Beckett and Ionesco: The Tragic Awareness of Pascal and the Ironic Awareness of Flaubert

BECKETT AND IONESCO: THE TRAGIC AWARENESS OF PASCAL AND THE IRONIC AWARENESS OF FLAUBERT from the structural simIlarity of Godot and The Chairs to the dissimilarity of their sociological vision. Waiting for Godot and The Chairs opened in Paris within the same year; they are perhaps the two most outstanding and significant works of the avant-garde theater. It is therefore surprising that scarcely any attention has been paid to similarities so striking that both plays might have been constructed from the same outline. Let me explain. From their openings, The Chairs and Godot place the spectator in very similar situations; we are in the presence of a couple who will not leave before the end of the play-in the one case, husband and wife, in the other, two inseparable friends. In both plays, we find two aged beings, two social outcasts-in the one case, two miserable tramps, in the other, two old people ending their mediocre existence in a kind of dotage. The two members of the couple cannot do without each other, not so much because of real affection as because of habit and fear of solitude. Their outbursts of friendship are ridiculous because they are rarely in the same emotional key. These miserable beings are trapped, prisoners; the one pair in a house on a lonely island, the other in a deserted place on a nameless road to which they seem riveted, despite their repetitions of "Let's go." They have been in other places, but their memories are vague, confused, challenged as soon as evoked. Their conception of time has become uncertain. Everything suggests that these people are castoffs of a humanity which is disintegrating and on the point of disappearance. The Old Man says this to his imaginary public: "To you, ladies and gentlemen , and dear comrades, who are all that is left from humanity, but with such leftovers one can still make a very good soup." (Donald Allen translation) Vladimir does not go quite so far when he declares: "at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not." "This place," "this moment" limit his affirmation, making it more banal. Nevertheless, this place, this moment, so isolated and empty in their monotonous repetition, inhabited only by these grotesque creatures-are they not a parabolic designation of a whole universe running down? In both The Chairs and Godot, 283 284 MODERN DRAMA December this mIcrocosm IS a reduced image of the macrocosm which is our untverse. In this vast emptiness, human absurdity becomes extremely sharp. Alone in the face of time, man has few resources by which to endow things with meaning. There remains one solution: to fill time in the most gratuitous fashion, to try in any possible way to stuff all the holes, to indulge in a parody of existence, hoping perhaps that the Meaning will emerge from it. A game, an entertainment, but a game and entertainment which will be largely verbal, in view of man's logorrheal tendency and also because one is in the theater. There will therefore be a game of speech, though one knows that such exertions are futile. Compare these passages from the two plays (in each case, the line from Godot precedes the one from The Chairs): Say you are, even if it's not true. Let's amuse ourselves by making believe, the way you did the other evening. Suppose we repented. Come on now, imitate the month of February. You know the story of the Englishman in the brothel? Tell me the story, you know the story. Say anything at all! Ah! Yes, go on ... tell me.... It is easy to predict the direction of such word-garnes-towards a mechanization of language. The machine will occasionally run out of energy; it will misfire or repeat. However, in Beckett's play, such repetition can become poetic synonymity-the same meaning in other words. But often, Vladimir alone supplies the variations in these exercises, whereas Estragon repeats the exact phrase. In Ionesco's play, the phonograph needle falls in the same rut. Towards the end of The Chairs, the voice of the Old Woman is...