The meaning of Godot - Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot - University of Birmingham - Transcript
Introduction
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Well welcome. I’d like to welcome you to your visit day here. I’m Dr David Pattie
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and I teach at the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts and what I’d like to do, and
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this will take about 20 minutes or so, is to give you a short taser lecture which will
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– well, it will replicate as far as we possibly can the kind of information, the kind of approach
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that you’ll be encountering if you take up an offer with the University of Birmingham
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and with our Department.
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I’m a specialist in a number of research areas. Like a lot of members of staff I have
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areas that I research in and that feeds into my teaching. One of my main research areas
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is the work of Samuel Beckett who just kind of crops up absolutely everywhere. He’s
Beckett in Popular Culture
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not simply an icon of 20th Century literature and especially 20th Century drama, the images
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associated with his plays wind up in popular culture, they wind up in histories of dramatic
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form and structure, they wind up in cartoons. This is one that I pulled at random actually
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from a large number of potential subjects from the Observer. This is way back in 2012
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and this is David Cameron and George Osborne looking appropriately bereft at the point
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at which it seemed like an economic upturn in they country wasn’t going to actually
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arrive and what has the cartoonist done? Well he’s identified them as Vladimir and Estragon
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from Waiting for Godot and he has put in David Cameron’s mouth the very first line of the
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play, “Nothing to be done”. I think if you wanted a sign of just how far Godot and
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Beckett have seeped into the public consciousness then a throwaway joke in a Sunday newspaper,
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or a partial mention in a programme like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if anybody remembers that,
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is a good sign just how much Godot is part of the consciousness of the wider culture.
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Just out of interest, the line out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is “That guy’s so late,
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he makes Godot look punctual”.
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However, I think it would be wrong to say that the seeping of the images of this play
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into the wider culture has actually rested on the thing that you might assume should
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be there, which is a secure and settled idea about what this play actually means. Godot’s
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a fascinating text and it’s a text which is – I don’t want to say baffled generations
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of scholars – but it’s a text whose meaning has regularly revealed itself as slippery,
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as hard to define. It’s been very, very difficult I think for any academic, for any
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actor, for any director, for any cultural critic to actually fix a meaning to this elusive
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text. What I’m going to say over about the next fifteen minutes or so is that that is
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not because the people who have engaged in the text are ignorant or wilfully missing
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something, it’s simply because the text itself evades meaning. One of the things that’s
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fascinating about Godot is that it’s a text that seems to fall apart as the play is produced,
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as the play is performed.
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First of all a little bit of background information. Beckett writes Godot in 1947. He writes it
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in the middle of writing a series of novels called The Trilogy, in the middle of also
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writing a series of novellas gathered together in a book called First Love and Other Stories.
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He writes it as a kind of a relaxation in the midst of all of this torrid, torrential
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prose, and he needs that relaxation because it’s a very, very intense time in his life.
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He’s come out of World War II where he was part of the French Resistance, he spent the
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last three years in hiding from the Nazis and he’s recovered from bouts of debilitating
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mental illness during that time and he’s found himself living in Paris, trying to make
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a living as a middle-aged Irish, penniless, would-be author, who hasn’t had much success
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in publication up to this point. But in this point in his life, texts just kind of flood
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out of him and Godot itself goes extremely quickly. It’s written in a very, very short
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space of time. The notebooks that we have for the text don’t have much inundation,
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they don’t have even many doodles and he was an inveterate doodler. Seriously, he could
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doodle for Ireland, but not in the notebooks for Godot.
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So this play kind of floods out of him and it seems, when the play actually takes on
Symbolism
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its final form, it seems that the play itself is formed from a series of symbols that Beckett
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in his writing just seem to have to hand. These are symbols that go all the way through
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his writing in this period. So we have a tree in a play, which is synonymous with the other
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blasted heaths and ruined countrysides in the novels and the short stories; we have
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tramps and Beckett writes about tramps from his earliest short stories right the way through
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to his last substantial prose work, Worstward Ho, just before he died. It has characters
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like Pozzo and Lucky who exist in a dynamic master/slave relationship and again, there’s
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something that runs through Beckett’ work which is very, very interesting in the dynamics
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of power in intense relationships between his characters. It has symbols of innocence
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like the boy, little moments of fleeting innocence that seem to appear and then to disappear
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because the world itself really can’t sustain that innocence. It has boots. Beckett’s
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characters always have trouble with their feet. Now that can either by symbolic, you
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know, ‘this is a long, tough journey that they’re moving on’, or it can be biographical
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because Beckett himself had terrible problems with his feet all the way through his life,
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so he obviously felt this very, very intensely.
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He’d just come from a period in his life when getting and obtaining and making sure
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you have enough food is something that he has had to struggle with and the whole of
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France has had to struggle with. So again, it runs through his writing in this period.
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And also, and this is something that Beckett in his writing starts to move into at this
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point in his career, he gets very very interested in the way that people costuming, but it’s
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a more general point, the way in which people perform to each other, the way in which people
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act out the dynamics of their relationships, act out their social status, act out their
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mastery or their lack of mastery on the environment and on the other characters when the main
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ways in which you can work out the power relations in Godot is to look at what the characters
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are wearing.
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And the moon. Beckett’s work always seems to exist, how can I put it, in the light of
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eternity. The actions of the characters which seem hopeless and helpless and lost are always
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juxtaposed with a wider natural environment which can be cosmic in scale, which does not
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care for them, which does not – it’s not even a question of having their best interests
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at heart, it’s a question of not even bothering that they’re there.
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Now, all these symbols coming together led early critics of Godot like – this is Ruby
Meaning
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Cohn, one of the first American critics of Godot - that the play had a definite meaning.
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The play was unambiguously about the absence of God, of these power relationships, of these
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struggles, the hunger, the pain, the anger. All of it way played out in a universe that
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meant nothing. As Cohn says, “Beckett’s man, while waiting for Godot, plays a part
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in a tragicomedy – a slapstick part of victim in a world he did not make, and that resists
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his efforts to make sense of it” and he can’t make sense of this world because there
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is no authority against which he can judge his actions in terms of the play. There’s
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nothing in this world which gives him any sense that there is in fact any chance of
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overall judgement. There’s no value system against which he can judge himself. Everything
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is meaningless and he is meaningless in the midst of this blank, empty universe.
Purgatory
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Critics like Cohn, in writing early in the history of Beckett criticism, this meant one
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thing. This meant essentially that Beckett’s world was purgatorial. Early critics noted
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Beckett showed a very, very early attraction for the work of Dante and of the three books
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of the Divine Comedy. He was especially drawn to the purgatory and many of his characters
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– that’s a character called Belacqua, whose pose is one that Beckett’s tramps
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adopt in moments of rest - characters like Belacqua in The Purgatory seem to be condemned
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to infinite lifetimes, not of suffering or not of salvage but simply of waiting. And
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for Cohn and for early critics, Beckett’s world was purgatory without the promise of
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salvation. So all you could do is wait and wait and wait in a universe.
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Purgatory in effect was without end but that kind of easy summary actually doesn’t take
Hold the Plane
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into account how the play actually works. It seems to suggest that the play is moving
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towards a definite meaning. However, when you watch the play, one of the things that
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happens, and all the characters say this and their actions lead you towards this conclusion,
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is that any sense of there being a definable meaning to this play is slowly removed from
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you. Every statement is undercut. Every action that seems to establish something is negated
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by another action which does the opposite or which simply effaces the first action.
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Pozzo, at the end of a rousing speech, which gives us a sense of his view of the world
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instantly pulls it back, “ Gentlemen, I don’t know what came over me. Forgive me.
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Forget all I said … I don’t remember exactly what it was, but our may be sure there wasn’t
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a word of truth in it”.
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And right at the heart of Act I of the play we have a classic example of the way that
Lucky Speech
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the play offers meaning and also bifaces it, and that’s Lucky. Pity the poor chap who
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has to learn all four pages of Lucky’s speech, which simply floods out of him, seeming to
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make no sense. In rehearsal with actors who played Lucky, Beckett said that the speech
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itself actually did have a kind of coherence to it but if you look at it carefully, it
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described the fate of man in a bare, bleak world, lost without the presence of a God
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to justify his actions. But if you can hear that signal amongst the noise of Lucky’s
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speech then frankly you’re a better man I am. And Beckett himself made the speech
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even more garbled in performance in 1975, working with actors in the [Shiller - 0:14:10]
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Theatre he instructed the actor playing Lucky to deliver the speech as fast as was humanly
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possible, but with gestures that seemed to suggest that lucky thought it made sense.
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Meaning is offered and meaning is denied. The set offers meaning and the meaning of
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the set is denied almost instantaneously. “You have a tree, but is it even a tree?
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It looks to me more like a bush”, “it’s a shrub”, “it’s a bush”, “what are
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you insinuating, that we’ve come to the wrong place?”. The directions say a country
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road, a tree – so even the stage directions if you go back to the text seem to be lying
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too. The tramps don’t know if this is a tree or not – “ not only do we not know
The Trees
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whether this is a shrub or a bush or a tree, but it is also a botanically misbehaving shrub
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or bush or tree”. One day passes apparently between the first act of Waiting for Godot
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and the second act, and the first and second act show entirely repeated actions. The same
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structure, the same pattern of entrances and exits, the same type of dialogue even though
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in the second half that dialogue’s more difficult to sustain, but the tree has changed.
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The tree has got leaves, “yesterday evening it was black and bare. Now it’s covered
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in leaves”, “leaves?”, “in a single night”, “it must be spring”, “I tell
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you, we weren’t here yesterday”. When the tree sprouts leaves, it not only calls
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into question location but it also seems to call into question the entire construction
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of the natural world. What kind of world is this if trees sprout leaves overnight? This
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doesn’t play by the rules that we’re used to but what rules does it play to? The play
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doesn’t tell us. Again, it sets up something simple and it complicates it.
No Certainty
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We have no certainty in the speech, we have no certainty in the natural world. We have
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no certainty, also because the tramps simply cannot remember enough about their previous
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experience to be certain about who they are, where they are and why they are in this particular
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location, waiting for this particular person. They have no memory that they can be absolutely
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certain of, and because they have no memory, they have no clear sense of time. For the
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individual that’s all time is. Time is the patterning of our memories in a narrative
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sequence. Well, the tramps don’t have that and neither does Pozzo, and we don’t know
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Lucky has it because in the second act, he’s. In the first act he made little sense anyway.
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If you live in a world with no memory, then the world you live in appears bare and bleak
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and infinite and the idea of time becomes a torment. Pozzo says in the first act, “have
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you not done tormenting me with your accursed time?”. Time is here accursed because time
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will not stay still. Time will not settle into memories because the tramps and Pozzo
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can’t hold a narrative sequence of events in their heads. So every time it feels simultaneously
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entirely all-consuming and also impossible to place. So the natural world misbehaves,
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speech misbehaves and Godot misbehaves most famously.
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Godot is the ultimate – I suppose these days we’d say gas-lighter or troll, you
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know, promising something and not delivering on it. Every single day, as far as we know,
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the tramps return. Every single day Godot sends an [0:19:08], sends the boy to say that
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he can’t come today but he’ll come tomorrow. Every single day and the tramps wait and wait
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and wait and wait. And as the tramps wait in this strange, bare world that has no rules
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to it, talking to each other in language which has no set meaning, trapped in a world where
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time and memory seem to have completely disappeared, something happens to their sense of self.
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The fact that Godot was going to arrive was the only thing that they are hanging onto.
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It’s the only thing that confirms that they are who they say they are because it’s the
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only thing that gives their lives any meaning. So when the boy says “what am I to tell
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Mr Godot, sir?”, “tell him you saw me and that… that you saw me… You’re sure
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you saw me, you don’t come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!”.
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When Godot can’t see them because Godot doesn’t arrive, it seems as though the tramps
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themselves feel as though they’re on the verge of disappearing. They need somebody
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outside themselves to confirm their existence, to give them purpose, to give them a shape,
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to give them a sense that tomorrow will be better and different from the world that they
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inhabit today. Godot doesn’t arrive. So therefore that sense of purpose, that sense
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of certainty, that sense of self, that sense of identity, isn’t confirmed. If Godot doesn’t
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arrive, how do they know who they actually are because their only purpose is to wait
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for Godot. So what do they fall back on? What can they fall back on? What’s the only thing
The Habit
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that can structure their lives?
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So one of the things that one can say about this play, in conclusion, that it doesn’t
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so much deliver an argument about man’s place in a different cosmos, it doesn’t
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do what Rubicon does with the play; it doesn’t establish definite meaning that these characters
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are definitely in purgatory, that the world around them is structured as a kind of indefinite
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waiting room that they are trapped in. But what it does do is to show the way in which
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– well, if there is no meaning, if there is no point at which your location in the
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world is going to change, if there is no point at which things might improve, or even disimprove
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[sic], what’s left is simply the habit of being there, simply the habit of living, and
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what we watch the tramps doing through the course of the play is, as Vladimir puts it,
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“constraining themselves to beguile the hour with proceedings – how shall I say
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– which may at first sight seem reasonable, until they become habit”. The characters
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go through repeated actions: Vladimir shakes grit out of his hats, Estragon checks his
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boots, Pozzo and Lucky come on, do the same things in each act and go off again. These
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actions might have had meaning once but in a world without time, in a world without memory
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and a world where there are no laws against which you can measure your existence, then
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all that you have left are the habits of the actions. All that you have left are meaningless
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things which do nothing more than fill the time. But those meaningless things themselves
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end up being empty because habit, as Vladimir puts it in Act 2, “is a great deadener”.
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So what are we left with at the end of the play? We’re left in a world which decays
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even as we look at it. The elements on stage have no stable meaning. Is it a tree? Is it
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a bush? Is it a shrub? Important parts of the symbolic system are missing. What about
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that ultimate power source of Godot? Well he’s not there. He’s the ultimate Pozzo
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to the other characters’ Lucky. He’s absent and he remains absent and symbols, meaningful
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actions, lose meaning through a process of repetition. You do something worse, it might
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achieve something. You do something for the tenth, fifteenth, twentieth, thirtieth, thousandth
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time, it’s just an action that means nothing.
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At the end of the play, just for a moment, Vladimir confronts this strange decaying world
The Decay of Meaning
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in which all stable meanings have fallen away and he gives a sense that just for a second
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he sees to the heart of it, “when tomorrow comes, or I think it does, what shall I say
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of today? That with my friend Estragon, at this place until the fall of night, I waited
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for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in
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all that, what truth will there be?”. Just for a moment, Vladimir realises he can fix
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no stable meaning to anything in a strange world in which meaning decays almost as soon
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as you try to grasp it. Typically he immediately dismisses the thought. Just after the speech
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finishes, agitatedly he walks backward and forward across the stage saying “what have
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I done? What have I said?”, as though decay of meaning is something that you can’t look
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at too closely because otherwise it destroys you.
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Godot as a play has proved endlessly fascinating for academics, for actors, for directors,
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for designers, for theatre critics. Each one of them has tried to fix a meaning to it but
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in doing so I think all that they do is draw attention to the fact that the play itself
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evades meaning because it shows, in a world that has no ultimate guarantees, a world that
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has no ultimate jurisdiction, no ultimate meaning, a world without time, a world without
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memory, any sense of a stable meaning is going to decay. Godot, if you like, is the dramatic
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equivalent of sand running through your fingers. You try to grasp it and it simply trickles
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away and there’s nothing that you can do about the fact that the grains of sand just
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keep on falling.
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and ...
YOUTUBE VIDEO
The meaning of Godot - Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot - University of Birmingham
Mar 6, 2019
Dr David Pattie delivers an undergraduate taster lecture on 'The meaning of Godot' as part of the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts' Offer-Holder Visit Day at the University of Birmingham.
duration 27:29 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXgI0EWaGhs&list=PLH99V1T9pDs62oXZ4oASmnPcgoA-agp0K&index=6
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