Here is a direct expression – pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it[r]
(1)DRAMA II
Modern Drama
(2)SYNOPSIS
1. Analytical Mapping: Social Significance 2. Philosophical Background: Themes
A Social
B Psychological
C Religious
(3)Social Acceptance Beckett
Plot Obscure, non consequential
Setting Symbolic, bare
Theme Meaninglessness of human
experience
Stage Directions Repetitive, frequent
Language Everyday, meaningless
Beckett: Critical Analysis
(4)Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot received its first impressions of the type of drama against which Beckett reacted in his rejection of what he has called “the grotesque
fallacy of realistic art – that miserable statement of line and surface and the pennyaline vulgarity of a literature of notations”
In Beckett’s work there is a deep existential
(5)Regarding the public’s lazy demand for easy
comprehensibility he said:
Here is a direct expression – pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of th scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation.
(6)The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfill no higher function that that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension.
Beckett and Language
Waiting for Godot is the attempt to communicate
where no communication is possible.
(7)
For an artist therefore, according to Beckett, the
only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contradiction. And art the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication.
Beckett’s work was one of the first works to point to the fallibility of language as a medium for
communication of metaphysical truth.
(8)Anyone who speaks is carried along by the logic of language and its articulations.
Thus the writer who pits himself or herself against the unsayable must use all his/her cunning so as not to say what the words make him/her say against his will, but to express instead what by their nature
they are designed to cover up: the uncertain, the contradictory, the unthinkable
The play is of a difficult reception because is so enigmatic, so exasperating, so complex, and so
uncompromising in its refusal to conform to any of the accepted ideas of dramatic construction
(9)(10)The crosstalk also provide a good example of the
impossibility of language to communicate, in
fact, they reveal the very failure of language. (p. 14, 2223 and 6869).
Any endeavour to arrive at a clear and certain
(11)Structure and Circularity
The form, structure, and mood of an artistic
statement cannot be separated from its meaning, its conceptual content; simply because the work of art as a whole is its meaning, what is said in it is
indissolubly linked with the manner in which it is said, and cannot be said in any other way.
This is particularly clear in the circular
structure of the play. There are many examples of
this circularity.
(12)Here some examples:
For instance the crosstalk, not only has the
function to pass time and neutralizing meaning,
but also structurally functions in both acts (p.
14, 2223 and 6869).
At the beginning of both acts there is a tree, and the space is the same, indescribably barren and
(13)The static situation is developed in this circular manner:
Both acts begin in the same manner: Estragon
playing with his boot (2, 62)
Both acts finish in the same manner: “Estragon: Well? shall we go? Vladimir: Yes, let’s us go. They do not move” (59). “Vladimir: Well? shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. They do not move” (109)
(14)In both acts they attempt suicide but fail. In fact, the suicide is more a game than a serious attempt, and allows them to pass time
Also, in both acts Pozzo and Lucky appear,
although in different circumstances: during the first act, Pozzo is the Master and Lucky the
salve; in the second, Pozzo I blind and therefore dependent, and Lucky is more his Lazarillo who
guides him through the road
This static situation and circularity is also
assured by the repetitive quality of the dialogue,
a dialogue that does not communicate, but simply
(15)If only we could discover some hidden clue, it is felt, these difficult plays could be forced to yield
their secret and reveal the plot of the
conventional play that is hidden within them.
Such attempts are doomed to failure. Beckett’s plays lack plot even more completely than other
works of the Theatre of the Absurd.
(16)Waiting for Godot confronts its audience with an
organized structure of statements and images that interpenetrate each other and that must be apprehended in their totality, rather like the
different themes in a symphony, which gain meaning by their simultaneous interaction
These structures are circular, as is the waiting of the two tramps.
(17)Social Acceptance Beckett
Plot Obscure, non consequential
Setting Symbolic, bare
Theme Meaninglessness of human
experience
Stage Directions Repetitive, frequent
Language Everyday, meaningless
Beckett: Critical Analysis
(18)Philosophical Background
(No Exit by Sartre) absurd content but rational form or presentation form and content
(19)(20)