The following article appeared
in the Erie Times-News SHOWcase
Thursday, March 1, 1990.
Photo by Dmitri Kasterine,
London, 1970.
An Appreciation of Samuel Beckett:
'A voice that I felt was speaking in the clearest and most accurate terms
about what it meant to be human and in the world'
by Rick Lopez .
Samuel Beckett passed from this earth
on Friday, December 22, 1989. Had he an active post-life voice (apart from
the astonishing body of literary and theatrical work he left) he would
likely be claiming that he had died on Christmas day. According to his
birth certificate, he had made his entrance, stage left, on May 13, 1906,
but he steadfastly maintained that he had been born on April 13, Good Friday--
just another strand in the playful web of contradictions strung across
his life and work."I like all these lies and legends," he had said. "The
more there are, the more interesting I become."
No other living author
elicited the critical interest that Beckett had. A bibliography of his
work and critics ran to 320 pages, and is now two decades out of date.
Of this focus on his literary output, Beckett remained unconcerned, commenting
that the scholars and critics finding headaches in their search for symbolism
and meaning in his writings "should bring their own aspirin."
Hamm: We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah, that's a good
one!.
--Endgame (1956)
"No symbols where none intended."
--Watt (1944)
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Beckett
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, an event
which caused him only embarrassment. Always the recluse, he fled in secret
to a small vilage in Tunisia in order to avoid the publicity. When reporters
finally tracked him down, Beckett agreed to see them only if they promised
not to ask questions. One of the cameramen, obviously sensitive to Beckett's
need for privacy, whispered an apology as he took his picture. "That's
all right," said Beckett, "I understand."
It was his only public response to the award.
Waiting for Godot, Beckett's
most famous work, premiered in Paris in 1953, and the theater
was changed forever, its limits and conventions dashed to bits. What audiences
found on their innocent night out was a set consisting simply of a scruffy,
barren little tree beside an equally barren country road. And there they
were, Vladimir and Estragon, a pair of destitutes from the fringes of vaudeville,
patiently, and not so patiently, waiting for Godot. And how long will they
wait? Why, as long as it takes; until he comes; or until the end, if he
doesn't come; or forever.And so it goes, this classic of twentieth-century
theater, a tragicomedy in two acts, during which nothing changes, nothing
happens (twice), time passes, and Godot never comes. |
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Godot's brilliance, seen immediately by
some, and missed completely by most, lies in its not being about
anything. It was something: a situation, simply put and simply presented,
of a state we all find ourselves in with great regularity. We wait in line,
we wait for our paychecks, we wait for dinner, we wait for our ships to
come in, for Friday, for the mail, for a phone call... it's one of our
common endeavors.
Another is to "look for sense where possibly there
is none" (Play, 1963), heaping meaning upon the meaningless-- and
this was another aspect of the play's importance, and of Beckett's work
in general: It is so open-ended that we must abandon our habitual need
for meaning. And yet audiences rush out to make their myriad decisions
on what it all signifies, and the decisions are legion. The most common,
and a fitting example of opposites applying for no other reason than That
we require it, were the positions that either Godot was God, and Vladimir
and Estragon brave Christians waiting for his return; or that Godot was
a God who would never come because he didn't exist-- both equally wrong.
This think-yourself-to-death confusion on Godot's identity irritated Beckett
to no end: "If I knew, I would have said so..." Beckett felt that a classically
captive audience of a production at San Quentin Prison understood waiting,
and hence the play, perfectly.
"Look Jean, this play is simple! So simple a child could read every
word of it. How can you not understand such language!"
--Actor Lucien Raimbourg, answering actor Jean Martin's "What's it
mean?" at rehearsals for the premiere of Waiting for Godot (1953).