Social Context of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot - Literature review Example

Though Becketts theatre carefully eschews placement in specific historical and social contexts, the audience often finds resonances with specific historical and social contexts in his plays. Discuss this reference to Samuel Becketts waiting for Godot. ‘Waiting for Godot’, the most enigmatic of all Samuel Beckett’s plays opened to a house of luke warm audience ,when it was first staged in the 1950s but, much to the chagrin of conventional theatre-goers ,gradually gathered popularity and even went on to receive ‘The Most Controversial Play of the Year’ award. Though Beckett himself dissuaded people from reading meanings into his work and thereby “complicating’ something ‘simple’, theatre-goers cannot but rummage through his play in search of a meaning. Actually the universal appeal of the play can be attributed to its genius in lending itself to a whole variety of readings. Coming in the wake of the two world wars, the play leaves the audience with no choice but to see clear reflections of a war-struck society. The plot of Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot is disarmingly simple and lacking in drama. Two vagabonds are waiting by a barren tree for the arrival of M. Godot. They quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot and gnaw on some chicken bones. Two other characters appear, a master and a slave, who perform a grotesque scene in the middle of the play. A young boy arrives to say that M. Godot will not come today, but that he will come tomorrow. He does not come and the two tramps continue their vigil by the tree, which between the first and second day has sprouted a few leaves, the only noticeable happening in their otherwise monotonous and tedious life. Though Samuel Beckett does not help his audience in deciphering the hidden meanings in his play “I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant.” the playwright’s biography does throw some valuable light on his baffling and difficult-to-read play. Actually his war experiences have influenced a large part of his writings and ‘Waiting for Godot’ shows some definite such impressions. The skies of the early twentieth century had been overcast by two World Wars that brought about uncertainties, despair, and despondence to all mankind. The writings of the day reflected the tragedy of the times. Faced by a blurry future, writers began to pen down their fears and uncertainties of a meaningless existence. Like all twentieth century writers Beckett too made his works the vehicles of his deepest anguish and despair. Beckett joined the French Resistance after the 1940 occupation by Germany.In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he and his companion fled south to the safety of the small village of Roussillon. Here he continued to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his home. Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in the late months of 1948, three years after Allied forces had liberated France from German occupation.Some see Waiting for Godot as a biographical sketch documenting a journey into Roussillon that Beckett and his wife took during the war when they slept in haystacks during the day and traveled by night. Beckett’s initial years, even before his involvement in the Second World War seem to have left an indelible mark on his psyche and thereby, his works. Gordon L in her book “The World of Samuel Beckett 1906-1946” describes the various places and events that affected Beckett during this formative period: war-torn Dublin during the Easter Uprising and World War I, where he spent his childhood and student days; Belfast and Paris in the 1920s and London during the Depression, where he lived and worked; Germany in 1937, where he traveled and witnessed Hitlers brutal domestic policies; prewar and occupied France, where he was active in the Resistance (for which he was later decorated); and the war-ravaged town of Saint-Lô in Normandy, which he helped to restore following the liberation. Gordon argues convincingly that Beckett was very much aware of the political and cultural turmoil of this period and that the enormously creative works he wrote after World War II can, in fact, be viewed as a product of and testament to those tumultuous times. The anxiety, forlornness, the monotonous waiting, the barren setting of the play –all point clearly to the wars and their effects on the society. Hugh Kenner, the first (and for a long time the only) Beckett critic describes the play this way in his Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett: Two men waiting, for another whom they know only by an implausible name which may not be his real name. A ravaged and blasted landscape. A world that was ampler and more open once, but is permeated with pointlessness now. Mysterious dispensers of beatings. A man of property and his servant, in flight. And the anxiety of the two who wait, their anxiety to be as inconspicuous as possible in a strange environment (“We’re not from these parts, Sir.”) where their mere presence is likely to cause remark. It is curious how readers and audiences do not think to observe the most obvious thing about the world of the play, that it resembles France occupied by the Germans, in which its author spent the war years. How much waiting must have gone on in that bleak world; how many times must Resistance operatives—displaced persons when everyone was displaced, anonymous ordinary people for whom every day renewed the dispersal of meaning—have kept appointments not knowing whom they were to meet, with men who did not show up and may have had good reasons for not showing up, or bad, or may even have been taken; how often must life itself not have turned on the skill with which overconspicuous strangers did nothing as inconspicuously as possible, awaiting a rendezvous, put off by perhaps unreliable messengers, and making do with quotidian ignorance in the principal working convention of the Resistance, which was to let no one know any more than he had to. We can easily see why a Pozzo would be unnerving. His every gesture is Prussian. He may be a Gestapo official clumsily disguised. Here is perhaps the playwright’s most remarkable feat. There existed, throughout a whole country for five years, a literal situation that corresponded point by point with the situation in this play, so far from special that millions of lives were saturated in its desperate reagents, and yet no spectator ever thinks of it. Instead the play is ascribed to one man’s gloomy view of life, which is like crediting him with having invented a good deal of modern history. Vladimir and Estragon do not exhibit any known culture and we do not know anything about their past. The playwright does not tell us if they had been friends for a long time or just new acquaintances. Everything about them is uncertain. Estragon is uncertain about their location and timing inquiring, "Youre sure it was here? … Youre sure it was this evening?" (p.15). No one in the play is actually sure of anything. This sort of reflects the uncertainty of the twentieth century society. After surviving two World Wars, the tradition of the West has been shattered and culture has greatly changed. People’s belief in humankind and trust in God have been challenged so much so that nothing holds any meaning to them.Normand Berlin in his Massachusetts Review succinctly states that ‘Waiting for Godot’,indeed reflects the mood of the contemporary society. In Godot, with its silences and emptiness and balances, Beckett has brilliantly caught the temper of the times. A radical uncertainty informs the 20th century, a sense that we have lost our moorings, that we are centerless, purposeless, godless, that we have a need for some kind of salvation even as we seem to know it will not come. Like Didi and Gogo we are waiting for Godot, whoever he is, whatever Godot represents, and theres "Nothing to be done." The condition of man is waiting, and the activity of man is to pass the time while waiting. The play every time it is staged, does not fail to bring forth to the minds of the audience, images of prisons, concentration camps and the mental distress of prisoners caught in jail with no sight of relief. The production of Waiting for Godot that took place in 1957 at the San Quentin penitentiary for an audience of over fourteen hundred convicts was a grand success mainly because the prisoners identified themselves with Vladimir and Estragon and their endless waiting. Norman Berlin feels that the play is a blatant portrayal of all the darkest, scariest and ugliest aspects of our times. Godot has the pressure of our nightmarish history behind it. When a play written in our time presents unaccommodated man, naked, helpless, waiting together with someone else but still intensely alone, talking and talking to avoid feeling the palpable, perhaps hellish, silence-well, how can we not think of those killing prisons called concentration camps? The polls 800 who found Godot the most significant play of our century must have been thinking not only that it "changed theater," as the Times put it, but that it hauntingly reveals the darkest shadows of our frightening age, the grossest example in our time of mans pitiful vulnerability and unexplainable cruelty. How can we not think of the uprooted and dispossessed when we watch Lucky carrying his bag and walking slowly, head down, in a desolate landscape? The loudness and corpulence of Pozzo, whip in hand, reinforces the image of a master race persecuting its helpless victims. In that context, how could ill-fitting boots, piles of boots and shoes, not remind us of Nazi extermination camps where one could do nothing but wait? Beckett, as we learn from his biography, deplored German anti-semitism, was horrified by film footage of Nazi atrocities, worked for the French underground, lost his close friend Alfred Peron, who died as a result of his treatment by the Germans in the Mauthausen concentration camp, and originally gave Estragon the name Levy. Beckett claimed that he was not connected with the post World War II French existentialists.  However, his plays, especially ‘Waiting for Godot’ tend to analyse some of the same philosophical questions as the existentialists. Becketts work tends to reduce existential problems to their most essential features. All the characters of the play and the events themselves are shrouded in uncertainty. All that they speak is incomprehensible to each other and to the audience. They do not know each other and find each other mysterious. These were the main concerns of the existentialists. Life is fleeting.  It’s almost totally insignificant in the grand scheme of the world; time and eternity are meaningless concepts; individual will feel lonely and alienated as a direct result of their inability to communicate in a meaningful manner with others; and human beings are mysterious (even to themselves).   The theme of waiting, though can be related to a universal concept had also a specific historical context. Most critics and also the audience of the time felt that the waiting of Vladimir and Estragon is not very different to the waiting of the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. And even in his Postscript 1967, when Bentley has come to realize that Godot might well have a historical specificity he had not at first recognized, he posits that the play “represents the ‘waiting’ of the prisoners of Auschwitz and Buchenwald . . . as also the prisoners behind the spiritual walls and barbed wire of totalitarian society generally, as also the prisoners behind the spiritual walls and barbed wire of societies nearer home.”(Perloff M)   While ‘Waiting for Godot’ can be said to be reflective of the times, it is also universal in its major themes like exploitation of the weaker sections of society. …..although the play can in no way be taken as a political allegory, there are elements that are relevant to any local situation in which one man is being exploited or oppressed by another.”( Knowlson, J 1996) The theme of waiting which is all-pervading in the play has more than historical specificity when we consider the fact that waiting is all we humans do for one thing or the other ,at all stages of our lives. Martin Esslin, for example, declared in a 1988 lecture given in Korea, on the occasion of a major production of Godot: Beckett gradually reduces the realistic original material, in order to extract the deeper, eternal, essential human situation - so that the play can become truly universal. That is the case in Waiting for Godot: the general situation of waiting has been, as it were, extracted from the particular experience that Beckett had had - he used his waiting for the war to end as the starting point for the exploration of waiting in human life in general. Even though ‘Waiting for Godot’reflects certain very specific historical and social contexts, it is universally appealing because, like all great works of art, it carries a common message and mood that can be identified by all peoples of all ages. References Books Kenner, Hugh. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (1973); Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996). Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp 638,639 Online Resources Berlin, Norman, Traffic of our stage: Why Waiting for Godot? The Massachusetts Review; Amherst; Autumn 1999; Norman Berlin Gordon, L.The World of Samuel Beckett 1906-1946(Yale University Press, 1998) Perloff Marjorie “In Love with Hiding”: Samuel Beckett’s War Noise Within Study Guide. Read More