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COMMENTARY OF THE TEXT In Ocyober of 1948, looking for an
alternative to the prose, Samuel Beckett started to write Waiting for Godot.
How he had done with his novels, he write in french like discipline and then
he traduced them to inglish, his native language. Even we donīt know who is
Godot what was the origin of the name. Even though Beckett had written
anteriorly a theater work, Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot was his first
mounting. His debut was the most important of a dramaturg in our century, the
work altered the contemporary theater course. Since the first opening in the
Babylone Theater in Paris, the 5th of January of 1953, Beckett went out to
the nameless. However, all didnīt be a positive recognition. He had more
detractors than wonderers. A critic of London declared that never in the life
had seen a worse drama and the critic of the New York Times defined the work
like "a mistery wraped up in an enigma". The thing that vexed to
critics was the luck of the developmento of the drama, obviating his
language and the vision of the world like a cosmic cabaret. The San Quintin
prisioners, captatived completely which the critics had disregarded, that the
wait is consubstancial to the life too and therefore to the dramaturgyc of
the spectecle. The "enigma" crossed out by Broadway converted it in
a phenomenal international issue. Represented it in theaters, schools and
prisions. Even the abstract in his form, Godot also had implicitions strongly
politics, like the expresion of the nationes in transit between the Second
World War and the bargain-counterof 26 milions of people and the Cold War in
the impacient wait of the resolution while sheared it the apocalipsis. The
production of South Africa did to Godot a proper experience about the eternal
wait for the emancipation. What is extraordinary of the metaphor of Godot is
that it canīt identify definitively. He waits it becouse there isnīt other reasonable
alternative. This is the 5th representation of the work in Puerto Rico since
his opening in the universitary theater under the direction of Myrna Casas,
the most absurdity of our dramaturgs, in 1963. For us, the wait have
something to see with lot of things: with the country and the centenary
dilema of the status, with the drug and cure, with the space we want to build
for the same theater. After 50 years we thank to Backett the initial
justification for reunite us to collaborating together, to look for the
intense games in the art that permit us to pass the time, to wait for Godot
in stage. We do lika Lorca said: "We are going to go, but we arenīt
going to arrive", we wait doing although Godot never
arrives...(Conversations with and about Beckett by Mel Gussow) Plot The classic work of the absurdity
theater presents two vagavonds: Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) that wait
near of a tree the arriving of Godot. While they are waitting, they lose the
time playing a verbal games, making some questions, thinking to commit
suicide or to get away, metting and unmetting in the same place. They recieve
frightened, the visit of Pozzo and Lucky, the owner and the slave and they
listen the large monologue that finally says the man and his cerebrum, in spite
of the progress are shrinking. Then they recieve a boy that he brings them a
missage of Godot. The second act developes as similar as the first with some
variant. CONTEMPORARY UNIVERSAL
LITERARURE Prof. Manuel Angel Vazquez
Medel COMMENTARY
OF THE TEXT They each
take an end of the cord and pull. It breaks. They almost fall. VLADIMIR: Not worth a curse. Silence. ESTRAGON: You say we have to come
back tomorrow? VLADIMIR: Yes. ESTRAGON: Then we can bring a good
bit of rope. VLADIMIR: Yes. Silence. ESTRAGON: Didi. VLADIMIR: Yes. ESTRAGON: I canīt go on like this. VLADIMIR: Thatīs what you think. ESTRAGON: If we parted? That might
be better for us. VLADIMIR: Weīll hang ourselves
tomorrow. (Pause) Unless Godot comes. ESTRAGON: And if he comes? VLADIMIR: Weīll be saved. Vladimir
takes off his hat (Luckyīs), peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes
it, knocks on the crown, puts it on again. ESTRAGON: Well? Shall we go? VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers. ESTRAGON: What? VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers. ESTRAGON: You want me to pull off my
trousers? VLADIMIR: Pull on your trausers. ESTRAGON: (realizing his trousers are down). True. He pulls up his
trousers. VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go? ESTRAGON: Yes, letīs go. They do
not move. Identification of the fragment in
the work context The conclusive fragment of the
second act in Waiting for Godot,1953, is the recapitulation of all the work
and his advance since the final point that, connect almost circulary
with the beginning. There isnīt exit. We look, since the last moment of the
representation, a situation without sense, in which even the most humorous
elements acquire some gloomy tinges of metaphysics implications. References to the rest of the work Remember that the first of his
three acts started in a country way, with tree, at the evening. Tree elements
highly symbolics, in the field of nackedness almost absolut of the
decoration: a ay that we donīt know where does it come or where does it go; a
tree that symbolizes at the same time the doom ( we donīt forget the
importance of the tree of the good and the bad knowledge), manifested
here in the constant tendency to commit suicide, but also the redemption (the
beam of the cross). And the night, the time of the absence of light, of the
darkness. Estragon and Vladimir, the principal characters of this work, wait.
They wait, in a radical solitude and incomunication that it canīt
dissipate the company (purely formal) neither the dialoge (that in vane tries
to drve away the silence and the no sense). At the end of the work, they are
still waiting between the alternative of a Godot that never arrives and the
suicide that never consummate it. The central couple, Didi and Gogo,
curfew completed in this devasted scenary for the transit of the slave Lucky
(look the ironic name) and his owner Pozzo, united by the sado-masoquist
relations that donīt finish even though when Pozzo curfew blind. Remember that the fragment we are
commenting continue the exit of the boy that apeared - behind the definitive
abandonment of the scene of Lucky and Pozzo- for infor them that Godot didnīt
arrive that night. Vladimir and Estragon come back to plan, again, the
posibility of commiting suicide in the tree about which Vladimir had
said "Only the tree lives". Before the luck of the other cord, they
propose to hang with the Estragonīs belt. The fragment that we comment starts
in the moment in which the cord broken and frustate the posibility of
the suicide, that donīt discard, but postpone ("We hang ourselves
tomorrow.(silence) Unless Godot comes", will say Vladimir). Meaning and interpretation of the
text The text proclame the innutility of
the things, inclosed of the cord that has to be the instrument to commit
suicide, to put the end to a wait without sense: "Not worth a
curse", will say Vladimir. Estragon will proclame, one more time, his
desperation: "I canīt go on like this", afirmation that Vladimir
relativices. Also come back the recurrent themes of the separation and the
suicide, to abridge all the hope in something that even though they know,
becouse if Godot arrives, "Weīll be saved". Almost Godot doenīt
come, becouse there isnīt a posible salvation. Connection with the rest of the
authorīs work and with his creative project Samuel Beckett (Dublin, 1906- Paris,
1989), a disfatherland irish inclose of his language, then he writes all his
work in french, secretary of Joyce and Literature Nobel Prize (1969) is one
of the top of the literary creation in the 20th century: he expreses not only
a certain limit of the narrative writing, broungt at the extrem of the
language pride, about all in his Molloy trilogy, Malone dies and the
Unnamable, but the form more provided for an absurdity theater and with the
existencialist thater and the experimental theater represents one of the big
lines of the potwar theater. The work ilustrated like an archetip
of an epoque experience The absurdity theater goes beyond of
the existencialist potwar theater that although conseves the ideas, missages,
dramatic encarnations of phylosophics planings. Now, fundamentaly through the
work of Ionesco and of Beckett, the dramatic recources are at the service of
a central experience that parts of the existencialism: the man is a Da-Sein,
someone there, someone dashing and abandonated to the existence. There isnīt
logyc in the world, and the life is continualy threatened by the death. We
are essence- for - the - death, had said Heidegger. In this fragment we find many of the
caracteristics more notables of the absurdity theater: a) Two incompleted and brittle
characters, managed by a destiny that exceed them, at the same time that
they tryto comunicate and drive away the silence deepen the radical senseof
the solitude and constantly were tempted to abandone themselves, even is this
company, in the last intance, the only thing that make more tolerable a wait
donīt know very good of who or what; b) A reduction of the dramatic
accion at the minim (realy happen little significative things), that
increment the senses of the anguish and the tediousness of an absurdity human
existence; c) Truncate dialogues, incomplete,
that aim to the human incomunication; d) The importance of the
gestuality, that in this case dissemble the words (this pathetic radical
final in which both characters proclame his intention of go away, to go out
of there, but the annotation inform us that They donīt move. e) The proper scenary nackedness and
the higher symbolism of each other of his elements aim to this sensation of
void, giddiness and without sense. Complementaries References Of The
Critic And The Others Lectures How the critic Alain Badiou
apointed, Beckett trasforms the Kant three big questions (What can I know?
What can I do? What can I hope? ) In his Texts for nothing in the questions more
radicals: Where should I go, if Icould go to an other place? What should I
be, if I could be somehting? What would I say, if I would have a voice? to
them he adds Who am I, if the other exists? Therefore, the realization and
the destin problem, expressed plasticaly in the walk or in the inmovility and
the clausure; the problem of the personal realization, of whom see them
abocated to the nothingness the problem of to say, of the language and the
comunication and, finally, the big question of the alterity, the opening to
the other that define me but, in the comunicative impossibility, condene me
to the lonlyness. Or, following to Badiou again, the
three functions that isolate his methodic ascesis in his prose and in his
theater work. a) The moviment and the rest (go,
fall, stand up...) b) The essence (everything thereis,
that exists it, places and aparences, the vacillation of every posible
identity. c) The language (the imperative of
to say and the imposibility of the silence) Conclusion The dramatic expression of Beckett connectes, in one hand, with the nihilista nietzcheana proclamation, at the same time that radicalize the language problems expressed by Heidegger in Essence and Time. However, the esencial, is that it bring us to the limit of a beauty experience that refulge in the word and human limits.
Academic year 2000/2001 |
