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BECKETT'S METAPHYSICAL TRAGICOMEDY The revelation of light in no sense means the denial of darkness .... Before the coming of the era of the Spirit man will have to pass through a thickening of the darkness. N. BERDYAEV Where we have both dark and light we have also the inexplicable . S. BECKErr I Waiting for Godot~ LIKE ALL LANDMARKS OF LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT, is a play more admired than understood. It has been interpreted in so many ways by so many critics to accommodate such a variety of theories about Beckett's work, and the state of the drama in contemporary culture, that the play stands as a Hamlet of our time. Our difficulty in understanding what Beckett has ,confronted us with is, in part, our failure to recognize the significance of the genre within which Beckett is working and, in part, our failure to comprehend the real implications of the metaphysical assumptions within which the play dramatically evolves. Though some may feel that the only critical agreement about Godot is that its dramatic form scarcely exists, we must expect Beckett to take seriously the subtitle of the play, "a tragicomedy in two acts." A precise definition of the term "tragicomedy" is, however, elusive. As Ruby Cohn has admitted, we cannot be sure exactly what Beckett means by the term. In her examination of Beckett's comic dimension, she accepts Sidney's definition of "mungrell Tragycomedie," although she also incidentally cites the more familiar definition of John Fletcher: A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no longer tragedy, yet it brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy: which must be a representation of familiar people with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned, so that a god is as lawful in this as in tragedy, and mean people as in comedy. To recall the action of the play is to realize the greater appropriateness of Fletcher's definition to that of Sidney, who disapprovingly saw clowns as playing a part "in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion." For the evolution of tragicomedy is not merely from classical tragedy and comedy, but from the primitive 259 260 MODERN DRAMA December literary forms of the satyr play and pastoral and beyond these from the rituals associated with Bacchus and Apollo in which majestical matters were not always treated in the gentlemanly manner of which Sidney approved. In calling his play "a tragicomedy in two acts" Beckett invites us to encompass the full nature of human experience as it has dramatically evolved in the mixed mode of tragicomedy from its origins in ancient religious rites. Past readings of the play, as Lawrence E. Harvey has suggested, tended either, at first, toward seeing Godot as Christian morality play or else, more recently, as absurdist comedy in which all religious references are treated mockingly . What is needed, as Harvey rightly observed, is some more comprehensive approach to account for the unique complexity of the play. Such an approach, in so far as it touches upon the realities of the human condition and man's fate, might well be a phiosophically religious one. What Beckett provides us with in the seemingly repetitive structure of his two acts is an opportunity, not unlike that gained from repetitive religious ritual, to reexamine afresh a metaphoric statement of reality that we have perhaps taken for granted or missed. What we encounter in Godot is a repetitive, ritual drama of words in which we may discover what Phillip Wheelwright calls the "tensive" quality of language--that language reflects, no matter how trivial it seems, the tensions of the individual self as it attempts to define itself and its relations with other selves and with the world around itself. Beckett has endeavored to sharpen and to crystallize the nature of this experience by depriving both the characters and ourselves of a traditional frame of reference within historical time. Vladimir and Estragon are essentially deprived of memory (Estragon more than Vladimir), and they must respond afresh to their experience, only vaguely aware that they have been through it...

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