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  • Bare Ontology:Synge, Beckett, and the Phenomenology of Imperialism
  • Robert A. Volpicelli

The most effective entrée into the dramatic worlds of either Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) or Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953) may just come from a few pairs of humble, well-worn boots.

Indeed, at times both Synge and Beckett seem preoccupied less with the ideas in their characters' heads than with the boots coming on and off their feet. At the beginning of Playboy's second act, a group of "Stranger girls" bursts in on Synge's tramp-turned-hero, Christy Mahon, as he polishes the boots of Pegeen Mike, his barmaid love interest.1 Forced to make a hasty exit, Christy leaves behind his own boots, which one of the girls tries on and, after closely examining their muddied exteriors, concludes, "That man's been walking, I'm telling you" (PWW 116). Of course, the tramps in Godot wait more than they walk; yet boots remain of the utmost importance for Beckett's Estragon, whom the play's opening scene shows attempting to muster a "supreme effort" in order to free his swollen, booted foot.2 In a play structured around so many repetitions, it is not surprising that this performance starts over at the end of Act One, when Estragon decides to ditch his boots (which he may or may not find again, later in the second act) so that he can walk barefoot, as "Christ did" (WG 50).

Synge and Beckett's overly dramatic treatments of boots play into the comedic undoing of their characters—after finding his muddy prints, the pack of Mayo girls eventually track down the cowardly Christy; Estragon is never more clownish than during his epic battles with his boots. But the boots in these plays do more than act as comedic props. They also point to a deeper, phenomenological drama concerned with the way objects mediate our experience of being-in-the-world. As things that connect us to the ground, facilitating our movements through the world we live in, a modest pair of boots owns something of a surprising philosophical aura, one that Martin Heidegger notices in his well-known [End Page 110] analysis of Vincent van Gogh's 1885 painting of a pair of peasant shoes.3 Initially, Heidegger confesses that shoes seem like a trivial thing to analyze—"But what is there to see here? Everyone knows what shoes consist of"—yet he quickly realizes that something more inheres in these objects.4 Peering into "the dark opening of the worn insides," Heidegger sees that van Gogh's shoes reveal to him glimpses of a peasant woman's life, "the tenacity of her slow trudge," as well as "the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field."5 Through these shoes the wearer makes contact with the enigmatic character of the earth; in them, there lingers nothing less than an imprint of an entire world.

It is apparent, however, that Synge and Beckett resist the romanticization of peasantry inherent in Heidegger's writing by depicting boots that seem to do anything but bring beings into harmony with their worlds. Christy prizes Pegeen Mike's boots, cleaning them before she comes out in the morning, because his own muddy pair—archiving as they do his life of itinerant wandering—betrays his out-of-placeness in any remotely domestic environment. And if Christy's footwear appears inappropriate, then Estragon's proves downright antagonistic: in either being too small or too big, Estragon's boots cause him nearly constant suffering, obstructing his ability to comfortably inhabit the world or move through it without friction; the stage directions note, "He rises painfully, goes limping to extreme left . . ." (WG 9). Even after Estragon abandons his shoes altogether, the fact remains that exposing his bare feet to the world still leaves him hobbling in discomfort.

Though it is less than obvious here, the sort of strained subject-object relations located in Playboy and Godot's respective depictions of boots—where an object fails to ground a subject—has much to...

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