The Absurdly Absurd: Avatars of Godot

Author(s): Ruby Cohn

Source: Comparative Literature Studies , 1965, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1965), pp. 233-240
Published by: Penn State University Press

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RUBY COHN

The absurdly Absurd

Avatars of Godot

what is still the only book on the Theater of th

sets up useful criteria for that theater, but does not
Subsequent critics of that aspect of contemporary th
dissatisfaction with the term by coining others -
Theater of Derision (Michel Corvin), Metaphysica
Theater of Protest and Paradox (George Wellwart
by Esslin's insistence on a tradition of the Absurd
that there is nothing new in the Theater of the Abs
Strindberg (Mordecai Gorelik), Chekhov (Robe
(Roderick Robertson) . Esslin himself implies that
were Absurdists avant la lettre. The critical confu
distinguish the adjective absurd from the metaphy
Esslin derives his criteria for the Theater of the Ab
passage in Camus' Mythe de Sisyphe: "Ce divorce
l'acteur et son décor, c'est proprement le sentim
Sartre points out in his review of L'Etranger (th
months of Le Mythe) : "Mais ce mot prend, sous l
significations très différentes: l'absurde est à la f
science lucide que certaines personnes prennent de ce
the conception of the Absurd, Sartre summarizes
dans l'homme ni dans le monde, si on les prend
caractère essentiel de l'homme que d' 'être-dans-le-mo
ne fait qu'un avec la condition humaine." In this
Malraux and Heidegger, Sartre enunciates the
literature. Thus, although Esslin maintains that
starts with Nietzsche's assumption that "God is de
reason why Drama of the Absurd might not be writ
with the metaphysical attitudes of Kierkegaard,
matter, Pascal.
233

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234 ♦ COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

However, metaphysical attitude is necessary but not sufficient for the

playwright of the Absurd, and Esslin insists that the form of the drama must
reflect the metaphysical attitude (thereby barring Sartre and Camus because
of their logical, orderly form) . In practical criticism, then, drama of the Absurd
is recognizable by de-emphasis on plot and on motivation of characters; dialogue
abounds in non sequitur, and action evokes the question "What is happening?"
rather than "How will it end?" To phrase it a little differently, absurdity with
a small a must reflect Absurdity with a large A; ridiculous absurdity must
reflect metaphysical Absurdity. In critical fact, Esslin sometimes admits absurd-
ists with a small a alone - Simpson, Kopit, and Albee are playwrights in point,
as well as isolated plays of Adamov and Ionesco. Since the new and distinctive
contribution of today's Drama of the Absurd is the reflection of a vision in the
form, it is well to insist upon absurdity and Absurdity. In John HurrelFs words,
"The elements of the theatre of the absurd cannot be detached; it is defined
neither by the idea of the world that it promulgates, nor by its form, but by
its absolutely organic presentation of the one through the other. Thus a play
that shares either the ideas or the form of what we now call absurdist drama,
without having both, is not really a play of the 'absurd.' M1
By this strict definition, the first drama of the absurd is the play that first
attracted widespread attention to the mode - Beckett's En attendant Godot.
In this play form and content, absurdity and Absurdity, are organically inter-
related; in this play there is coalescence of the Absurd, being-in-the- world, and
the human condition.
In the same Camus essay from which Esslin quotes, there is another state-
ment about the Absurd that also employs the metaphor of the theater: "La
ténacité et la clairvoyance sont des spectateurs privilégiés pour ce jeu inhumain
où l'absurde, l'espoir et la mort échangent leurs répliques." Written almost a
decade before Godot, the observation is virtually a prophecy of that play,
where tenacity and clairvoyance are in the evening air of man; where the
Absurd, hope, and death engage in disconnected discourse - not as allegorical
figures but through depths below the surface of the words. And it may be
doubted whether there can be an Absurdist play without this profound dialogue
between the Absurd, hope (be it under the guise of hopelessness), and death.
Today it is almost as difficult to come fresh to Godot as to Hamlet, but if it
were, the metaphysical Absurdity would appear slowly, after several minutes
of dialogue, whereas it is at once evident that the play demands symbolic
interpretation. Even before the curtain rises, we look at the program and see no
Godot in the Cast of Characters, but we do see names of international flavor.
We read that the setting is "A tree. A country road."; we may recall that tree
and road have a long history as metaphors for human life. Well before the end
of the play we realize that we are confronted with internationalized (universal-
ized) man, with man-in-the-world, with man's life. For all the abstraction of
these phrases, they take on concrete meaning through the wait for Godot,
who never comes today but may always come tomorrow. And for all that
has been written about Existential loneliness, Didi and Gogo do not wait
alone, but together; before our eyes they are virtually inseparable, and pre-

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 THE aBSURDLY ABSURD ♦ 235

sumably they will go on waiting together till kingdom or Godot come. Thus,
the metaphysical Absurdity is conveyed through the Didi-Gogo relationship
during their long, irrational loyalty to a transcendent power. Despite momen-
tary insights (especially on the part of Didi), they are not aware of their
condition, but we are aware of it, and through it, of the Absurdity of man-in-
the-world.
Though Absurdity is nowhere else dramatized with such mastery, it is
comparably dramatized: two subsequent plays recapitulate the basic pattern
of Godot.2 A widely produced English play, Pinter's Dumb Waiter, and a
still unpublished American play, Bromberg's Defense of Taipei, exploit the
same central situation - a human relationship founded on loyalty to a mysteri-
ous, invisible power - and they exploit it in the absurdist manner, with em-
phasis upon pattern rather than plot, questions rather than answers, significance
rather than suspense, and outrageous intertwining of comic and cosmic. More-
over, in contrast to poetic plays on the one hand, and to musical spectacles on
the other, all three dramas use few of the resources of language and theater,
but this very sparseness of stage imagery places all the brighter spotlight on
that imagery, converting it to symbol in and of the Absurd.
In En attendant Godot, as everybody knows, two bums in Charlie Chaplin
attire intermittently remember their past and quite consistently hope for a
future under the protection of Godot. While waiting for Godot - and in
spite of Gogo's opening line, "Rien à faire," (Nothing to be done) - they look
for something, anything, to do. And what they do is the drama; as Gogo says
in one of his brighter moments, "We always find something, eh Didi, to give
us the impression we exist?" That "something" consists of ludicrously simple
gestures and sentences, of recollection and prediction, of mastication, defecation,
and imagination, comically and poignantly intermingled in a style that is
sometimes called tragic farce.
In The Dumb Waiter Harold Pinter's two characters engage in similar
activities. Pinter's action, like his title, repeats Beckett's all-important verb
to wait. Pinter's Ben and Gus are waiting for Wilson "to get in touch." Wilson
is not only as mysteriously elusive as Godot, but Pinter's play is, as Edward
Albee claimed for his Tiny Alice, "both a metaphysical mystery and, at
the same time, a conventional 'Dial M for Murder* type mystery." Or so it
appears for roughly half of The Dumb Waiter, and this contrasts with Godot,
where metaphysics is in the air from the moment we watch Gogo trying to
remove his stinking boot.
At the very beginning of Godot the scenic gestures summarize Beckett's view
of the human condition : "Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take
off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted,
rests, tries again. As before." In French même jeu is even more pointed than
"as before" as a comment on the repetitiveness of human activity. Didi's open-
ing speech reinforces the repetitive suggestions : "All my life I've tried to put it
from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And
I resumed the struggle." (My italics.) From the beginning of the drama,
stage bareness, incongruous costumes, and suggestive dialogue combine to lead

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236 ♦ COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

us beyond the literal level; a mysterious "they" have beaten Gogo, the two
friends should have lost heart "a million years ago," and Biblical phrases
haunt their speech. Through the course of the drama, time, space, and
memory are eroded, and the total action has a circular pattern, the play ending
where it began.
The Dumb Waiter, in contrast, opens on a trivial, realistic level. The tree
and road of Godot are replaced by a windowless room, sparsely furnished with
two beds, and between them a serving-hatch, a dumbwaiter. Although this set
seems to resemble that of Fin de partie, there are no absurd details, such as
garbage-cans containing people or a picture with its face to the wall; instead,
pantomime and dialogue, like set and costumes, might be that of lower-class
English comedy. Like Godot, The Dumb Waiter opens with comic business
involving shoes. While Ben lies on one bed reading a newspaper, Gus sits on
the other bed and removes from one shoe a flattened match-box, from the
other shoe a flattened cigarette pack, shaking each one to emphasize its empti-
ness. He then goes off stage, and we hear a lavatory chain being pulled, but
the toilet does not flush.
Pinter's first reviewers seized on such details to group him with the Kitchen
Sink School, which dealt with life in the lower classes. But Pinter is no more
concerned with kitchen sink than is Beckett; on both sides of the Channel
they dramatize man's life on earth, in which plumbing problems and class
distinctions are of minor importance. But Beckett shows his metaphysical
hand from the opening scene of his plays, whereas Pinter only gradually dis-
solves the documentary details into a metaphysical situation.
After the opening pantomime of The Dumb Waiter, Ben reads Gus sensa-
tional newspaper items, and Gus comments in cliché phrases: "Go on," "Get
away," "It's unbelievable," "Incredible." Though all the newspaper stories deal
with death, Gus complains trivially about the room in which they are waiting
till Wilson gets in touch - the toilet tank fills too slowly, there are no windows,
the bed-linen is dirty, there should have been another blanket. Comically but
ominously, black is the dominant color of the crockery - a suitable color for
those whose job is murder. When Gus describes their job, there are resonances
of Kafka behind Beckett: "I mean, you come into a place when it's still dark,
you come into a room you've never seen before, you sleep all day, you do your
job, and then you go away in the night again." Despite similarly repetitive
activities, this is a different kind of metaphysical Absurdity from Gogo's "All
my lousy life I've crawled about in the mud!"
And yet the characters have comparable reactions in both plays: Didi and
Gogo are terrified by offstage noises; Ben and Gus are terrified by the matches
that are slipped under the door. Gogo implies that Didi has killed people; Ben
and Gus are hired killers. Didi carries radishes and turnips that Gogo eats;
Gus carries biscuits (McVitie and Price), cake (Eccles), chips (Smith's), milk
(Express Dairy), and tea (Lyon's Red Label). Didi and Gogo abuse each
other; Ben physically attacks Gus at the climax of their argument about
whether you say "light the gas" or "light the kettle." But whether one lights

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 THE aBSURDLY ABSURD + 237
the gas or lights the kettle, Ben and Gus can have no tea, since they have no
money for the gas-meter.
Even the rhythms of Godot are sometimes reflected, as in the following
dialogue:
Gus: The gas has gone out.
Ben : Well, what about it ?
Gus: There's a meter.
Ben: I haven't got any money.
Gus: Nor have I.
Ben: Then you'll have to wait.
Gus: What for?
Ben: For Wilson.

As opposed to Godot, however, it is only "half the time [that Wilson]

doesn't even bother to put in an appearance." Though we neither see nor hear
Wilson, his existence is made more definite than that of Godot; he is more
cruel and capricious, literally killing men like flies - for his sport. Less a haven
than an employer to Ben and Gus, Wilson's invisibility prompts Gus to com-
plain: "There are a number of things I want to ask him." Gus asks many
questions in the one-act play, but his most insistent line is about the questions
he meant to ask, parallelling the line about waiting for Godot in Beckett's play.
Didi and Gogo also ask questions, but they never question why they wait or
that they wait. Gus, on the other hand, asks questions about his surroundings,
about Wilson, about the job, whose full horror is revealed to us when he
describes a nameless girl they evidently murdered: "It was a mess though,
wasn't it ? What a mess. Honest, I can't remember a mess like that one. They
don't seem to hold together like men, women. A looser texture, like. Didn't
she spread, eh? She didn't half spread. Kaw!" The comic, colloquial words
mess and spread take on grim significance in Pinter's comedy of menace. It
in the recollection of this girl "that made [Gus] start to think"- but "a loud
clatter and racket" from the dumbwaiter immediately interrupt his thinking.
Revolvers cocked, Ben and Gus remove from the dumbwaiter a note
reading: "Two braised steak and chips. Two sago puddings. Two teas without
sugar." As more exotic meal orders travel down the chute, the two men react
excitedly, and in view of the play's end, it is of some importance that after
the first note all the orders are for single portions. In an effort to palliate the
powers above the dumbwaiter, the two men send up the little store of refresh-
ments that Gus has brought, the English brand names in sharp contrast to
the universal radishes, turnips, and carrots of Beckett's tramps.
By the middle of The Dumb Waiter Pinter has built a symbolic structure
on his realistic foundation, and the dumbwaiter of his set begins to function
as both altar and oracle. The increasingly exotic food commands are as obscure
as Delphic pronouncements, and, humble mortals that they are, Ben and Gus
offer their foodstuffs in ritualistic sacrifice. Through a speaking-tube Ben is in
more direct communication with the powers above than Didi ever is through
the small boy in Godot; before the speaking-tube Ben is as subservient as
the valet Jean in Strindberg's Miss Julie. At the upper end of the speaking-tube,

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238 + COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

there is dissatisfaction with the offerings; Ben and Gus are ordered to "light
the kettle," so as to send up some tea. Though authority thus settles their
language dispute, Gus and Ben still cannot light the kettle since they still have
no shilling for the gas-meter. When Gus again returns from the lavatory
where the toilet again does not flush, he asks tensely, "Why did he send us
matches if he knew there was no gas?" The routine rehearsal for their job
(in which Ben omits Gus's gun) is followed by a paroxysm of questions from
Gus; explicitly about their job, they implicitly emphasize the Absurdity of the
human situation. For Gus is no longer a dumb waiter. The last punning order,
"Scampi," rattles down the chute, and Gus screams into the speaking-tube:
"WE'VE GOT NOTHING LEFT! NOTHING! DO YOU UNDER-
STAND?" It is evident that "NOTHING" refers as much to their
as to their material resources.
In the last few minutes, as in the first few minutes of the play, Ben
on one bed and Gus sits on the other. However, Ben no longer
newspaper items aloud, but merely gives Gus his cues, to which
responds dully in the words of the opening dialogue: "Go on,"
"It's unbelievable," "Incredible." The death-centered news items ar
necessary, for death is virtually in the room. Gus leaves for the
stage left; after Ben, alone, receives orders through the speakin
toilet off-stage flushes, and Gus stumbles in at stage right, dish
unarmed. Ben raises his gun to shoot, and the curtain falls. A prop d
and a human dumb waiter remain in the room, but Gus will be
precisely because he refuses to continue as a dumb waiter. In Pin
world, they only serve who meekly stand and wait.
Pinter's God-surrogates are as invisible as Godot, but their mes
subtle. They send henchmen not to save but to destroy, and thes
penetrate into the most realistic surroundings. As compared to th
wait for Godot, Pinter's victim is more quickly annihilated. In contr
circular structure of Godot, Pinter's action leads with linear directne
annihilation.
Also linear, but jagged rather than direct, Bromberg's Defens
opens in that limbo between realism and symbolism - the play
play. Some indication of the differences between French, English, an
can Absurdist plays emerges from their respective lighting: the moo
the naked bulb of The Dumb Waiter, and the key lights of a tele
in Defense of Taipei. But there is a striking similarity in the basi
the three plays - exploration of a relationship based on loyalty to an
mysterious power. Again the relationship involves two men, th
middle-aged Negro, Aimé, and a "falsely young" white America
Godot the relationship between Didi and Gogo is that of equ
master-servant pair is embodied in Pozzo-Lucky. In The Dumb W
the "senior partner" of Gus, and in Defense of Taipei Airne's p
inferior to that of Don, the white man.
When the play opens, the two Americans are playing par
television camera, and they will continue to play such parts thro

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 THE aBSURDLY ABSURD ♦ 239

the first act, one of the scenes showing American G.I.'s defending Taipei. If
Don and Aimé obediently mouth their pat parts, a mysterious "they" will "take
care of everything." "Their life makes sense. They have answers for questions."
Questions arise, as in Godot, as in The Dumb Waiter; and as in these plays,
questions are discouraged by the powers that be: in the American play
rebellion is punished by an ominous blue light from the television control
booth. Nevertheless, both Don and Aimé introduce deviations from the set
scripts; Don wonders how he can dominate his wife sexually, and Aimé tries
to recall the name of his newly dead child. Intermittently, white man and Negro
sympathize with each other's plight, but usually they mistrust each other.
In Act II of the three-act play, Don and Aimé are at their respective homes,
and through a series of illogically connected scenes, it becomes apparent that
Don will never dominate his wife and that Aimé will never know the name of
his dead son. By their common wish for middle-class security, both Don and
Aimé are trapped into lip service to the stereotype parts they play on television.
At home Don's wife compels him to watch television, reinforcing the powers
of the blue light, whereas Aimé's wife intuitively senses that television mores
are oppressively Absurd. Through its tentacular hold on all their lives, we
become aware of television as a metaphor for mysterious, transcendental powers.
Back in the studio Don boasts of his sexual success with his wife, and Aimé
lies that his son's name is Bob, but each one soon confesses the truth. Aimé
offers his friendship to Don, and, rejected, refuses to play by the script, protest-
ing, "You never know what they want. One minute be this, the next be that.
They have me turning somersaults inside myself." Even as his own rebellion
flares against the control booth, Aimé hears that Taipei has fallen and American
forces have withdrawn to Manila. His faith further shaken in the powers that
be, he again searches for his dead son's name.
Openly expressing hatred and fear of one another, Don and Aimé grapple
for a prop gun, and in the mêlée Don is shot. Quite suddenly Aimé's educated
voice reverts to Negro dialect, as he cowers behind his gun in a scene reminis-
cent of O'Neill's Emperor Jones. He ransacks the prop closet for some clue to
the name of his son, screaming, "All make believe Ha ha ha! I brought it
down with my own hands!" To Don's body he pleads, "Come on, buddy, you
ain't dead! All make believe! Come on, get up! (The body does not move.)
The bullets were real. So was he. Just him and me. We made it all, and I killed
him." In the last moments of the play Aimé reviews his life, then racks his
brain for possible names of his dead son. As the curtain falls, he is frantically
trying a series of names beginning with A : "Albert ? Adrian ? Arthur ? Allen ?
Alex?" Significantly, he never thinks of his own name, Aimé, which, as he
earlier explained to Don, means love. For who can think of love in a television
universe, where being-in-the-world is living-by-the-script ?
Although the three dramas are built on the same pattern - exploration of a
relationship based on loyalty to a transcendent power - that relationship disinte-
grates in the three successive plays. In En attendant Godot, though Godot does
not come, he still represents hope, and at the end of the play Didi and Gogo
are still together, still waiting, though they have spoken of separation and

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240 + COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

suicide. In The Dumb Waiter Ben and Gus are directly under Wilson's orders,
and they have a seemingly satisfactory job situation until Gus asks too many
questions; it is his questioning that dooms him. In Defense of Taipei, too, the
relationship terminates in destruction; intermittently, both Don and Aimé
have asked questions, and violence brings an answer to neither of them.
Don's death - itself accidental and absurd - leaves Aimé lonelier than in the
hypocritical roles he played; nor does he achieve self-awareness.
All three plays reflect Absurdity in absurdity. More explicitly than most
Absurdist plays, they deal with the transcendental, fully meeting HurrelFs
criteria of an "absolutely organic presentation" of Absurdity through absurdity.
For all the differences in plot, the pattern is strikingly similar; for all the
differences of language, all the plays probe more deeply than the surface level
of their words. Far from allegory, each play embodies a dialogue between the
Absurd, hope, and death, and it is up to us to supply tenacity and clairvoyance
- if we can.
San Francisco State College

NOTES

i. Drama Survey (Winter, 1964), 448.

2. It is critically interesting but irrelevant that Beckett and Pinter reject labels and
Bromberg considers himself a "social writer."

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