attention to, amplifies waiting.) In some respects,
Godot
is the reverse of Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu.
Proust made something out of nothing; Beckett is making nothing out of something, but the result is the same, to force the audience to consider what nothing and something are, and how they differ (and recalls Wolfgang Pauli’s question from the 1920s – why is there something rather than nothing?). 57
    Both acts are interrupted by the arrival, first, of Lucky and Pozzo, and of the Boy. The first two are a sort of vaudeville act, the former deaf and the latter dumb. 58 The Boy is a messenger from Mr Godot, but he has no message, recalling Kafka’s
Castle.
There is much else, of course – a lot of cursing, a hat-passing routine, comic miming, problems with boots and bodily functions. But the play is essentially about emptiness, silence, and meaning. One is reminded of the physicists’ analogous scale when illustrating the atom – that the nucleus (which nonetheless has most of the mass), is no more than a grain of sand at the centre of an electron shell-structure the size of an opera house. This is not only bleak, Beckett is saying; communication is not only fatuous, futile, and absurd, but it is also comic. All we are left withis either cliché or speculation so removed from any reality that we can never know if it has any meaning – shades of Wittgenstein. Though Beckett loved Chaplin, his message is the very opposite; there is nothing heroic about Vladimir or Estragon, their comedy evokes no identification on our part. It is, it is intended to be, terrifying. Beckett is breaking down all categories. Vladimir and Estragon occupy space-time; in the early French editions Pozzo and Lucky are described as ‘les comiques staliniens’; the play is about humanity – the universe – running down, losing energy, cooling; the characters have, as the existentialists said, been thrown into the world without purpose or essence, only feeling. 59 They must wait, with patience, because they have no idea what will come, or even
if
it will come, save death of course. Vladimir and Estragon do stay together, the play’s one positive, optimistic note, till they reach the superb culmination – as an example of the playwright’s art, it can hardly be bettered. Vladimir cries, ‘We have kept our appointment, and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?’
    The important point with Beckett, as with O’Neill and Eliot, is to experience the work. For he was no cynic, and the only satisfactory way to conclude writing about him is to quote him. His endings are better than anyone else’s. The end of
Godot
reads as follows:
    Vladimir: Well, shall we go?
    Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
    [They do not move.]
     
    Or we can end by quoting Beckett’s letter to fellow playwright Harold Pinter: ‘If you insist on finding form [for my plays] I’ll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That’s the kind of form my work has.’
    For Beckett at midcentury, the speculations of Sartre were pointless; they were simply statements of the