The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett's Postwar Drama and Fiction

Revolutionary and Evolutionary Paradoxes

Cristina Ionica

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030349011
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030349028
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett's Postwar Drama and Fiction: Revolutionary and Evolutionary Paradoxes theorizes the revolutionary and evolutionary import of Beckett's works in a global context defined by increasingly ubiquitous and insidious mechanisms of capture, exploitation, and repression, alongside unprecedented demands for high-volume information-processing and connectivity. Part I shows that, in generating consistent flows of solidarity-based angry laughter, Beckett's works sabotage coercive couplings of the subject to social machines by translating subordination and repression into processes rather than data of experience. Through an examination of Beckett's attack on gender/ class-related normative injunctions, the book shows that Beckett's works can generate solidarity and action-oriented affects in readers/ spectators regardless of their training in textual analysis. Part II proposes that Beckett's works can weaken the cognitivedominance of constrictive "frames" in readers/ audiences, so that toxic ideological formations such as the association of safety and comfort with simplicity and "sameness" are rejected and more complex cognitive operations are welcomed instead—a process that bolsters the mind's ability to operate at ease with increasingly complex, malleable, extensible, and inclusive frames, as well as with increasing volumes of information.

© The Author(s) 2020

C. IonicaThe Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett's Postwar Drama and FictionNew Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34902-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction to Beckett’s “Absurdist” Excess

Cristina Ionica¹

(1)

Fanshawe College, London, ON, Canada

Cristina Ionica

End Abstract

1.1 Absurdist Excess and Political Value

On 19 November 1957, the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop presented Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to an audience of 1400 convicts at the San Quentin State Prison in San Rafael, California. As Herbert Blau and other members of the cast and production team state in interviews included in a documentary by Adams, the prisoners’ laughter and applause frequently interrupted the performance. Apparently, the fragment that elicited the most intense audience reaction was Lucky’s speech—certainly not the most straightforward part of the play. Armed robbery convict Rick Cluchey, perceived as a security liability and required to remain in his cell during the representation, heard the play on the prison’s loudspeakers and gathered the visual details from other inmates. Deeply impressed, he worked with other convicts to create the San Quentin Drama Workshop (still active today). Released on parole in 1966 due to his involvement in that project and support of other inmates’ commitment to change, Cluchey met Beckett in 1975, played Krapp in a 1977 production of Krapp’s Last Tape directed by Beckett himself, and—as an actor, director, and playwright—dedicated the rest of his life to the theatre. In his 1961 The Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin mentions, based on press reports, that “Godot himself, alongside turns of phrase and characters from the play, have become a permanent part of the private language, the institutional mythology of San Quentin” (21). The major impact of the play on the San Quentin inmates is confirmed by several members of Blau’s group and by several former convicts interviewed by Adams for his documentary, including Cluchey and jazz artist Ed Reed, a member of the San Quentin jazz band at the time.

A common critical claim is that Vladimir and Estragon’s endless waiting in a hopeless wasteland resonated strongly with the convicts’ bleak life experiences and general dispiritedness. However, this does not fully explain the intensity of this peculiar audience group’s first reactions or their lasting commitment to transform their lives. Waiting for Godot has, by now, a long history of successful representations in prisons and areas marked by natural disasters and various forms of social upheaval. The earliest known instance is the Lüttringhausen Prison staging in Germany, which premiered on 29 November 1953 under the direction of convict Karl-Franz Lembke, who had translated the play from French into German earlier that year. Beckett became aware of this representation through his publisher Jérôme Lindon (Éditions de Minuit), who sent him two cuttings from German newspapers, a letter from Lembke, and one from the prison chaplain, Ludwig Manker, on 12 October 1954. Lembke writes, “Your Godot was a triumph, something wild!—Your Godot was ‘our’ Godot, ours, our very own!”; Manker identifies in the play “the real truth about the real situation of humanity today” and adds, “Our men accepted it as their play, and I am keeping the tree that was used on the stage, now in my room in the sacristy, for it has become for me the tree of life” (see footnote 1 to Beckett’s 14 October 1954 letter to Lindon, L2 504). The editors of the second volume of Beckett’s letters also quote from Pastor Peter Schippel’s recollections of a 1954 performance: “During the performance the walls became transparent. In the end, the whole prison was a ‘Waiting for Godot.’ In a sense, so was the whole world to which we returned” (Schippel, qtd. in footnote 1, L2 505).

For Lembke, Manker, and Schippel, as for the other spectators whose experiences they convey, the play seemingly functioned not as a symbolic but a raw, unmediated materialization of their conditions of existence, in prison and in the world. All three quote positive reactions—joy (“something wild”), solidarity (Godot became “ours”), renewed hope (“tree of life”), and enhanced (self-)awareness (“the walls became transparent”). The significance of this experience of the play as a positive and transformative event and the political import of its success in a technically unpropitious cognitive environment did not escape Beckett, who wrote to Lembke, on/ immediately after 14 October 1954, “In all my life as a man and writer, nothing like this has ever happened to me. … I am no longer the same, and will never again be able to be the same, after what you have done, all of you. In the place where I have always found myself, turning round and round, falling over, getting up again, it is no longer wholly dark or wholly silent” (L2 506). Such relatively unqualified expressions of elation are rare in Beckett’s letters.

Within days of his response to Lembke, on 18 October 1954, Beckett reports to his Grove Press editor Barney Rosset the following conversation with well-known British actor Ralph Richardson:

[He] wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vitae, and seemed to make the forthcoming of this and similar information the condition of his condescending to illustrate the part of Vladimir. Too tired to give satisfaction I told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that this was true also of the other characters. … I also told Richardson that if by Godot I meant God I would [have] said God, and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly. (L2 507, my emphasis)

The emphasized passages express sarcasm and barely veiled disgust, as do the emphatic and repetitive formulations in the sentences on Pozzo and Godot—including the phrase “if I had known more I would have put it in the text” (variations of which appear in a number of Beckett’s letters and interviews), whose semantic and pragmatic context indicate that it was primarily meant to deride the obtuse character of the clarification request rather than express ignorance. Beckett shows more patience in a letter dated 25 June 1953 to Carlheinz Caspari, director of a German production of Waiting for Godot , who had asked for staging guidance in light of what he perceived as the presence of expressionist, symbolist, and other attempts at “abstractization” in the play. Beckett rejects those assumptions:

First and foremost, it is a question of something that happens, almost a routine, and it is this dailiness and this materiality, in my view, that need to be brought out. That at any moment Symbols, Ideas, Forms might show up, this is for me secondary—is there anything they do not show up behind? In any event, there is nothing to be gained by giving them clear form. The characters are living creatures, only just living perhaps, they are not emblems. … I would urge you to see in them less the result of an attempt at abstraction … than a refusal to tone down all that is at one and the same time complex and amorphous in them. … If his [Godot’s] name suggests the heavens, it is only to the extent that a product for promoting hair growth can seem heavenly. … Others, more fortunate, will see in him Thanatos. (L2 391)

Beckett seems strongly resistant if not hostile to alignments between his brand of immediacy, “dailiness,” and “materiality” and the realist or naturalist tradition, as his response to Richardson’s approach reveals, as well as to symbolic, “abstracted” readings of his barely living “creatures,” as seen in his response to Caspari. His characters are neither real people with a street address nor “emblems” of the human condition in some “metaphysical simplification” (L2 391) schema. Most importantly, they must not be reduced to univocal meanings (“clear form”). Beckett’s elation at the Lüttringhausen convicts’ experience of the play arguably derives from the apparent consequences of their adoption of this premise. They did not interpret the play as a sophisticated abstraction, nor did they see it as a realistic scenario. Instead, they seem to have experienced it as an immediate, material “outing” of their conditions of existence, complete with an intimate and transformative call to disengage from stagnant or destructive societal arrangements and seek more positive and beneficial means to connect and to act.

Representations of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in areas marked by natural disasters, political repression, or war appear to have yielded similar results. In a 2009 article prefacing a new British production, Smith, Carter, and Carnwath present statements from several artists who pursued such dramatic projects: Cluchey, who played Vladimir in two San Quentin Prison productions; Benjy Francis, the director of the first South African production allowed by Beckett (with an all-black cast)¹; Haris Pašović, the producer of Susan Sontag’s 1993 representation in the besieged Sarajevo; and Wendell Pierce, who played Vladimir in a Hurricane Katrina-inspired Classical Theatre of Harlem production eventually performed in the ninth ward of New Orleans, in the middle of “square miles of destroyed homes.” These contributors report positive and empowered reactions both from their collaborators on those projects and from their audiences.

Citing Saiu, Bradby, and others, Morin notes that Beckett’s “early plays were commonly perceived as having a stark, yet somewhat imprecise, political dimension” (8) in Eastern and Central-European countries during and immediately after the communist rule. Indeed, as Saiu notes, Waiting for Godot was translated and published late (during or after the late sixties) in most Eastern-European countries, and performances were often delayed, crippled, or banned by state censorship institutions, mostly for fear that the play’s “waiting” would resonate with citizens’ hope in an American overthrow of communism (260–65). Bradby stresses another aspect of the play consistently perceived as subversive: its ostentatious incongruities, which seemed to speak to “the absurdities and frustration of life under a totalitarian regime” (165). More recently, news coverage of the conflict in Syria offers additional evidence of the perceived positive, action-oriented, political content of Beckett’s works. Morin quotes news reports filed between 2012 and 2014 by Ian Pannell for BBC News, Matilde Gattoni and Matteo Fagotto for Newsweek, and Emily Jane O’Dell for Salon, mentioning a refugee who perceived “the absurd wait” of Beckett’s “dispossessed characters” as a reflection of his country’s political situation and found consolation in “memories of Beckett’s humour”; another refugee’s idea to use a performance of What Where to explain torture to those around him; and a game devised by two homeless Syrian children living in Beirut, consisting of an endless repetition of “I am Samuel Beckett!”—“No, I am Samuel Beckett!” (Morin 251–52). The solidarity-based, action-oriented, empowering dimensions of these reactions could hardly be contested.

Waiting for Godot undoubtedly strikes a raw nerve for anyone who has experienced states of confinement, from constraining socio-economic conditions and various forms of discrimination to actual imprisonment or life in a war zone/ under totalitarian rule. Still, it appears to consistently elicit (and to be consistently suspected that it might elicit) action-oriented feelings of revolt and hope in audience members rather than a passive state of “wise” acceptance. Furthermore, Beckett’s destabilizing, “difficult” linguistic operations appear not to hinder and perhaps even to enhance these effects—the “absurdities” and “abstractions” involved are eerily substantive, clear, and moving. A brief discussion of the play’s subversive rendering of suicide might begin to clarify what activates these effects. In Act I, Vladimir and Estragon, seemingly overwhelmed with boredom and despair, decide to attempt suicide by hanging, excitedly anticipating an erection in the process, but give up because they have no rope and the tree branches seem frail. The idea re-emerges in Act II, and they test the cord holding up Estragon’s pants, but it breaks—so they decide to find a sturdier rope by “tomorrow” (CDW 86). This hopelessly botched and eerily cheerful iterative suicide act has been universally read as a tragicomic existentialist depiction of the human condition (devoid of hope and substance, the characters are still pursuing “empty” sexual gratification), but this reading fails to account for the odd joy and productivity of this apparent exercise in futility. We might come closer to an explanation if we read the episode, instead, as a paradox-based, slapstick-style, mocking response to existentialist philosophy—especially to existentialist notions of freedom.

In his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes the absurdity of existence as a given and proclaims the need for a heroic response to the question “whether life is or is not worth living” (3): revolt rather than suicidal despair. However, his notion of revolt has little in common with Beckett’s paradox-based mayhem, especially since it involves an ethically questionable aggrandizement of the (male) subject. First, his category of “absurd heroes” strangely encompasses Sisyphus and stage actors alongside notoriously exploitative/ genocidal male figures like Don Juan and colonial conquistadors. Second, even his discussion of his title character is problematic, as he insists that Sisyphus must have experienced inner freedom and happiness in the exertion of his torturous tasks—arguably a return to the logic of (self)-sacrifice, mind over matter, use and abuse aligning the Christian martyr and the romanticist megalomaniacal geni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction to Beckett’s “Absurdist” Excess
• Part I. Contagion and Accessibility: Revolutionary Beckett
• Part II. Script Evaluation and Enrichment: Evolutionary Beckett
• Back Matter