Ways of Waiting in Waiting for Godot

Ways of Waiting in Waiting for Godot. JAMES L. CALDERWOOD The perfect title of a literary work, one might expect, would be, as it is in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a synecdoche, a particularly meaningful part from which the reader could infer the whole. With that in mind, I'd like to trace out some of the implications of Beckett's title. But first let me note a general curiosity abouUhe titles ofplays, one that Beckett exacerbates to paradox in his paradoxical work: the simple fact that as compared to those of poems and novels the titles of plays appear in a different mode from the play itself. They are written, not spoken, whereas poems and their titles are both written. A reader frrst looks into Keats's words "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" before he looks into the words ofthe poem that appears below it. The . one leads naturally into the other, so naturally, indeed, that many titles of poems are simply the frrst phrases or lines of the poems themselves, as in Keats's "I Stood Tip-Toe." In this case thetitle is a synecdoche infact as well as in figure,an actual part of the poem that stands for the whole and exists both outside and inside it. Such a title is not a verbal microcosm or illuminating abbreviation ofthe whole but merely a tautology serving as an identifying tag. So it is when we read a playas a written text. But the case is significantly altered when the play is performed. Because the title now exists in a different mode from that of the play, it seems outside it. Waiting for Godat is unusual in this respect, however, inasmuch as it attempts to incorporate its title into its performance, and to do so in a manner that renders it elusively significant. In the frrst place, the title is within the play quite literally by virtue of its appearance at the end of Gogo and Didi's oft-repeated verbal routine: Let's go. We can't. Why not? We're waiting for Godot. JAMES L. CALDERWOOD But it is also within the play more complexly. If we adopt the view that one of the things Waitingfor Godot waits for is its own summarizing title; then the title is a concluding continuation ofthe play. That is, the title precedes the play, and yet as a synecdoche it does not begin but end it, since not until the whole has become whole can a synecdoche represent it. The apparent ending ofthe play is merely a state of incompletion, a still-waiting: VLADIMIR Well, shall we go? ESTRAGON Yes, let's go. They do not move. Their failure to move inevitably forces us as audience to take up and complete their familiar verbal routine: "We can't ... Why not? ... We're waiting for Godot." And that takes us back to the play's title, which, though suggested by the ending of the play, resides outside it, in the voice of our imagination. Thus we encounter a title directly opposite to Keats's "I Stood Tip-Toe," in that it trails the last line ofthe work instead ofpreceding the first. From this standpoint the play waits for the title that will complete it. To complicate matters, we could take the opposite and more commonsense view, that the title waits for the play that will complete it. That is, we could argue that the title appropriately precedes the play because that is how the play was written. Beckett had a vague notion about a play whose main action was waiting for someone named Godot; he sketched out this idea in the words Waiting for Godot; and he then filled in the details by writing the play. Instead of the last lines of the play pointing to an apparently conclusive title, the title points forward to the play about to begin. But of course, Beckett being Beckett, he would not want it one way or the other when it could be both at once. In that case the title and the text form a circle, like the synecdochic "round" with which Didi begins Act II: A dog came in...