Another cultural milestone now bears my chalkmark: I've just finished reading Samuel Beckett's "Waiting For Godot."
Frankly, I'm not a fan of Beckett. I'd read some play of his a few years ago in college and can't recall squat about it today save that its title was vaguely Germanic and the play itself involved an old clown, a tape recorder and some bananas. Not exactly a recollection to inspire one with fervid lust after more of the same.
With regards to "Waiting for Godot," Vivian Mercier put it very well: "Nothing happens, twice." Most of the lines sound as though they've been pulled randomly out of a hat. There are brief flurries of activity - Pozzo's entry; the odd little exchanges vis-a-vis his pipe and the chicken bones; Lucky's insane monologue; Pozzo's second entry; the boy - but they never last more than a line or two.
I'm not really sure what Beckett wanted the spectators to take home with them beyond a strengthened sense that life's a bitch and then you die. I guess this was an iconoclastic statement to make on British stage at the time, and the Brits needed to hear it, but even so I'm not really convinced that there's staying power in the piece. All that verbiage and puttering around for the sake of some gags about suicide, vague insinuations about God and a single memorable quip about giving birth astride a grave. Hmph.
No, I understand the *importance* and what-not, the *influence* it had - hell, if there hadn't been "Waiting for Godot," there wouldn't have been "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"! So whether or not the play seems relevant or interesting today, Beckett deserves every respect and honour for writing it when he did, since it was "Waiting for Godot," if memory does not deceive me, that galvanized the young Tom Stoppard into activity by showing him that plays can be daring and minimalist, striped down to bare essentials and raw nerves. Of course, no sooner did Stoppard learn the craft properly than he abandoned all pretense of provocation and settled for simply being the best damn British playwright since Shaw, but that's quite beside the point. The point is, sine Beckett nullum Stoppard. And that is a sobering thought. As I've said, I've only read two plays of Beckett's so far, - 'Waiting for Godot' and the one with all the bananas, - but I've read just about everything Stoppard's ever published except "Hapgood" and the theatre critiques he wrote in his youth for the local papers.
In short: my advice is, if you haven't read "Waiting for Godot," don't bother. Read a Stoppard play instead. Why ride a velocipede when you can have a 24-speed mountain bike?
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4 comments:
My advice for anyone about to read Beckett is to have some anti-depressants to hand.
I’ve got five minutes after a long day writing, for no purpose, no end. I wonder why blog? Yet I’m stirred from my lethargy by your saying that you don’t like Beckett. It’s so odd. There was once a time when he annoyed me. ‘Endgame’ was the play that I was forced to read, reread, and then eventually to teach. I didn’t understand it until I realised that the pleasure of ‘Endgame’ is in watching yourself trying to produce an endgame for the play. He makes us form associations for something that is essentially free of deeper meaning. Its non-meaning is its meaning. It’s a conceit and a brilliantly executed one at that. The people who is usually tricks are the pretentious pseudish intellectuals and, for that alone, it is a wonderful thing.
The second pleasure of Beckett is his love of language. His humour comes from the physical granulations of words, held in the mouth, spat out in wonderful gobfulls of blood and spittle. He swears magnificently. I’m not usually a man who likes this kind of art – too much of it is artistic self-abuse – but I appreciate Beckett more than I do, say, Joyce. I love words.
Well… perhaps not tonight. Being a writer (or thinking you’re a writer) can seriously suck. Don’t give up on Beckett though.
Perhaps it's just laziness on my part, but when I read, I want the author to do the work and take me along for the ride. I don't want to read ana array of words that seems really quite arbitrary and have to infuse it with my own meaning. That smacks of MadLibs. I'm honestly not getting this "physical granulations of words, held in the mouth, spat out in wonderful gobfulls of blood and spittle" from Beckett. Perhaps if he were writing in a more precise language than English. It just seems like there's nothing going on in Beckett. I like layers, connections, call-backs, wordplay... Look, I'm as fond of non-meaning as anyone - my favorite Russian author is Viktor Pelevin, whose modus operandi is non-meaning. But he builds this non-meaning out of brilliantly crafted, beatifully engineered and painstakingly assembled prose.
And I don't appreciate the implication that I'm a "pseudish intellectual," and that my dislike of sophomoric word-juggling is really just an inability to comprehend its deeper meaning. I get the meaning just fine. The execution stil bores the hell out of me. And I honestly don't understand how one can love words and get a hotter word-gasm from Beckett than from the same James Joyce. I mean, honestly. How does a page of tossing back and forth the same four or five words rearranged with different pronouns and prepositions top "the ineluctible modality of the visible"? Perhaps it's a matter of mood, and Beckett gets a steeper rise out of the viewer when the latter has perhaps lost his job, his girlfriend, his sobriety and, at least temporarily, his hope for the brighter tomorrow. I can see how 'Waiting for Godot' might resonate better in that case. But let's not discount as *entirely* bourgeois and therefore irrelevant the fact that a play must also entertain, else why the fuck bother buying a ticket? And two acts of "nothing happens" don't cut it.
All right, fine. I'm feeling merciful towards all and everything tonight. "Endgame," you said? I'll get on that and have another review ready soon.
its only 100 pages long!
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