En attendant / Waiting for Godot

I liked this story a lot, but it just didn't godot anywhere.

I read this book while hang-gliding over the coast of Liechtenstein. It was difficult to grip the jacket of the book, not only because I was airborne, but because the night before I was in Moscow having vodka and gasoline with Luis San Baptista Rodolfo Sr., a ex-foot soldier for the Revolutionary FALN, and my head was POUNDING! I told Luis over a dinner (red cabbage over braised Skeletor Dolls) I had never seen the last episode of Family Ties, and he instantly grew furious, and cried out, "Matushka! Matushka! My cauliflower is on fire!" and thrust a copy of "Waiting for Godot" into my pocket, and whispered into my big toe, "Listen, my friend, I only have a credit card, so I put on my visa and you give me cash, no?"

I immediately understood Luis' implicit instructions: the only proper way to read Beckett truly, to feel the power of his words, is to do so while manning non-mechanical aircraft.

At first, I found Beckett's dramatic universe too glib, even watery, like a Burmese jungle cat. I found the dialogue too reliant upon the use of words. I thought the use of characters instead of sandwiches or tuxedos was trite and derivative. I also found the verdant pastures of Liechtenstein simply enchanting from an aerial point of view. Several times, I found myself questioning my decision to question my decision to use McDonald's wrappers from the Basque Region for the material of my hang-glider's wings, but then I realized, that's the point: having no discernible narrative thru-line is STILL a narrative thru-line all the same. Beckett's brilliance touched me at last. (But without permission, so I'm suing him in the Hague.)

So, I'm giving this a 5. Not a strong five. But not a weak five either. The sort of 5 that actively worked out for the high school rugby team, but then spent college taking it easy, drinking Irish Car Bombs, and now, years later plays Ultimate Frisbee on the weekends and sometimes runs in Central Park in the evenings, if not doing Bikram Yoga in Soho.

بعد از مسخ کافکا ،این دومین کتابیه که اینقدر منو منقلب میکنه ⁦
⁦⁦ಠ_ಠ⁩

100th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Spanish painter Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).

During the slight easing of some lockdown or other last year I travelled on the train to Brighton to meet with some women on my MA course to workshop our writing. I hadn’t much been out of W——, it felt strange. At first I got the wrong house and was stood outside for some time pressing the doorbell and clicking my tongue. Luckily no one was in and I soon realised I had the wrong place entirely. Trying again, I found the right place and I. appeared from below ground and welcomed me. The downstairs was quite light (considering it was below the road level) and had a large dining table, the kitchen and a toilet in the back. S. was already there. All others had cancelled. I busied myself with the first dog and kept attempting to call the other one (from his bed) over to me quietly. Eventually the second dog heaved itself up and hobbled over to me—it only had three legs. I patted it feeling guilty. Tea was made, biscuits laid out. The table was rather large and behind I. at the head was a mantelpiece. As she was talking to S. I looked over her head at the trinkets lined up on it and was sure there were several photographs of Samuel Beckett lined up amongst other things obviously bought from her travelling and family photos. He has a fairly distinctive face anyway but I was sure I could see his badger-streak hair. I said, ‘I’m not wearing my glasses, but is that Samuel Beckett up there?’ A part of me was excitably wondering if he was some distant relative. But no. ‘My mother adores him,’ I. replied; ‘she sends me postcards all the time about how she is and what she’s up to, and they always have Beckett’s face on them.’ She took one down and turned it over to reveal a postcard-back scrawled with handwriting. ‘She thinks he’s so dishy.’

My first introduction to Beckett was Molloy which I found interesting but difficult to read and difficult to follow the ‘point’. I’ve had Malone Dies sitting beside me for a few months and was going to read it next but then I found myself in the library the other day piling books and books into my arms and dropped Waiting for Godot in with the rest. It was about time to read Beckett’s most famous, I thought. So, the Theatre of the Absurd. How is it? Answer: Absurd. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting but also got what I was expecting: two blokes waiting. It’s boring, but it’s so boring it becomes un-boring. It’s so seemingly pointless that it becomes blazingly significant. It reminds me of (codename) Swan once saying in a lecture about how he always sees young people lined up on train platforms as if the trains never come. He jokingly voiced the desire to write a novel about people waiting for these trains that never come. The Godot Train.


"The Persistence of Memory"—1931

I won’t go into all the stuff that’s inevitably said about this play all the time, probably since people first sat and watched it performed. Beckett famously said, 'I told him that if by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly.' And that’s about all he said as he was also quite well-known for being silent about the ‘meaning’ of his work. So rather than talking about all the existentialist stuff, the meaning of life in the waiting, whether we believe Beckett about Godot/God, the suicide contemplation, everything else, I will instead just say that the play did leave me feeling rather empty. Somehow it did trigger me to somehow consider my own existence. I was either bored reading it or amused but either way had the premonition that it would stay in my head a little while. Is something instantly good if we cannot stop thinking about it? My stock answer for why I adore reading so much is because it allows me to think about things I don’t normally think about. Or think about things I do think about but think about them differently. Waiting for Godot has essentially done both of those things and therefore qualified to be ‘good’/’worthwhile’/’profound’. And so by identifying that within myself, I suppose this is a very fantastic play.

I have seen this play several times; years ago I saw a local theatrical company put on a very impressive production. I decided to read the play because there are still so many questions I have about the core meaning that Beckett was trying to convey. So here is my interpretation: I find WfG 'existential horror' - essence 'stripped' of existence - the central question obliterated by illusory pantomimic gestures that echo our collective 'sound and fury' through the corridors of time. As with any corridor one has a choice of what 'door' to go through; only to find a perversion of Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel (California) - there never was a front desk manager.

That passed the time.

All we’ve to do is to sit for a while with ourselves, leaving all what we’ve invented ourselves to be busy with apart, the people thronging us around, the works on due, the dates to meet, the places to reach, the days to come. Just make the life silent outside you, sit and think about all that which has gone by the wind, sit and look at ourselves real deep, at our past actions, the struggles of us that transformed into strengths, the loves we weren’t brave enough to embrace or the ones who left us considering unworthy, the moments we cherished most and kept re-playing in the mind until memory lifted them down in subconscious, the triumphs we savored , the people we wanted to be ,the words we had to say, the lies we desired to speak or the truths we spoke and bemoaned for, it’s been all for nothing!
What it is to be in the world? To be born and follow a long-been scripted routine, with a little alterations from others? This is what we’ve been doing, this is what we’ll keep doing, and we the routine robots, actors on the stage waiting for our roles from the director, and in wait, musing the audience! With our gibberish talks, plot less story, helpless hope, and too tired to move to some next stage, waiting for the director to assign roles. This is where the actors need to sit and realize. There’s not going to come any director, there’s never been any, alone are they and alone is the stage to be performed, all they’ve to do is to invent roles for themselves, to accept the stage without director, and to honor themselves as the ultimate authority.
Waiting for Godot can easily secure its place from a sublime absurdist play to a ridiculous continuity of nonsense, no matter how meticulous you’ve been to decipher the meaning between lines, how deep you dug and how many times, it offers nothing save the performed words, as there isn’t been any cryptic meaning, and this is the beauty of the play, it leads you to no definite end, as there is never been a methodical beginning. What strike me unaware is it’s being the play version of Camus’s suggested ways to confront absurdity of life in his "Myth of Sisyphus", Suicide being the foremost, characters suggest to hang themselves as they wait for godot to pass time, they tend to indulge in a religious narrative, the Denial of absurdity as proposed by Camus, consequently one’s philosophical death, the characters at length also ponder to accomplish erections, another petty way to confront the absurdity of life by sheer oblivion of its presence, but they never reach up to acceptance, as did Sisyphus, so shall they always be waiting for godot and grieved at his not coming.
And as of godot, “the great success of Waiting For Godot Has arisen from a misunderstanding: critics and public alike were busy in allegorical or symbolic terms a play which strove at all costs to avoid definition” (Ben-Zvi 142). puts Beckett himself.
As there’s never been any Godot to wait for!

edited:04/11/2019

One of the prompts for my current reading challenge is “a book you started but never finished” and Waiting for Godot was the shortest of the three books on my DNF list, so here we are. Listening to it on audiobook was a bit more bearable than my previous attempt with a printed edition, but I guess I'm still just not smart enough to get it? It's kind of like an even more irritating Groundhog's Day, which remains one of the only films I've ever walked out of the theater on, so I suppose I'm nothing if not consistent.