Dialogues on Beckett: Whatever Happened to God?

By Antoni Libera and Janusz Pyda

‘Dialogues on Beckett’ is a collection of 12 conversations about 12 plays by Samuel Beckett, discussions about the meaning of life and the universe between an agnostic and a Christian, based on a close reading of the text. It includes a judicious balance of basic information about Beckett’s life and work, brief sketches of some interpretations of his plays and a few words on the critical reception of each, and sets out some possible criticisms of the vision of the world expressed in them. These last are particularly interesting given the many references and allusions to Christian theology to be found in the plays. They are, admittedly, heavily ironic, but they testify to the importance in Beckett’s thought of the Christian vision of the universe and the eschatological dimension of human existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783088966

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Dialogues on Beckett

ANTHEM STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance takes a broad, global approach to cultural analysis to examine and critique a wide range of performative acts from the most traditional forms of theatre studies (music, theatre and dance) to more popular, less structured forms of cultural performance. The twenty-first century in particular has seen theatre and performance studies become a major perspective for examining, understanding and critiquing contemporary culture and its historical roots. In addition to traditional theatre studies, then, the series takes as its subject international folk performances, minstrel and music hall shows, vaudeville, burlesque, ballroom dance, rock concerts, professional wrestling, football and soccer matches, snake charming, American snake-handling religions, shamanism, street protests, NASCAR or Formula 1 races, tractor pulls, fortune telling, circuses, techno-mobbing, the gestures of painting and writing, and even the performance that denies itself, that pretends that it is not play(ing). Performance is thus a vital manifestation of culture that is enacted, a form to be experienced, recorded, analysed and theorized. It is among the most useful and dynamic foci for the global study of culture.

Series Editor

S. E. Gontarski – Florida State University, USA

Editorial Board

Alan Ackerman – University of Toronto, Canada

Herbert Blau – University of Washington, USA

Enoch Brater – University of Michigan, USA

Annamaria Cascetta – Università Cattolica, Milan, Italy

Robson Corrêa de Camargo – Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil

Stephen A. Di Benedetto – University of Miami, USA

Christopher Innes – York University, Canada

Anna McMullan – University of Reading, UK

Martin Puchner – Harvard University, USA

Kris Salata – Florida State University, USA

W. B. Worthen – Barnard College, Columbia University, USA

Dialogues on Beckett

Whatever Happened to God?

Antoni Libera

Janusz Pyda OP

Translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Kolakowska

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Antoni Libera and Janusz Pyda OP 2019

The authors asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-894-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-894-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

HAMM: Let us pray to God! […] The bastard! He doesn’t exist!

CLOV: Not yet.

Endgame

CONTENTS

Authors’ Note

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989): The Last Literary Giant

AUTHORS’ NOTE

The 12 dialogues in this book arose out of a seminar on Samuel Beckett offered in 2012–13 by the the Dominican Philosophy and Theology Studies programme in that year’s ‘School of Reading’, conducted under the auspices of the Polish Province of the Dominicans.

Our discussions were so lively and inspiring, and so conducive to further analysis and enquiry that we thought them worth elaborating, editing and preserving in written form. Thus arose these twelve conversations about 12 of Beckett’s plays – those which we considered to be the most important, the most interesting or the most representative of his work.

We have included what we hope is a judicious balance of basic information about Beckett’s life and work, brief sketches of some interpretations of his plays and a few words on the critical reception of each; and we have set out some possible criticisms of the vision of the world expressed in them. These last are particularly interesting given the many references and allusions to Christian theology to be found in the plays. They are, admittedly, heavily ironic, but they testify to the importance in Beckett’s thought of the Christian vision of the universe and the eschatological dimension of human existence.

Beckett, through the radicalism of his thought and his crystalline and very distinctive style, succeeds better perhaps than anyone else in getting at the heart of the disquiet which has marked our age; and he identifies its cause as a metaphysical transformation which is taking place before our eyes. That transformation is the disenchantment of the world. A number of factors have contributed to it; the progress of science is just one among many. But whatever the causes, the sphere of the sacred has lost its power and can no longer explain the course of history. The temple lies in ruins, and we have found nothing to supplant it, no new way of making sense of the world and our place in the universe. Western Man has lost his bearings and can see no way forward; beyond the ancient and familiar paths of the Judeo-Christian tradition, increasingly difficult now to return to, lies unknown territory, empty and dark and cold. This state of suspension and disorientation gives rise to a profound disquiet, though we may not always be aware of its nature or its source.

An analysis of Samuel Beckett’s major plays is an excellent introduction to a broader debate not only on the current state of Western culture and civilization but also, more generally, on the spiritual condition of modern man. We hope that the dialogues we present here will inspire readers to reflect on these issues and encourage such a debate.

Antoni Libera

Janusz Pyda OP

SAMUEL BECKETT (1906–1989): THE LAST LITERARY GIANT

Samuel Beckett was an extraordinary writer; but he was extraordinary in a number of other ways. An Irishman, he was not Catholic like most of his countrymen but Protestant, from a Huguenot family which had come to Ireland in the eighteenth century, fleeing religious persecution. He himself travelled in the opposite direction, leaving Ireland when still quite young, like many famous Irishmen before him, and settling in France.

Beckett wrote most of his work in two languages: his native English and French. He spoke a number of other languages besides these; he was highly educated and had been a good student, but he preferred to keep his distance from the world of academe and rejected the academic career path.

His parents were well off and he had a comfortable childhood in which he lacked for nothing; as an adult he spurned material comforts and led an ascetic life. When his writing brought fame and fortune, he made no use of his money except for necessities, and gave much of it away. He also shunned publicity, refusing interviews, television appearances and readings. He even refused to go in person to collect his Nobel Prize, asking his French publisher to attend the ceremony for him. Throughout his life he fiercely guarded his privacy and independence. But he was an extraordinarily warm person, kind and generous to his friends.

He avoided involvement in politics and never took sides or spoke out in public conflicts of any kind; but during World War II he unhesitatingly joined the Resistance, which nearly cost him his life and later earned him the French Military Cross. The certificate was signed by General de Gaulle. After the war he stood up for victims of persecution in various parts of the world, including those living under communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe. This, too, he did quietly and with no publicity. When Poland was under martial law he gave a sizeable chunk of his royalties to ‘Solidarity’, and he dedicated one of his last plays, Catastrophe, to Václav Havel, who at the time was serving a three-year sentence in a communist prison in Czechoslovakia.

His work absorbed him to the exclusion of almost all else. ‘I love the word, words have been my only loves,’ says the narrator in one of his short pieces of fiction, and Beckett might have said as much of himself. He wrote poems, short stories, essays and novels, but he is best known as a playwright and innovator of theatrical forms – the creator of a new kind of theatre.

His style is at once plain and difficult: the words are simple, but they conceal a multiplicity of meanings that have to be teased out. His writing is condensed, concise and direct, in accordance with his principle that ‘less means more’; it is also extremely disciplined in its attention to rhythm and form, so much so that it is almost like music, to which indeed it has been compared. When directing his own plays Beckett always planned everything in the minutest detail: the intonation of every phrase spoken, its rhythm and tempo and where the stresses should fall, the number of steps an actor was to take on stage, the exact number of seconds every action was to take. Under his direction his plays were like complex pieces of machinery in which every part worked smoothly in perfect coordination with every other.

He writes in a minor key; his work is gloomy and depressing. At the same time it is full of humour, ingenious word games and comic dialogue which is genuinely funny. In his prose works, too, there is much black humour. But it is not the humour that dispels the stifling atmosphere of gloom in Beckett’s work; it is something that one can only call beauty. The beauty of his prose – its symmetry, its echoes and refrains, its cadences, its counterpoint, its crystalline clarity – is striking even when – perhaps especially when – he is writing about chaos and doubt. And this beauty, this attention to form, is a source of catharsis.

Dialogue I

MESSIANISM: PROS AND CONS

WAITING FOR GODOT (1949)

Janusz Pyda OP: Let’s start with the fundamental question: Who is Godot? The play’s protagonists seem unsure. In fact, they have no idea. Estragon is clueless, while Vladimir, the only character in favour of waiting for Godot, is incapable of describing what he looks like, let alone explaining the circumstances of their meeting or the reason for his conviction that Godot can change their destiny. He nevertheless claims that they have both met Godot once before and that Godot promised to meet them again. In short, Vladimir is not credible and gives one nothing to go on.

When Beckett was asked the same question, he would reply indirectly or by negation: ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have written the play’ was his standard answer. He is also on record as saying, ‘If I knew, I would have said so in the play,’ or again, ‘If by Godot I had meant God, I would have said God and not Godot.’ For me the most interesting of his very few comments on the subject is the following: ‘I do not know who Godot is. I do not even know if he exists. And I do not know if they believe he does, these two who are waiting for him.’ One thing emerges clearly from all this: the author does not place himself above the reader/audience; there is nothing that only he knows and wants to conceal from them. He does not even place himself in a privileged position in relation to his own text. Like the audience/reader, he knows only what can be deduced from the text, nothing more.

So the text is all we have. And the text, full as it is of uncertainties and unknowns, things murky and obliquely hinted at, does seem to tell us one thing with certainty, namely, that whether or not Godot exists, whether or not he really did meet the protagonists somewhere or is merely a figment of their imagination, he is a person. The protagonists are not waiting for an event or a thing, like manna from heaven; they are waiting for a person. Is this really something we can be certain of? And if so, what does it entail?

Antoni Libera: Yes, that is definitely something we can be certain of, and it entails a number of important things. What the protagonists hope for from Godot is some sort of improvement in their lives: food, a roof over their heads and above all a goal to strive towards, something to stave off boredom and give meaning to their existence. But whatever they expect from him, their hopes are bound up not with a miracle, a piece of luck or some natural event, but with a human being – someone like them. And the fact that they personify their potential benefactor in this way tell us quite a lot about them. It tells us how deep their dependence is on human nature, on the human perspective: even a radical transformation of their lives must come about through the mediation of a human being. In the sphere of human affairs the mediator must be their fellow man; they cannot even imagine anything else. But that someone, although – as they imagine – a human being like them, differs from them in a fundamental way, for he has power. He has power because he has wealth – possessions, a house, perhaps a farm – and that wealth gives him the power to help them: to assure their safety and deliver them.

But at this point we come up against a problem: Does such a person exist in Beckett’s world, a world governed by laws so different from our own? Is it even conceivable that such a person could exist in that world?

We know that our own world contains rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, the powerful and those who do their bidding, guardians and wards, and that the former have the means to help the latter. But in the world of Beckett’s plays the same principle holds as in any fictional world, in any work of art: what you see is what you get. What we are told (or shown) is all there is. And what are we shown in the world of this play? Two vagrants, Estragon and Vladimir, talking under a tree; two travellers, Pozzo and Lucky, whose physical capacities are gradually declining; and a pair of twins, young boys, probably shepherds, since one of them ‘minds the sheep’ while the other ‘minds the goats’. That completes the list of the inhabitants of Beckett’s universe in Godot. There is no one else here, nothing that might correspond to Godot, the character whose existence is deduced. The closest to him would be Pozzo, because of his wealth and status, which is why the naive Estragon suspects that he is Godot. But Vladimir disabuses him of this notion – though with rather less conviction the second and third time round:

ESTRAGON: Are you sure it wasn’t him?

VLADIMIR: Who?

ESTRAGON: Godot.

VLADIMIR: But who?

ESTRAGON: Pozzo.

VLADIMIR: Not at all! ( Less sure. ) Not at all. ( Still less sure. ) Not at all!

We are thus led to the conclusion that though Godot may be a person, he is an impossible one, in that while he is deduced from the world of the protagonists (and assumed to be someone like Pozzo), he is endowed, by Vladimir’s imagination, with traits which are not from that world. He is a kind of centaur: a hybrid being, half man, half –

J. P.: God?

A. L.: The two components of his name, God plus the French diminutive ending -ot, suggest a little God; a godlet. The combination of French and English makes it possible for the name to resonate in both languages. But it will only resonate only a purely intellectual level, with the reader who knows both languages and is aware of the two components. In any case, certainly no person called by any such name would have a divine nature.

J. P.: I agree that there are no grounds for attributing a divine nature to him, at least not in the sense of that term in classic Christian theology. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that the distinctive features of the awaited Godot are very close to the most important features of God. Godot is both a person and a possessor of power, and he is not of the world of those who are waiting for him. God, too, is a person, and He is, moreover, both omnipotent (interestingly, this is the only attribute of God mentioned in the Christian Creed) and Other – in relation both to man and to the world. He is transcendent. St Paul said on the Areopagus in Athens, ‘Whom therefore ye worship in ignorance, Him I declare unto you’ (Acts 17:23).

But I’d like to take a closer look at something else: the world of Beckett’s play. It is a world that is not only empty and mute. For the characters in it, its most important feature is that it is alien, if not actually hostile. Estragon feels uncomfortable in his shoes, Vladimir in his hat. Estragon is eternally hungry; Vladimir has problems with his prostate. Estragon imagines that someone beat him up; he escapes into dreams and it is only then that he is ‘happy’. Vladimir thinks of suicide and feels ‘lonely’. Both are homeless; they have not even built themselves a hut, though they could have done, since there is a tree. They are cold and constantly frightened. All this indicates that this is a world in which they do not feel at home.

To a Christian such an idea is unacceptable for at least three reasons. First, because he believes the world was created for him, as his home, and given to him as his dominion. Second, this world clearly indicates the existence of a transcendent being. To quote St Paul once again, ‘For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse’ (Romans 1:20). Finally, although for the Christian this world is not the ‘last word’, for it is not our permanent home, just a place we pass through, nevertheless, for all its imperfections and disadvantages, it is a good thing: a blessing, not a curse.

Beckett’s world is quite different. The world of Waiting for Godot is not a home but a place of exile. ‘The earth abode of stones’, Lucky calls it in his monologue that is, not a place for people. And it seems to be a world devoid of sense or meaning, or at least of any trace of a higher power. This is made clear in a striking and highly effective passage in Pozzo’s last monologue:

One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second […] They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

Why is Beckett’s world such a terrible place for man?

A. L.: With that question you have gone right to the heart of the matter. Godot, like most of Beckett’s work, is part of an extended argument with Christian theology, especially with the philosophy of consolation.

Beckett’s initial premise is in agreement with the Judaeo-Christian tradition: our world is a place of transit, full of evil, cruelty and pain. It is – as the Book of Genesis tells us – a land of exile, a vale of tears in which the woman suffers (‘in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children’), while the husband must toil for his bread in the sweat of his brow (‘in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’). The savagery and greed of human nature causes suffering not only to our fellow men but also to ourselves, for our passions and lusts can never be assuaged: no sooner are they satisfied than they reawaken. And when at last they pass, in old age, we are left with boredom and emptiness, and a longing for lost passion, even though it was a source of pain.

Up to this point Beckett shares the Christian view of man and his place in the world. But from here on their ways diverge. Christianity offers the prospect of salvation as a way of overcoming the miserable condition of man and the world. Beckett rejects this; he rejects theodicy and eschatological hopes. But his tone – unlike, for example, Nietzsche’s – is not triumphalist; it is rather one of sadness and regret. And remember when this discussion takes place: almost two thousand years after the Christian Revelation and after several centuries during which the scientistic consciousness developed and took shape, leading, willy-nilly, to the disenchantment of the religious view of man and the world.

Nor is Beckett’s tone one of self-satisfaction or contempt. He does not declare in pitying tones that all the promises of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are nothing but fairy tales for soothing restive children, morphine for our pain, a pathetic delusion. He says rather that in our time, something, some vital spark, has been extinguished, and the religious view has lost its power or is in the process of losing it. Two thousand years of experience tells us that there is no Consolation and no Great Promise. The world has neither come to an end, as it was supposed to soon after Christ, nor changed for the better. There is still suffering, perhaps more than before. And there is no help, no comfort, no sign. The only remedy for our Weltschmerz is to stifle our needs and desires and adopt a strict asceticism. But that is not really an answer, and besides, it is possible only for a few.

In short: yes to Job, yes to the Cross, yes to pain, fear and abandonment. But no to consolation. And no to salvation and eternal light.

This is said almost explicitly in the famous dialogue at the beginning of Act I, where Beckett alludes to St Augustine’s ‘Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned’. Beckett loved the way this was expressed and thought there was a deeper meaning to be found in its symmetry. He was fascinated by the 50-50 idea. Here, in this dialogue, he undermines that balance, in a spirit of contrariness and with a kind of perverse glee at the thought that he has achieved this through arithmetic:

VLADIMIR: One of the thieves was saved. It’s reasonable percentage […] Suppose we repented.

ESTRAGON: Repented what?

VLADIMIR: Oh […] We wouldn’t have to go into the details.

ESTRAGON: Our being born?

(Vladimir breaks into a hearty laugh.)

And they continue:

VLADIMIR: And yet […] how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there […] Of the other three two don’t mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him […]

ESTRAGON: Well what of it?

VLADIMIR: Then the two of them must have been damned.

ESTRAGON: And why not?

VLADIMIR: But one of the four says that one of the two was saved.

ESTRAGON: Well? They don’t agree, and that’s all there is to it.

VLADIMIR: But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?

ESTRAGON: Who believes him?

VLADIMIR: Everybody. It’s the only version they know.

ESTRAGON: People are bloody ignorant apes.

The calculation is as follows: if there is a 50-50 chance, as Augustine claims, but only one of the Evangelists mentions it, then the chances are four times smaller: not one in two but one in eight.

J. P.: I’m not sure if Beckett does share the view of the Judaeo-Christian tradition even up to that point, as you say. Yes, the world in the Book of Genesis is a place of transit, full of evil and suffering, but that is not the world that was given to us; it is a world we have corrupted. We were given the Garden of Eden, and then came the Fall: through our own fault – through original sin, the bad use we made of our free will – we ended up in a land of exile. But Beckett does not mention Paradise; his world is the world just after the Fall. So the question arises if for Beckett, in this play, the Fall is acknowledged to have taken