Beckett's "Godot" and the Myth of Alienation

BECKETT'S uGODOT" AND THE MYTH OF ALIENATION* THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD-and certainly Beckett's Waiting jor Godot-discards the direct approach to reality, prefering to attack it from the angle of myth instead. This theater is bent on exposing the myths that are now empty of validity, untrue, devoid of substance. Rather than advance arguments to refute them, the aim is to demolish these hallowed and devoutly revered beliefs "from within," by exploding the mines of travesty and distorted humor under their feet. Waiting for Godot trains its guns, first and foremost, on the Christian myth of redemption. It also repudiates the myths of enlightenment, progress, nature, and love-all the myths, in fact, which promise redemption , salvation to mankind in this world or hereafter. What Beckett is doing is probing the farthest limits of negation, replacing the hero with the anti-hero, the race of Prometheus with tramps lingering by the roadside, and substituting for gods, ideals, and faiths the elusive Godot-That-Never-Comes. The vanity of power and wealth, of science and service, is symbolised by the Pozzo-Lucky pair; in Beckett's world talk and action become meaningless, reduced to a means of killing time, an antidote to boredom. Nature has turned into a dreary wilderness; on the stage unfolds the vision of an alienated world. This horrible picture of dehumanised existence, from which beauty and charity, indeed all the values ever created by man, appear to be banished, explains the attitude of the playgoers and critics who denounce Beckett's art as an ultra-pessimistic, anti-human product of existentialism, and who question its aesthetic value. They claim that the sheer negation of all values can lead to nothing positive and to no aesthetic contribution of value. But to recognize only the negative side, to fail to see the positive content in Beckett's travesty of the myth unfolding through negation is to miss the point of Beckett's Godot: that his art is achieving a negation of negation, a new faith. Under a decaying tree-·a distorted reminiscence of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, and of the crucifix-sitting by the side of the Road of Life that leads nowhere , two wretched tramps are awaiting the arrival of Godot. The anti-heroes of this travesty of myth, this anti-myth, Estragon and·The New Hungarian Quarterly, No. 24, Winter 1966. 277 278 MODERN DRAMA December Vladimir, become symbols of mankind in this tragic comedy, suffering and longing for redemption. In Waiting for Codot, Beckett in fact does nothing else than confront the myth of redemption with anotherthe Godot-That-Never-Comes. In Codot-and therein lies Beckett's exceptional quality as a writer-the anti-myth built upon anti-heroes rises from mere travesty to the elevated rank of a myth itself; from a work of art, it becomes an almost dissociated mythological symbol in its own right. The third stage of the dialectic, the negation of negation, necessarily comprises the new proposition which, at a higher level, in the form of a more universal truth, encloses the former by now out-of-date proposition. Beckett finds himself unable to acquiesce in final negation . In the second part of Waiting for Codot the decaying tree puts out leaves, Nature will not surrender, man's instinct for life cannot be broken, Vladimir and Estragon will always be waiting for Godot, and their solidarity and friendship cannot be suppressed, for the two friends will meet again and again. Nor indeed can the beauty of art be banished: the aesthetic experience of this play which laments the extinction of beauty, proclaims at one and the same time the unconquerable miracle of man's creativeness in art. The moving poetry of Codot can be felt in reading the play; and this very lyricism, springing from sympathy, pity and compassion, is evidence of Beckett's deep involvement with humanity. His plays bear witness that alienation is for Beckett not t,he eternal, unalterable mode of existence of reality, but the final stage of a process. As in all drama, Codot harks back to an earlier, more humane world where beauty, charity, friendship...