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This essay analyzes how Waiting for Godot exposes the structural logic of both rhetorical and dramatic performativity. Drawing on the language-philosophy of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Begam considers what happens to "performative" locutions – statements that actually make things happen, such as "I now pronounce you man and wife" – when they are theatrically represented. Austin claims that such locutions when uttered on stage are rendered intransitive – i.e., they lose their performative force – and are therefore relegated to the Kantian realm of the purely aesthetic. Yet Beckett's play spends two acts demonstrating that the primary function of language is not "constative" – not meant to give us a picture or representation of reality. Rather, Beckett's conception of language – drawn from his reading of Mauthner – is essentially performative. But if words, phrases, and sentences all function performatively, if all descriptive uses of language are, in fact, instrumental uses, then the larger effect is to return illocutionary or transitive force to the theatre. As a result, Beckett's play breaks through the wall not only of Ibsenian realism but also of Kantian aestheticism, reclaiming for the dramatic event the kind of "there-ness" that Alain Robbe-Grillet discovered in the first performances of Godot.
In summer 2005, the Irish theatre company Corcadorca presented The Merchant of Venice as part of a multinational project called "Relocations." The production was a site-specific, promenade performance that travelled through Cork city centre late at night. It had a multinational cast in the speaking roles and a multiethnic community cast drawn from the local population, who marshalled the audience, processed, and heckled the Jewish characters from within the spectatorial space. The performance aimed to challenge the audience to confront their response to Ireland's recent history of immigration and the country's increasingly multilingual and multiracial population. This essay explores the concretization in performance of the fictional dramatic world of the play and focuses on specific devices used by the company to realize their interpretation of the work.
In 1972, Joseph Brodsky, the renowned Russian poet expatriate, the Nobel Prize winner, the Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College, began his exilic "quest for significance," since the democratic state, the place of his émigré inhabitant (America), provided him with "the physical safety but render[ed] him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take" (Brodsky, "Condition" 4). For Brodsky, this quest was a welcome one. He understood exile as a lesson in humility that teaches one existential essentials and puts one's journey "into the longest possible perspective" (5). For Brodsky, exile became a pursuit in creativity, a spiritual and aesthetic expedition, and a condition that generated new energy and ideas. Brodsky's expulsion became a creative paradigm rather than a state of constant suffering, disorientation, and displacement. It caused an expansion of his artistic interests when the Russian poet not only willingly embraced his forced bilingualism but also found it stimulating to think, to write, and to teach in English. Moreover, the exilic condition necessitated his investigation of the forms of writing that he had regarded as "foreign" when living at home. Thus his life in distant lands made Brodsky not only write in a new language but also explore the artistic challenges of composing prose and drama not poetry. These other venues became Brodsky's new creative territories, the manifestation of his adaptability and hybridization, the creolization if not of his everyday then of his artistic tongue. Accordingly, this article discusses Joseph Brodsky's play Marbles (1982) and argues that the play offers a representation of the Platonic city – a modern version of the ideal metropolis, based on the tendencies of geopathology and nostalgia, and the crossroads of exilic narratives registered within cityscapes from the period of the Enlightenment on. It becomes an exilic writer's projection not only of his past experience with the state but also of his understanding of how his adopted country, a model democracy, is, in fact, treating its citizens.
"La Donna Mobile: Massimo Bontempelli's Nostra Dea as Fascist Modernism" offers a reading of the 1925 play Nostra Dea in the context of the widespread aesthetic return to order of the period. Discussing the play as a response to Gabriele d'Annunzio's decadentism and F.T. Marinetti's futurism, the author considers it one of the new "myths for the modern era" Bontempelli called for in his literary movement Novecento, which he claimed was spiritually akin to fascism. Revealing how the play both draws on and subverts key aspects of fascist modernism – such as its "rhetoric of virility" and "aesthetization of politics" – the article finally cautions against simple equations that render art of the right "irrational" and art of the left "alienating," suggesting that the play's ideological ambiguity is its artistic success.
The end of the Cold War and German unification have brought about a more complete treatment of the Nazi past in Germany, one that includes the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Since the early 1990s, perpetrators have increasingly become a part of the discourse about the Nazi past, in historiography as well as in fictional literature. I would argue, however, that perpetrators have been part of the cultural memory of (West) Germany since the first post-war decades. Many dramatists wrote plays that included Nazi perpetrators as characters and, in doing so, confronted Germans with this difficult and suppressed memory. One of these was Erwin Sylvanus, who wrote Dr. Korczak and the Children in 1957 in order to challenge his contemporaries' faulty memory of their difficult past. With his play, Sylvanus countered their strategies of distancing themselves from the crimes of the Holocaust and from those who committed them. Employing a Pirandellian technique, he presented Germans with a Nazi character who reminded them that the perpetrators had come from out of their midst and were still with them in the present. After its world premiere in 1957, the play was performed in West Germany numerous times in the late 1950s and early 1960s. An examination of newspaper reviews written in response to these stagings reveals, however, that the playwright's attempt at stimulating more critical self-reflection in discourse about the Nazi past was largely unsuccessful. The majority of reviewers interpreted the productions as a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and they saw these performances as celebrating the spirit of humanism exemplified in the play by the character of Janusz Korczak. This reception illustrates Germans' conflicted struggle with remembering the perpetrators' experience and highlights the role of the media in the construction of cultural memory.
Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a play about basic striving for meaning in a world in which meaning is not forthcoming. The desire for meaning is, at the same time, a desire to understand one's suffering and a desire for justice. Reading Beckett "politically" means at once attempting to understand where the political impulse – the impulse towards justice – comes from in human life and at the same time demonstrating, through facing the frustration of meaning and a sense of justice, the limits of politics as an overarching explanatory force. The political philosopher Judith Shklar's question about how one distinguishes between "misfortune" and "injustice" guides this essay's considerations about tragedy, comedy, absurdity, and our attempts to make sense of suffering and death.
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