How does a notoriously obscure tragicomedy align with an auto-immune disease and the chaos of 2020? Mitch Van Acker invites us into his latest readings of the play to upheave the similarities.
Anyone who’s had “the drunk spins” after an extravagant night out will know what it's like to lose the proper functioning of the inner ear. For the over-eager bar patron, “the spins” lasts for a few moments before he ends the night curled around the toilet. He only needs to wait until morning for the nausea to recede and the world to stop tumbling around his head. Two years ago, I staggered into an ENT in Holland, MI to check out a case of the spins that, along with some serious hearing loss, would continue night and day for three months. My doctors discovered a few weeks later that I was suffering from Cogan’s syndrome, a rare auto-immune disease that attacks the inner ear and eye tissues as if they were foreign agents threatening the body. My own immune system had chewed up the nerve crystal in my left ear, blunting my brain’s ability to orient itself in space. For three months I couldn’t move my head without the room spinning. It was the first time an illness had fixed me to one spot. When I had the initiative, I’d force myself to do basic yoga poses to help recalibrate my center of gravity with visual cues and the use of one ear, a task that usually ended in a fit of dry heaving—I’d learned not to do this on a full stomach. When I didn’t care enough to do these exercises, I slept. When I couldn’t sleep I watched TV and later resorted to YouTube, where I came across RTÉ’s Beckett on Film project, a series of televised plays by Samuel Beckett that had aired on British TV in the early 2000s.
I revisited the plays this past summer during the lockdown and I found that, in terms of both illness and isolation, Waiting for Godot resonates with the strangeness of the current moment.
I obsessed over them. Up to that point I had only read Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and had never seen it performed. For the rest of my recovery I watched Waiting for Godot again and again, along with Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days, by lying down on my dorm-room futon and holding my skull still in the palm of my hand.
I revisited the plays this past summer during the lockdown and I found that, in terms of both illness and isolation, Waiting for Godot resonates with the strangeness of the current moment. A senior in high school reading Godot for the first time might describe it as a play in which “nothing” happens. The “plot,” if we can call it a plot, involves two tramps, Vladimir (known by Didi) and Estragon (known by Gogo), waiting on a country road for a man named Godot. It is never made clear why they are waiting for him, when he will come, or if they’re waiting at the right place. They encounter a traveler named Pozzo and his slave Lucky, a seeming invalid that Pozzo handles dog-wise with a noose, and later on a boy messenger sent to tell Didi and Gogo that Godot will come “surely tomorrow….” The main dilemma of the play is how to pass the time until Godot arrives, an event Didi and Gogo can’t be certain will ever come and indeed doesn’t. Over the course of two acts they argue, sing, trade hats, struggle with shoes, eat vegetables, philosophize about death, speculate about religion, and consider hanging themselves with the hope that it might give them erections. While modern circumstances provide us with other safer ways to assuage our boredom, the core of this very fundamental and very human problem of passing time, often ignored or flatly denied, came alive for many of us in lockdown as it does in this play.
Both the tragic and comic aspects of the play seem sparklingly revenant in light of our collective confinement and our collective waiting.
Drawing specific explanations of Godot always runs the risk of leaping in and out of unhelpful rabbit holes, and scholars have employed many “-isms” to get to the bottom of it with varying degrees of success. The catastrophes of the early 20th Century seem to saturate the mood of the play; Beckett himself served as a courier for the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied France—what he’d later call his “boy-scout work” for the French underground (1)—and composed Godot in the lead-up to the Cold War, but he remained reluctant to confirm any direct references to these events and readily dismissed conclusive interpretations of the play. Of what direct conclusions we can draw from Godot, a play about uncertainty, we’d do best to be silent and look instead into the state of mind it evokes with its form and candor. Indeed Beckett himself suggested that his “way in” to writing was by “impoverishment,” “in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding”(2).
Beckett’s theater of impoverishment amounts to a play that I believe is notably without pretense and, despite its reputation for being difficult, a play that is anything but pretentious. That is why critics have trouble with it. Godot bucks against interpretations that approach it with an appetite for uncovering prolix messages and hidden symbols. Every aspect of the play is upfront about itself in a way that if it obscures at all, it obscures by being too close to us instead of too far off. It has an inherent way of speaking to those on the peripheries of society. At its Paris premiere theater-goers forced the curtains down before the second act. At its London premiere an audience member shouted out: “This is why we lost the colonies''(3)—an unintended compliment perhaps. Yet on November 19th, 1957, when a small group of young actors from San Francisco performed it for a crowd of prisoners at San Quentin Maximum Security Prison, the audience was, by all accounts, mesmerized up to the close of the final act. The prisoners had understood it outright as opposed to the play’s early critics whom it had angered and confused (4). Now both the tragic and comic aspects of the play seem sparklingly revenant in light of our collective confinement and our collective waiting. We all have been, in some sense, exiles in our own homes.
The concept of waiting is, of course, an obvious parallel to the lockdown experience. Not only do Didi and Gogo wait, but they wait without knowing when, if ever, relief will come, in what form it will come, or in what sort of condition it will find them. Once lockdown began to grow from weeks to months and political tensions boiled over into country-wide riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death, even those best situated to sustain the setbacks of the pandemic couldn’t be sure what sort of world they’d wake up to month by month, which is to say nothing of those who suffered disproportionately from the strain to the economy and the health-care system. All this at a time when the integrity of our sense-making institutions had been all but worn away by sensationalism and bad faith, with colleges and major media outlets somehow managing to surrender themselves to both predatory market pressures and transparently insane political ideologies.
Like us, every character in Godot can’t seem to get a grip on what the hell is going on. Beckett devotes a substantial bulk of the text to Didi and Gogo’s struggle to confirm the basic facts of their existence. They aren’t sure what day it is. They aren’t sure where they are. They aren’t sure how long they’ve been waiting, and by the second act, they fail to remember the key details surrounding their encounters with Pozzo, Lucky, and the messenger boy. Beckett even confounds the audience directly by disturbing their sense of continuity between the two acts. In the second, the cruel and boisterous Pozzo claims to be blind and assures Didi that he’d been blind for years even though Didi and the audience had been led to believe that they’d met the day before. The boy also claims at the close of the play that he had never seen Didi and Gogo, that it was his first time speaking to them, and tells them, once again, that Godot will come “surely tomorrow….” We likewise find ourselves thrown into a kind of night-world where nothing is certain and everything from the debilitating flux of the media to the existential jolt prompted by an apocalyptic scenario made concrete confronts us with the stark strangeness of being anything at all…
Beckett doesn’t merely illustrate waiting, he identifies how our deepest anxieties live perpetually in the present... It is only when we’re closed off from our normal societal circuitry that the weirdness of being a human stranded in some kind of “now” point takes on a silly and frightening shape
What should we do…at any time, ever? Does it matter? These are questions that don’t usually factor into the normal course of our lives while working or going to school. I suspect the lockdown subjected a lot of distracted people to self-reflection—some better equipped than others to face the undivided truth of the state of their lives and their immediate surroundings. A friend of mine working in post-lockdown Chicago told me he’d noticed an air of melancholy even among well-to-do young professionals in the city after they’d realized in isolation that they’d built their identities on little more than going to bars and restaurants. In this sense, Godot cues us into what we do moment by moment to establish the continuity of our lives as they slide into obscurity behind another sinking sun. Beckett doesn’t merely illustrate waiting, he identifies how our deepest anxieties live perpetually in the present by examining them at close range. It is only when we’re closed off from our normal societal circuitry that the weirdness of being a human stranded in some kind of “now” point takes on a silly and frightening shape; especially in those moments of supreme boredom where the present opens up into a kind of abyss full of listless dreams and weird—very weird—thoughts.
There were many times in lockdown when I’d wake in a daze at one in the afternoon, unsure of what day it was, and stare out my window after dropping an hour or two looking at memes. My thoughts in these moments weren’t the sort of grand reflections that I’d be proud to share with you here. They were akin to the carton of milk spilling in Patrick Star’s thought-cloud after he announces to Spongebob that “the inner machinations of [his] mind are an enigma”(5). Compare this to Gogo’s exploration of the way the English pronounce the word “calm.” He says the word over and over, slowly, savoring it as a child or a cartoon character would. In playful gestures like this, Beckett gets at something far deeper and far weirder than the felt experience of despair and hopelessness as prompted by the pandemic and the accompanying unsteady political climate. Something more uncanny. Something childlike…
While I was futon-bound with vertigo, there came a point before I’d found the Beckett plays when I’d realized that the near-infinite varieties of entertainment at my beck and call couldn’t satisfy me. Movies, TV shows, and the endless wheel of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts seemed to bleed into one uniform experience of brightly-colored numbness. I felt dislocated from time and from my ability to encounter the moments of my life as they came and passed away. I began to suspect that the exhaustibility of any human action suggested something deep and sad about the ways we divert ourselves while waiting for death. I was, in other words, beginning to agree with Jason Compson Sr. in The Sound and the Fury: “no battle is ever won…they are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools”(6). This attitude is, incidentally, the best mood to be in if you want to get into Samuel Beckett. Godot was, in fact, the only kind of media that could’ve offered me practical consolation to that state of mind because unlike other narrative “pass-times,” this play doesn’t help time along. It doesn’t redeem the time you spend watching. Time is suspended in a way that for many audiences, couched well within the bustle of the everyday, feels very uncomfortable. You can’t rely on the forward thrust of a concrete plot to stimulate your sense of wonder. Withholding a conventional plot in this case allows you to interface with the characters, events, and dialogue in a more transparent way. The wonder comes in when you recognize something uncannily close to your own humble experience in the plight of Didi and Gogo as they grapple with the felt presence of the moment, the odd feeling of relative motion as the past and the future slide past one another. To experience Godot in this way is to plunge into a realm beneath despair that you can’t arrive at by binging media designed to keep your mind on for-profit hamster wheels. What Beckett offers in Godot is a run-down on the architecture of the present moment without relying on the false support of things outside the margins of immediate experience.
Isn’t it strange to think that you will spend your whole life well within the limits of your own attention span? Your whole life funnels unceasingly through this apparent gap of about a few seconds and hurries on into memory. No work of fiction before Godot analyzed the structure and qualities of those few seconds in such a stark and uncompromising way. Rather than having symbolic meanings, the inconsistencies in Didi’s and Gogo’s memories and the apparent inconsistencies between acts one and two serve as a device for examining the act of living in present on its most basic and concrete terms. With infirm minds and infirm bodies all they have to verify the continuity of an individual “self” are the vulgar facts of their waiting: their illnesses, their mannerisms, a pair of ill-fitting shoes left on the road, or a few leaves sprouting laboringly from a bare willow tree.
If there’s one thing I hope the lockdown taught us in a circumstantial way—what I think that Beckett teaches in a fictional way—it’s to reevaluate our present on its own terms rather than coloring it with spurious expectations of what will come or clinging to what has passed us by.
Mindfulness gurus tell people to “live in the moment” as if the moment were any less terrifying than the past or the future. Everyone lives in the moment whether they like it or not. We’re trapped there. Sickness teaches you this. If there’s one thing I hope the lockdown taught us in a circumstantial way—what I think that Beckett teaches in a fictional way—it’s to reevaluate our present on its own terms rather than coloring it with spurious expectations of what will come or clinging to what has passed us by. This is a daunting task because all of our unchallenged assumptions hide in the present and what we make of ourselves in the future, what we hope for, what we wait for, we spawn in-embryo every moment with very little understanding of how it starts and how it ends. Most changeling of all, we need to massage our egos by taking sojourns in the void. We should reflect deeply on death and the seeming futility of our actions not to indulge in hopelessness—that would be just as decadent as the average consumerist and a lot more pedantic—but to map the bleakest aspects of our existence with a light touch. Beckett is an essential guide for this task. After a thorough Beckett phase, you hop over despair and emerge with an enriched sense of humor and humanity in the face of life’s unredeemable tragedies.
Some might call this way of being “absurdism,” but it seems to me that Beckett’s work achieves something far subtler. Phrases like “the heroic affirmation of the absurdity of existence” strike me as the kind of stilted cocktail-party chatter that Beckett abhorred in intellectual elites. Godot shows us that the pessimistic outlook doesn’t have to be a black-clad cigarette-smoking cool-kid measuring himself to others according to his ability to see through all illusions and take on all tragedies and look for other tragedies to sigh about. At a certain point disillusionment becomes the illusion. As long as he keeps “measuring” himself to others and maintaining the I-can-see-that-exsistence-is-a-piece-of-junk-better-than-you-can-see-that-exsistence-is-a-peice-of-junk perspective, he misses the point. He’s waiting for cosmic vindication that will never arrive. We shouldn’t be absurd to be heroic, we should be absurd because it's fun!
After a thorough Beckett phase, you hop over despair and emerge with an enriched sense of humor and humanity in the face of life’s unredeemable tragedies.
How do I know what I know minute by minute? Am I a replicant? Is this real? If you find yourself asking questions like this seriously, which is to ask them in a way that isn’t serious at all, good news: you’re achieving escape velocity from despair. You will see the lurid weirdness of life the way a child might after a trip out of time through the world-weariness of adulthood and back into a state of wonder. I’m weary of describing this realm beneath despair any further. It is something felt rather than understood, like a Zen koan or a shout in the street (7).
Some closing remarks from Didi:
“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth would there be?…Astride a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on”(8).
Notes:
Brater, Enoch. Why Beckett. Thames and Hudson, 1989.
Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1997.
Mount, Nick. Nick Mount on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Youtube. June 13, 2015.
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Vintage Books, 2004.
Dohrn, Walt, et al. Spongebob Squarepants. “The Secret Box.” Season 2, episode 35a, 2001.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Vintage, 2015.
A reference to Beckett’s literary fore-father and soul-brother James Joyce, whose fictional alter-ego Stephen Deldaus refers to God as “a shout in the street” in Joyce’s novel Ulysses: Joyce, James. Ulysses / James Joyce. Penguin, 1968.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. Grove Press, 1954.