Crritic!

CRRITIC! BECKETT'S PLAY En attendant Godot has produced a heated and sustained colloquy, which is comparable to the critical dialogue engendered by Eliot's "Waste Land" and Hopkins' "Windhover." The comparison is especially apt when one considers how many of Beckett's commentators have insisted that he is a poet. Since Eliot supplied a set of "program notes" to ease interpretation of "The Waste Land," Godot more closely resembles Hopkins' sonnet in inspiring different and often mutually exclusive readings. However, Hopkins offered a crucial key to his poem by dedicating it "To Christ Our Lord," while Beckett has maintained his accustomed interpretive silence. Godot and "The Windhover" were the subjects of two active letterwriting campaigns in the pages of the London Times Literary Supplement . La Querelle de Godot started innocently with a typically unsigned review in the February 10, 1956 number, under a title borrowed from Milton: "They Also Serve." Between February 24 and April 6, a variety of letters appeared in response to this review. The letterwriters argued hotly among themselves so that, for example, the distinguished poet and critic William Empson (author of a mild letter of March 30) received a harsh reproof from a Mr. John J. O'Meara (April 6) who suggested "the New Criticism is just the thing for him [Empson]." This was aimed directly at the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, one of the seminal works of the New Critics. A certain decorum was imposed by the 'TLS editorial, of April 13, 1956, suggesting that the printed letters represented only a small sampling of what at the time seemed an endless correspondence. The Times editorialist ended on a conciliatory note: "The extraordinary interest which this play has aroused from so many points of view, and at so many levels, suggests that a healthy hunger for novelty is not so dead in us as we may have feared." It is particularly ironic that this exchange was printed in TLS whose "neverfailing toughness and impermeability " were admired by Beckett's Molloy. "Even farts made . . . " no ImpreSSIOn on It. Other literary periodicals have had similar experiences with Godot. When Bernard Dukore published his "Gogo, Didi, and the Absent Godot" in the February 1962 number of Drama Survey, he was greeted with a lengthy reply by Thomas Markus (February, 1963), who felt Mr. Dukore had tied too much of Godot "in a neat Freudian parcel." Dukore replied in his own defense in the May, 1963 number; an edi300 1966 CRRITlc! 301 tor's note at the end of this piece warned readers that no more rejoinders would be published. The Kenyon Review had a similar experience with Ward Hooker's "Irony and Absurdity in the AvantGarde Theater" (Summer, 1960), to which Martin Esslin replied in a commentary revealingly entitled "The Absurdity of the Absurd" (Autumn, 1960); this brief essay offers a convenient "overture" for Esslin's masterful Theatre of the Absurd, published the following year. The always controversial Village Voice printed replies to Godot pieces by Jerry Tallmer and Norman Mailer. All this is symptomatic of the failure of critics to reach agreement about Beckett's play. The commentators on Godot have tripped over one another's toes in their urgency to elucidate it and to find some of their own problems solved in it. These critics cannot be classified by linking them to the more fashionable "schools" of literary criticism. The New Critics have shown small interest in drama, preferring the elaborate cadences of modern poetry to the "silences" of Godot. The Myth critics have found relatively little to their liking. The Chicago Aristotelians and the Freudians have held their peace. The New Humanists have also kept silent-a silence which they maintain when confronted with any form of the avant-garde. Yet some of these approaches have been used intermittently in the study of Godot, but not with the systematic persuasion of one committed to a critical method. Occasionally, a "professional" will turn up to offer a specialized reading-such as Eva Metman with her Jungian approach in "Reflections on Samuel Beckett's Plays" (Journal of Analytical Psychology , January, 1960; reprinted in Samuel Beckett, ed. Martin Esslin). Beckett early earned approval from his fellow...