Waiting for Godot – Small Group Project PDF

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An essay and research for a small group project over the play "Waiting for Godot"...

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Waiting for Godot March 22nd, 2018 Modern Theatre Small Group Project Reference Source: Behnke, Megan. “Background: Waiting for Godot.” Theater 271, 2014, pages.stolaf.edu/th271spring2014/background-waiting-for-godot/.

This source goes into detail about when Waiting for Godot was written, and why it is important to connect that to the play itself. It also elaborates on important events of the time period, such as the ending of WW II, and how this cultural context affected the content of the play itself. The author also touches on the importance of Surrealism, and how it affected not only cultural ideas of the time period but the overall tone of the play as well.

“Waiting for Godot was written at a time period that has ambiguous ties to the cultural context of the play itself. Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot sometime between 1948 and 1949 in France, using a foreign language to portray his ideas. The play was first performed on January 5th, 1953 at Theatre de Babylone in Paris. In the aftermath of World War II, cultural ideas such as Surrealism affected, and were affected by, the arts. The changes brought a critique of the ideological foundations of western civilization, and traditional values faded. Surrealism, which began in the early twenties, was able to resurface after the war and make an appearance in works such as Waiting for Godot. In Beckett’s play, this cultural context can be found in moments such as Lucky’s speech, when a stream of consciousness takes the characters away from their monotonous lives for a moment. Unordinary consciousness can also be seen in Vladimir’s memory of events that stir no recollection for Estragon.

In post World War II France, the birthplace of Waiting for Godot, there was also a crisis of moral order. Moral standards had flip-flopped more than once with the occupation and exit of the Nazis in France. The eventual elimination of the Nazi influence led to some vague, undefined, and unique philosophies of morality. The two sides in World War II had extremely different ideas about what was right and wrong for the human race. Such widespread rejection of the traditional organization of morality reflected the philosophy of post-structuralism, which focuses on the instability of the human sciences. Beckett’s portrayal of humans in Waiting for Godot invites many different interpretations, and the complexity of the characters may prevent the audience from giving them an order, just as the human complexity prevents us from fully inspecting ourselves in post-structural philosophy. Existentialism also played a role in post World War II art. The Liberation of Paris in 1944 reinstated the nation’s independence, and allowed France to become a new country despite its old existence. The changes allowed the French to act as observers in a world in turmoil. This set the stage for the philosophy holding that existence precedes essence, and that human nature is shaped by the individual in that specific historical context. Waiting for Godot is classified as Absurdist theatre. By understanding Waiting for Godot in its Absurdist context, its intentional confusion emerges. The humans in the play seem unable to find inherent meaning in the universe, and our production should not try to impose order where none was intended. Although the philosophical movements of France in the 1940’s seem to surface in Waiting for Godot, Beckett demands a freedom from such conventions. The time and location of this world operate differently from our time and location. Didi and Gogo cannot decide if they were in the same place the day before, or if it was a different place, as if either their memories or the landscape change at whim. Whether this is from their

own indecision or from the rules of their world is not clear. Yet the play’s cycles imply a cyclical world, where however far in time or space one travels, one returns” (Behnke).

Secondary Source: Rechtien, John. “Time and Eternity Meet in the Present.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 6, no. 1, 1964.

In this article, the author discusses the vague location that the play is set in, and why it is important to articulate to help propel the meaning of the story. The author also talks about how the play lies in an ambiguous middle ground, neither confirming nor denying anything symbolic in nature; thus, leaving the meaning of the play completely open to the audience’s interpretation.

“Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy Waiting for Godot presents the frustrating and comic tragedy of man's waiting for a natural solution to human existence, a solution to be fully understood and accomplished by the unaided efforts of man's nature as a free and personal being. Reason and faith, two possible solutions, are seen as natural activities, activities proper to man's nature. Since they have their origin within man's nature, the person who gives them existence gives himself the destiny that the acts of reason and faith promise. The unsuccessful seeking of reason and faith enacted in the play, therefore, appear to be sense and nonsense inevitably frustrated in a destiny which is beyond nature. The play does not propose to solve the problem but merely to portray the human situation in which nature is frustrated whether it seeks its solution in the sense of reasoning - in science - or in the nonsense of faith, hope, and charity - in natural Christianity. Waiting for Godot, then, is not a play which posits or denies an abstraction. Rather, by observing man as an existent, the play presents and explores the human situation. As

Robert Champigny states in "Interprétation d' En Attendant Godot," man himself has formulated two explanations for his existence, the theological explanation drawn out of Christianity and the scientific religion of progress. Both explanations of reality, or "myths," are presented as natural to man's nature and natural destiny. By playing with words, Beckett presents each of the "myths" in its own light. Neither "myth" is chosen; neither is denied. Although Beckett does not espouse either cause, the play, Esslin notes, seems to be positive in its effect on the audience, which experiences a catharsis of the anxieties existence imposes. The audience, "confronted with concrete projections" of its "deepest fears and anxieties, which have been only vaguely experienced at a half-conscious level," purges itself of "the subconscious contents of the mind through facing up to the suffering of the reality of being, that Vladimir almost attains in Waiting for Godot." Catharsis is achieved simply because the play presents play as reality and reality as play. The actors, becoming an audience, stand back and comment on themselves as actors and then play within the play. The human situation in Waiting for Godot, then, is that of a play world produced as being a play. Considered as a play reflecting the reality of play, Waiting for Godot's significance for the self as actor and observer can be put into the perspective that Beckett, in his vision of the total form and its development in the play, perceived them to be : man, a player at play. Thus, the self's relation to self and to other and the ac companying or absent virtues of faith, hope, and charity that should arise in the self's relationships can be seen in the static action of qualities of existence - of waiting in the play, as shown in Vladimir and Estragon -or in the acting state of life” (Rechtien 5-8).

Secondary Source: Corcoran, Paul E. “Godot Is Waiting Too.” Theory and Society, vol. 18, no. 4, 1989, pp. 495– 496., doi:10.1007/bf00136436.

In this last source, the author discusses the causes and affects of historical events, and how it influenced Waiting for Godot. He also discusses how Beckett uses the cultural context of the time period as well as the setting of the play to establish a mood that the audience will carry with them through the duration of the show.

“It has long been unfashionable to write about historical causes and effects. Historical ends fall under a similar stricture, whether intended in a teleological sense to signify a purposive telos, a higher reality, or simply a finis beyond decline and fall. For even longer it has been been out of fashion to use the old organic metaphors to depict the painful birth, promising youth, prolific maturity, faltering old age, and final demise of an epoch or civilization. An empiricist rectitude may save the rare historiographer from such claims, but many humanists feel, or at least write, as if history has its origins, aims, and ends. Our language cannot prevent an indulgence in the mythical conceit that history has shape and purpose, and is even somehow a reflection, however distorted, of the hopes and sorrows of human life. We are intelligent enough to know, of course, that this is not really true, or cannot be held to be true. Yet history, as the very word implies, is a story that cannot be deprived of its fictive elements. Reflection upon historical endings inevitably broaches the confusing terrain of cultural history. Yet I hope to explore the idea of "endings"' unencumbered by the methodological rigors that proudly eschew the obscurity of "culture" and the fallacies of historical explanations based on great men and ideas, or "laws of development." Those debates are as irrelevant to my present

task as the ancient accounts of divine genealogy, first and final causes, or Fortune. I suggest that a philosophical inquiry about historical endings is a separate concern from defending or debunking cyclical theories, cultural organisms, or any brand of eschatology. This is not to deny the importance or even the possibility of specula ion under those topics. Intelligent people have proposed that we are now experiencing the "end of an age," and they have felt entitled to use the powerfully judgmental categories of cultural decay, political and military madness, and environmental self-annihilation. Critics of West ern culture in centuries past as in the present day have looked back to a period of prodigious harvest in the arts and sciences,2 followed by a glut, a time of unproductive inertia, and finally a loss of fertility. Some claim to have heard a voice of youthful, profligate, and creative rage signaling the passing of a withered, corrupt culture and the coming of a liberated, vigorous new age. A difficulty quite other than historiographical method belies such metaphorical accounts, no matter how often and even eloquently they are proclaimed. What is most striking about the many intellectual claims of cultural desuetude is the failure to connect the evidence of historical endings to any pattern of meaning or foundations of belief and hope. The "endings" that are so often said to confront us do not, at least as yet, reveal an access to any imaginable future. Yet in a way that I hope to show in the second part of this article we are indeed doing something in the face of this impasse” (Corcoran, 495-496)....