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1988 18: 253Journal of European StudiesRainer ZaiserPirandello

En Attendant Godot: Reflections on some Parallels Between Beckett and  

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J. European Studies, xviii (I988)

En Attendant Godot: Reflections on someParallels Between Beckett and Pirandello

RAINER ZAISER University of Tübingen

&dquo;Je tiens En attendant Godot pour une des trois ou quatre pièces clefsdu theatre contemporain, depuis que le vieux sorcier sicilien nous afait eclater au nez Six personnages en quête d’auteur.&dquo;, Jean Anouilh’sstatement offers us an easier approach to our subject than doesSamuel Beckett himself, who would hardly make such an openevaluation of another author’s work. It is no coincidence that JeanAnouilh, himself an acknowledged follower of Pirandello,2 mentionsBeckett’s En attendant Godot in the same breath as Pirandello’s

masterpiece. There must be similarities which justify such a compar-ison and place Beckett in the same tradition as Pirandello. To whatextent the Irish-born Beckett was acquainted with the Italiandramatist’s work cannot be confirmed by any statement of Beckett’s,leaving open the question of a direct influence. This does not rule outthe possibility of affiliation between the two, however, and indiscussions of Pirandello’s effect on contemporary theatre, Beckett’splays receive repeated mention.3 Yet these claims for an affinityremain unsupported by closer analysis of Beckett’s works, consistingin generalities. It is therefore not surprising that parallels betweenthe two dramatists are most often discovered in the means oftheatrical representation which result above all from comparisonwith Pirandello’s play-within-a-play device. Thus Giovanni Calen-doli sees in Godot the completed dissolution of traditional plotdevelopment, of which the fragmented, disjointed events in Sei

personaggi in cerca d’autore mark the beginning: &dquo;Il procedimentobechettiano ha un precedente specifico in Sei personaggi in cerca

d’autore, dove la vicenda rivive sulla scena a brandelli, in un ordinediverso da quello cronologico, ora rappresentata ora discussa oranarrata.&dquo;4 Anne Paolucci as well sees Pirandello’s break withtraditional dramatic form as a forerunner of the Theatre of theAbsurd. According to Paolucci, Pirandello’s incisive view into thechaotic human psyche provided the Theatre of the Absurd with acourse leading to the minimalized plot and dialogue in works byIonesco and Beckett, among others:

It was Pirandello who first shifted the dramatic sights to thefragmented internal world of self, forging a new language for

0047-2441/88/1804-0253/$2.50 © 1988 Science History Publications Ltd

254

the purpose, a new stage. Without him, Theater of the Absurdmight not have come into being; certainly it would have takena very different direction.5

Paolucci’s description of a &dquo;Pirandellian journey into the interior&dquo;6which brings about a &dquo;synthesis of the positive and negative, thecomic and the ’pathetic’, the yes and the no ... optimism andpessimism, hope and despair, comedy and tragedy&dquo;7 in Beckett’splays does little to explain where Beckett’s introspection actuallyleads him, aside from showing his use of contrasts to be in agreementwith Pirandello’s call for a humorous writing style, a connectionwhich Beckett scholarship has already made.8 These studies fail tomake clear to what extent Beckett’s humour can be traced to thesame source as Pirandello’s, whose view into the psyche hopes todiscover an absolute subject, which makes an appearance only inrelative form. The search for an absolute becomes a problem ofcognition for Pirandello; consciousness falters before the depths ofthe soul, and all human experience reveals itself in its pure arbitrari-ness, driving the individual into endless questioning and doubt.The following study will examine whether Beckett, like Piran-

dello, is obsessed with the idea of a metaphysical-ontological truthwhich withdraws itself from human consciousness and damns theindividual to a life of alientation, of subjection to external forces,constant self-delusion and suffering.9 A further question to beconsidered is to what degree Beckett uses the play-within-a-playdevice to convey his version of reality, and to what degree he too ishindered by the limits of art which prevent Pirandello from reveal-ing the ontological truths of human existence on the stage. Thisstudy will thus deal with theatre’s reflection upon itself. The variouspoints will be discussed using the example of En attendant Godot.

We do not need to spend much time on the plot of Godot, since thereisn’t one in the traditional sense. Waiting, as already indicated in thetitle, is the central issue here, an element totally antithetical to thedramatic genre, the name of which literally means ’action’. The playbegins with the entrance of two characters, Vladimir and Estragon,who refer to each other as &dquo;Didi&dquo; and &dquo;Gogo&dquo;, and who are waitingfor a certain Godot, who, however, does not appear. At the end ofboth acts, which contain basically the same ’action’, a small boyenters to assure them of Godot’s arrival on the following day. Thetwo fill the time with endless conversation and slapstick gags whichserve solely to conceal the emptiness of their waiting: &dquo;En attendant,il ne se passe rien&dquo;,I° complains Estragon. Even the meeting withPozzo and Lucky, who appear in both acts, is only a stop-gap: &dquo;Qa a

255

fait passer le temps&dquo;, (p. 80) comments Vladimir on Pozzo’s andLucky’s exit at the end of Act i.

If we consider both pairs of characters with regard to Pirandello’sontological investigation, we can see two fundamental parallelsbetween them. Pozzo and Lucky portray the individual, alienatedfrom society and constructed by the gaze of his fellow beings, whileVladimir and Estragon stand for the attempt to come to terms withthe self out of sight of the Other. Whether they are successful is aquestion to be discussed later; let us look first at Pozzo and Lucky,whose relationship is repeatedly characterized as one of master andservant.&dquo; We must ask whether the play does not also point to thegeneralization of the hierarchy of this &dquo;mythe sociologique&dquo;, as

Champigny calls it,12 to the most fundamental level of existence, asEdith Kern suggests: &dquo;The rope that ties master and servant

concretizes how each is the prisoner of the other, each entrapped inthe role society has assigned to him.&dquo;I3 With that we would alreadybe closer to Pirandello’s understanding of social reality, and whenPozzo then declares his dependence on the gaze of others for a senseof self, it sounds very much like the typically Pirandellian conflictbetween the external constraint and the internal necessity of role-playing : &dquo;Voyez-vous, mes amis,je ne peux pas me passer longtempsde la societe de mes semblables ...&dquo; (p. 38). And elsewhere Pozzo asksworriedly:

Tout le monde y est? Tout le monde me regarde? (Il regardeLucky, tire sur la corde. Lucky leve la tete. ) Regarde-moi,porc! (Lucky le regarde.) Parfait ... Je suis pr~t. Tout le mondem’6coute? ... Je n’aime pas parler dans le vide (p. 48).

The gaze of the Other - and Pozzo’s &dquo;tout le monde&dquo; surely refersto the audience as well - forces the individual into a role entirelydetermined by external circumstances. Thus Pozzo is fully awarethat he could as easily be in Lucky’s place: &dquo;Remarquez que j’auraispu ~tre a sa place et lui a la mienne. Si le hasard ne s’y était pasoppose. A chacun son du.&dquo; (p. 50). This at least hints at the fact thatevery role is finally fictional, possessing no absolute validity. Theimage which society constructs of the individual remains relativeand could always have been completely different.

But what exists behind this mask, if we assume that the individualcould withdraw himself from the fixing gaze of the Other and thusreveal fully to self-consciousness an absolute self? Probably Beckett’smost direct answer to this appears in a film sketch which heintroduced with Berkeley’s &dquo;Esse est percipi&dquo; I4 and continues:

256All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine,self-perception maintains in being. Search of non-being inflight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapa-bility of self-perception.15 5

With the quote from Berkeley and his following explanation, Beckettpoints to the fact that a person continues to be determined byperception, even when he removes himself from the perception ofothers. There always remains one eye which he can never escape: hisown. The conclusion of the film scenario demonstrates this: after the

protagonist 0 (as in (’object’) flees the busy street and retreats to hisroom where he puts out dog and cat and covers the birdcage andaquarium with a cloth so that none of the creatures can look at him,after he smashes the staring icon, he has still not gotten rid of hispursuer E (as in ’eye’). This pursuer turns out to be his own image,who never lets him out of its sight. Understood literally, theindividual always perceives himself from the outside, even in themoment when he is completely concentrated on himself. Anythingexisting beneath the surface level of that which can be perceived bythe senses escapes conceptual experience and is registered by con-sciousness as non-existent, as Murphy experiences:

... Murphy began to see nothing, that colourlessness which issuch a rare postnatal treat, being the absence (to abuse a nicedistinction) not of percipere but of percipi. His other senses alsofound themselves at peace, an unexpected pleasure. Not thenumb peace of their own suspension, but the positive peace thatcomes when the somethings give way, or perhaps simply addup, to the Nothing, than which in the guffaw of the Abderitenaught is more real. Time did not cease, that would be askingtoo much, but the wheel of rounds and pauses did, as Murphywith his head among the armies continued to suck in, throughall the posterns of his withered soul, the accidentless One-and-Only, conveniently called Nothing. ’6 6

At this failure of the powers of perception, Murphy suddenly standsbefore a void in which all concrete forms of existence dissolve. This

experience, a kind of revelation, provides Murphy with unexpectedenjoyment and brings him, with a reference to the observation ofDemocrites of Abdera, to the conclusion that nothing can be morereal than this nothingness. This, then, must be where the truth ofhuman existence lies hidden, as the comparison to the womb hasalready hinted. Long before the publication of Murphy, in an essayon Proust (published in 1931), Beckett writes &dquo;But here, in that’gouffre interdit a nos sondes’, is stored the essence of ourselves, the

257

best of our many selves and their concretions that simplists call theworld&dquo;.17 7

The parallel with Pirandello is evident. In Beckett’s ontology theindividual’s actual being loses itself in an abyss, over which the mostvaried forms of the self hover within the world of sense perceptions.These forms are not only the product of interpersonal relations, aswe have seen in the case of Pozzo and Lucky, but also the result ofthe individual’s self-creation in order to ward off the threat of facingan emptiness, as Vladimir’s and Estragon’s example shows. Theseself-constructions correspond exactly to Pirandello’s &dquo;mascherenude&dquo; which his protagonists slip on in order to exist at all over thevoid of their actual being. And thus Estragon poses the unsettlingquestion: &dquo;On trouve toujours quelque chose, hein, Didi, pour nousdonner l’impression d’exister?&dquo; (pp. II6-I7). To maintain this

impression, they resort to games such as putting on and taking offeach other’s hats (cf. pp. 121-2), they tell stories that the otherdoesn’t want to hear (cf. p. 17), and anxiously keep conversationgoing to hold off the disquieting moment of waiting that nearlybrings time to a halt (cf. p. 81). Inactivity and silence are the dangerzones where they are confronted with the void. This is the thresholdto the state of waiting for an answer from the depths of the self, ofhoping for the appearance of the other I which they name Godotand in whom they expect to find refuge: &dquo;Ce soir on couchera peut-~tre chez lui, au chaud, au sec, le ventre plein, sur la paille. Qa vautla peine qu’on attende.&dquo; (p. 30). The longing for this state offulfilment can, however, never be satisfied, for Beckett’s ontologi-cally-based claim for truth extends far beyond the limits of time,space and consciousness. He, like Pirandello, sees life as the creationand destruction of forms, as a series of habits which the consciousnessof the individual creates for itself over and over again. Thus we readin Beckett’s essay on Proust:

Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since theindividual is a succession of individuals; the world being aprojection of the individual’s consciousness ... the pact must becontinually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up todate. I8

For Beckett, as for Pirandello, these continual changes to the surfacepersonality can be traced to a process of inner change which is neverfully revealed to consciousness, but rather appears in successivesegments.

The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation,decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time,

258

sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing thefluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the pheno-mena of its hours. ’9

Time is responsible for this constant process of change: &dquo;At the best,all that is realised in Time (all Time produces), whether in Art orLife, can only be possessed successively, by a series of partialannexations - and never integrally and at once.&dquo;2° The most onecan do is put these pictures of the past together in a &dquo;retrospectivehypothesis&dquo;,21 if only memory would stop coming up with gapswhich allow only the experience of a present state of consciousness.Thus Pozzo is unable to remember that he and his partner alreadymet Vladimir and Estragon the day before, and he tells his partner&dquo;Je ne me rappelle avoir recontre personne hier. Mais demain je neme rappellerai avoir recontre personne aujourd’hui&dquo; (p. 151), andelsewhere he confesses, &dquo;C’est que ma memoire est d6fectueuse&dquo; (p.62). Pozzo and Lucky are completely subject to the workings of time;&dquo;Comme vous avez chang6!&dquo; (p. 152) exclaims Vladimir at theirreunion, and indeed the years have left their trace, for Pozzo is nowblind and Lucky mute. They move entirely along the horizontal oftime within the play, and are subject to the endless cycle of naturerepresented by the appearance of leaves on the tree in the second act.Carried along themselves by the current of time, they remainentirely unaware of these changes. Pozzo and Lucky represent in thisway human consciousness, which is carried along by the stream oftime and hardly notices changes to its personality but rather movesfrom one illusion to another, never glimpsing its true inner nature.

In contrast, Vladimir and Estragon act on the atemporal plane ofthe play; unlike Pozzo and Lucky, they are no different in the secondact, and for them the stage directions indicate &dquo;Lendemain. M~meheure. M~me endroit&dquo; (p. 95), whereas the direction &dquo;L’arbre estcouvert de feuilles&dquo; (p. 95) applies to the other pair of characterswho are completely bound up in the passage of time. Vladimir’s andEstragon’s atemporal existence allows them entry into far deeperlevels of consciousness than Pozzo and Lucky, blinded by time, canattain. The latter remain unaware even of the bodily changes whichdestroy their identity. They function at the level of an individualwho relies solely on his organs of sense perception, while Vladimirand Estragon belong rather to the sceptics who are not convinced bythe outer appearance of things. The light under which they observehumanity is an X-ray which does not stop at the surface but goesthrough to illuminate inner existence. This perspective reveals themutability of the individual’s external appearance, but is incapableof conceptualizing its inner essence which is not divided into limited

259

time-segments. This presents a new problem for the individual insearch of enlightenment, namely, endless waiting for the real,permanent self to reveal itself- a state tantamount to absolutenothingness.

Beckett’s characters fail in their quest for their true identity just asdo Pirandello’s, at the temporal and spatial limits of consciousnesswhich deny the simultaneous experience of past, present and future.Vladimir and Estragon must therefore use every opportunity to keepthings moving, whether by shouting at each other and then makingup (cf. p. t 27), by doing exercises, imitating a tree (cf. pp. i 28-g), orplaying at being Pozzo and Lucky (cf. p. 123). It is all, finally, self-staging in order to make the endless waiting more bearable. Theirmotto is &dquo;Comme le temps passe, quand on s’amuse!&dquo; (p. 128) andgreat is their relief when Pozzo and Lucky reappear in Act 2 to keepthem company:

Nous ne sommes plus seuls, a attendre la nuit, à attendreGodot, a attendre - a attendre.... D6jA le temps coule toutautrement. Le soleil se couchera, la lune se levera et nous

partirons - d’ici (p. i 30) .

The pastimes Vladimir and Estragon pursue are simply illusions thatoffer escape from the incomprehensibility within them. They aredeceptions, fictions that make existence possible when the truth ofexistence retreats into the metaphysical realm, beyond the grasp ofconsciousness. This explains why the individual in search of its trueidentity falls back again and again on masks and role-playing in thetheatre that is the world. In contrast to Baroque theatrum mundi, inwhich the position of director is clearly occupied by God, it isunclear whether there is a director responsible for the action on thisworld-stage. Beckett thus takes the appearance/reality conflict a stepfurther; life becomes a masquerade from which it is impossible todeduce anything about Being other than that it cannot be containedwithin the narrow bounds of material existence, conscious exper-ience or space and time. Beckett responds to this problem aestheti-cally not only through the metaphoric use of theatre and role-playing as does Pirandello, in order to uncover the fictionality ofboth theatre and the ’real’ world, but also by turning the masquer-ade of the serious actor into the farce of the clown.22 Life and stageboth become a circus; Vladimir and Estragon realize already at theirfirst encounter with Pozzo and Lucky that the latter offer thediversion of a circus act:

VLADIMIR. Charmante soiree.ESTRAGON. Inoubliable.

260

VLADIMIR. Et ce n’est pas fini.ESTRAGON. On dirait que non.VLADIMIR. Qa ne fait que commencer.ESTRAGON. C’est terrible.VLADIMIR. On se croirait au spectacle.ESTRAGON. Au cirque.VLADIMIR. Au music-hall.ESTRAGON. Au cirque. (p. 56)

Pozzo and Lucky are indeed a comic pair of the Laurel and Hardyvariety: the one superior and in control, the other naive and

constantly taken in. Lucky performs on Pozzo’s command like atrained circus animal, and his movements are mechanical andawkward like a clown’s. Pozzo is the trainer who not only has Luckyon a leash but also has his own role well under control; after a

moving description of the sunset he suddenly drops this role to askhis audience, Vladimir and Estragon, &dquo;Comment m’avez-voustrouve ? (Estragon et Vladimir le regardent sans comprendre.) Bon?Moyen? Passable? Quelconque? Franchement mauvais?&dquo; (p. 62).Their response is disappointing, however, for after relatively unen-thusiastic praise, they express their continued boredom:

ESTRAGON. En attendant, il ne se passe rien.Pozzo (desole) . Vous vous ennuyez?ESTRAGON. Plutot.Pozzo (a Vladimir). Et vous, monsieur?VLADIMIR. Ce n’est pas folichon. (pp. 62-63)

Out of this arises unnoticeably a play-within-a-play situation.Vladimir and Estragon have turned into spectators of the perfor-mance Pozzo stages to relieve them from the boredom they exper-ience in the state of timelessness:

Que puis-je faire, voila ce que je me dis, pour que le temps leursemble moins long? Je leur ai donne des os, je leur ai parle dechoses et d’autres, je leur ai explique le crepuscule, c’est uneaffaire entendue (p. 63).

Finally Pozzo falls back on Lucky’s tricks in a final effort to dispersetheir boredom: &dquo;Que pr6f6rez-vous? Qu’il danse, qu’il chante, qu’ilrecite, qu’il pense ...&dquo; (p. 64). Vladimir and Estragon want to seeLucky dance and hear him think; he carries out their wishes byperforming an awkward dance, and then giving a long speech which

26I

consists solely in listing words and sentence fragments devoid of allmeaningful content. Lucky demonstrates two of the basic elements ofhuman existence, speech and movement, which distract the indivi-dual from the experience of the emptiness of Being. At the same time,Lucky’s mechanical, automatic movements and speech point to theartificiality of these pastimes, which have no function in themselves,but serve to maintain existence. Pozzo and Lucky succeed at gettingVladimir and Estragon to forget the intolerable incomprehensibilityof Being and experience the passing of time: &dquo;C~a a fait passer letemps&dquo;, declares Vladimir with satisfaction after the meeting withPozzo and Lucky. He appears to have learned from their perfor-mance : as Act 2 opens, he appears alone on the empty stage andbegins ’acting’, assuming a pose before the audience and loudlysinging the same verse over and over again. The banality andcircularity of the text seem at first reminiscent of the clowning in theprevious scene; upon closer observation, however, we recognize thisas an improvised strategy to repress the psychological sufferingcaused by his ontological uncertainty. With this observation thetragic dimension beneath Vladimir’s clownish rendition of the

simple text becomes apparent. This applies also to the slapstickexchanges mentioned above which remind of Kintopp’s silent films.The comic routines of a Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton undergo atransformation to the tragic when one realizes that Vladimir andEstragon fall into pantomime precisely at that moment when thewords run out and the intolerable incomprehensibility of Beingbegins to threaten through the silence. Borrowing from the genres ofcircus and silent film, Beckett fulfils perfectly Pirandello’s demandfor humour in representation in order to wrap up the tragic truth ofthe loss of Being in a comic package. And this must be done in such away that on closer reflection the fa~ade gradually crumbles and thelooming emptiness chokes off laughter.The most effective means of uncovering illusion is still, for Beckett,

the overstepping of the normal stage boundaries. Both protagonistslook expectantly beyond the stage, hoping to derive some meaningfor existence from the unknown darkness. Neither probing into theauditorium nor behind the backdrop meets with a response, andthey are forced to conclude that the space beyond the stage is hometo the same ridiculousness that governs the stage. Estragon makesthis clear:

Il se leve p6niblement, va en boitillant vers la coulisse gauche,s’arrete, regarde au loin, la main en écran devant les yeux, seretourne, va vers la coulisse droite, regarde au loin.... Estragonrevient au centre de la scene, regarde vers le fond.

262

ESTRAGON. Endroit delicieux. (Il se retourne, avance jusqu’a larampe, regarde vers le public.) Aspects riants. (Il se tournevers Vladimir.) Allons-nous-en.

VLADIMIR. On ne peut pas.ESTRAGON. Pourquoi?VLADIMIR. On attend Godot.ESTRAGON. C’est vrai. (Un temps.) Tu es sur que c’est ici?

(pp. 19-20)

Vladimir is of course not sure, but one thing seems clear: that theywill find Godot neither behind the stage nor in the audience. Theyare situated on a plateau surrounded on all sides by a steep drop.Thus Estragon returns from an excursion to the edge of the stagewith the frightened cry &dquo;Je suis damn6!&dquo; (p. 125), and answersVladimir’s question as to how far he got: &dquo;Jusqu’au bord de lapente&dquo; (p. 125). The more perceptive Vladimir draws the onepossible conclusion from this observation: &dquo;En effet, nous sommessur un plateau. Aucun doute, nous sommes servis sur un plateau&dquo; (p.125). There is no point in hoping for a rescue from beyond the stage,for the audience as well is cut off from them by an unpassable gulf:

VLADIMIR. Nous sommes cern6s! (Affol6, Estragon se precipitevers la toile de fond, s’y emp~tre, tombe.) Imbecile ! I1 n’y apas d’issue par la. (Vladimir va le relever, l’amène vers larampe. Geste vers l’auditoire.) LA il n’y a personne. Sauve-toi par la. Allez. (I1 le pousse vers la fosse. Estragon reculeepouvante. ) Tu ne veux pas? Ma foi, ~a se comprend.

(PP-125)

By making us aware of its own theatricality, this scene demonstratesonce again the hopeless situation of the characters, whose onlyalternative is to retreat to the world of illusions to avoid falling intothe abyss beyond the stage. This scene also confronts the viewerdirectly, even though Vladimir, pronouncing &dquo;LA il n’y a personne&dquo;,seems rather to ignore the audience. The ambiguity of this statementallows for the interpretation that the viewer is intended to take it as areference to his own lack of Being which turns him as well into ahollow personality on the plateau of the world-stage. Indeed, thespace reserved for the audience is also bounded by the unknown, bythe nothingness that horrifies the characters on stage.From the preceding we may conclude that the play-within-a-play

device and the shattering of illusions serve Beckett, as they doPirandello, in portraying the discrepancy between appearance andreality. In the process, life and theatre are revealed as illusions andthe traditional Aristotelian theatre is put into question. Pirandello’s

263Sei personaggi already shows traditional theatre’s inadequacy to

portray the true state of human existence, by having a traditionally-oriented troupe of actors give superficial and unsatisfactory perfor-mances of the fragmentary characters they are supposed to play. InBeckett’s work, on the other hand, the confrontation with theAristotelian tradition is indirect, for he carries further the rejection ofexisting rules, an aesthetic which Pirandello’s dismantling of existingtheatrical conventions had already started. Unlike Ciascuno a suomodo, in which the stage manager must interrupt the third act

because it provides no resolution, Godot was conceived from the firstas a two-act play. Its circular structure breaks away from the

traditionally linear dramatic scheme; Godot’s absence, repeated onthe successive days of the play’s time, expresses in theatrical idiomthe futility of striving for Being. For this reason the traditional, well-defined, self-assured character is no longer in demand, but rather theself-doubting sceptic whose clown-like improvisations arise on thespur of the moment and provide no insights. This recalls an oldtheatre tradition which began with the improvisations of commediadell’arte. Pirandello as well felt himself indebted to that tradition, ashis admiration for the teatro del grottesco shows. Beckett, however, wasthe first to use improvisational elements successfully in the represen-tation of a metaphysical subject matter. Not only does he questionthe capacity of language to express meaning, he also creates a newlanguage for the stage, which relies on non-verbal expression toconvey a state of consciousness beneath rational cognition, a non-discursive truth beyond all naming. Thus the denial of speech,almost a provocation against the nearly exclusively verbal nature ofAristotelian theatre, becomes an essential element of Beckett’s

revelatory stage idiom. It becomes obvious that the word alone isincapable of revealing illusion when the character’s speeches havenothing at all to do with their actions, as we see when Vladimir andEstragon speak continually of going away and remain as thoughrooted to the spot. Language has become simply automatic in thestate of waiting for the &dquo;dernier moment&dquo; of revelation, without thecharacters becoming aware of its purely stop-gap nature. For themlanguage is strictly a token which allows them to exist in the world ofthings and concepts, while they search in deeper levels of conscious-ness for true Being which cannot be expressed in words. The lack ofspeech and action constitute a supplementary text of the inexpres-sible which the characters run up against in their self-examination.Beckett devotes the most space in this supplementary text to thedirections for the pantomimes; their movements are as automatic astheir language, and reveal thereby the impossibility of authentic self-representation and the futility of the search for Being. This shifts the

264

expressive function almost entirely to the supplementary text. Thenon-linguistic sign, consisting of silence, plotlessness and pantomime,is no longer simply an ornament to the spoken word as it is inAristotelian theatre; on the contrary, it alone has the capacity to getat the truth of human existence.

Beckett not only destroys the theatre’s traditional means of

expression and the misleading picture of reality they produce, asPirandello did. He also succeeds at producing a new dramatic idiomthrough the reversal of the old elements, an idiom which is capableof plumbing the depths of the human psyche.23 Instead of dialogue,there is speechlessness; instead of plot, waiting; instead of well-defined characters, clowns; instead of meaningful words and ges-tures, mechanical monologue and pantomime. With this dramaticreversal Beckett withdraws himself from the realm of external

appearances and beings to descend into the spirit, as he alreadyformulated it in the essay on Proust:

The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contradic-tion of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively,shrinking from the nullity of extra-circumferential phenomena,drawn into the core of the eddy.24

To summarize, there exists without doubt a filiation betweenPirandello and Beckett, which led both to confront dramatic con-ventions. Their protagonists are in search of a fixed and lastingidentity that they do not find in the real world. They are forced torecognize that they constantly alter their identity and that they cannever refer with certainty to actual Being. Their search for ontologi-cal certainty is condemned to futility by the temporal and spatiallimitations of the faculty of perception: it can comprehend a wholeonly in successive segments. For that reason, all conscious effort todiscover an absolute self leads to the perilous edge of the void, whichdemands immediate retreat to the empty forms of existence. Beckettdoes not emphasize social role-playing, which Pirandello repeatedlyuses to display the problem of identity; Beckett mercilessly confrontshis characters with the threshold experience of the void. Thisbecomes a tightrope-walk between two worlds: on the one hand,comprehensible, if limited, existence; on the other, incomprehensiblehuman essence. Since waiting for a revelation from the void isn’trewarded, even Beckett’s protagonists are drawn back to the clearlydelineated forms of existence, which do not have the moralisticcolouring that Pirandello gives them, but rather are reduced to thefundamentals of human self-representation: speech and pantomime.

Sharing the conception that life is mere illusion, both dramatists

265seek to shatter the illusions of the stage by revealing the play withinthe play, though Beckett uses the elementary activities of existence,while Pirandello plays with the roles of social interaction. Byreducing the appearance/reality problem to the level of languagegames and pantomime, Beckett goes far beyond mere imitation ofPirandello. He displays on the contrary an originality in his dra-matic treatment of this theme: not only does he dismantle thetraditional elements of the drama, he develops a new dramatic idiomfrom their reversal, an idiom based on silence, waiting and panto-mimed play. By emphasizing non-linguistic elements of expression,Beckett is able to convey the stripped-down reality of humanexistence. This brings us back again to Pirandello, whose work alsodisplays a pessimism arising out of the failure of consciousness insearch of the absolute self.

From the German by Gretchen Wiesihan.

REFERENCES

I. Jean Anouilh, "Du Chapitre des Chaises", in Pol Vandromme, Jean Anouilh, unauteur et ses personnages: Essai suivi d’un recueil de textes critiques de Jean Anouilh(Paris, I965), 23I-3, p. 232.

2. Cf. Alba della Fazia, "Pirandello and his French Echo Anouilh", ModernDrama, vi (I963/64), 346-67.

3. Pirandello’s influence on the French theatre has extensively been discussed intwo major studies: Thomas Bishop, Pirandello and the French Theater (NewYork, I960) and Halina Sawecka, Structures pirandelliennes dans le théâtre

français I920-I950 (Lublin, I980). These critics, however, pay little attentionto Beckett’s theatre: the problem of Pirandello’s impact on the plays of theIrish dramatist thus remains unsolved.

4. Giovanni Calendoli, "La trilogia e le esperienze europee d’avanguardia", Ilteatro nel teatro di Pirandello: La trilogia di Pirandello. Atti del convegnointernazionale sul teatro nel teatro pirandelliano, Agrigento 6-I0 dicembreI976, ed. by Enzo Lauretta (Agrigento, I977), 207-22, p. 2II.

5. Anne Paolucci, "Pirandello and the Waiting Stage of the Absurd (with SomeObservations on a New ’Critical’ Language)", Modern Drama, xxiii (I980),I02-II, p. 102.

6. Ibid., I09.7. Ibid.8. Charles J. Gattnig, Pirandello, "Umorismo", and Beckett (unpublished Ph.D.

dissertation, Southern Illinois University, I967), Dissertation Abstracts, xxviii(I967/68), 3807 A. See also Józef Heistein, "L’Humorisme de Pirandello etle ’nouveau théâtre’", Beitrage zur Romanischen Philologie, xvii (I978), 227-36.

9. The latter of these phenomena which determine human existence are confirmedin Godwin Okebaram Uwah’s Ph.D. dissertation, though here as well theunderlying factors responsible for Pirandellism’s outer appearance remainunexamined: Godwin Okebaram Uwah, Aspects of Pirandellism in SamuelBeckett’s En attendant Godot and Fin de partie (unpublished Ph.D. disser-tation, Florida State University, I982), Dissertation Abstracts, xliii (I982/83),2693 A.

266

I0. Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, I952), 62. Allpage numbers in parentheses refer to this edition.

II. See for example Robert Champigny, "Interprétation de En attendant Godot",PMLA, lxxv (I960), 329-3I, p. 329: "Pozzo est le maitre, le guide." AlsoMartin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London, I962), 35: "Pozzo is thesadistic master, Lucky the submissive slave."

I2. Champigny, op. cit., 329.I3. Edith Kern, "Structure in Beckett’s Theatre", in Yale French Studies, xlvi (I97I),

I7-27, p. 26.

I4. Samuel Beckett, Film. Complete scenario/Illustrations/Production shots, withan essay On Directing Film by Alan Schneider (London, I972), II.

I5. Ibid.I6. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London, I963), I68. Beckett first dramatized the

theme of escape from the conceptual world in the unpublished andunperformed play Eleuthéria (I947). The protagonist’s search for freedomfrom the others and his own way of thinking, speaking and perceivingconcludes either in committing suicide or returning to the prison of sociallife. Cf. among the few critics who discuss the play: John Fletcher and JohnSpurling, Beckett the Playwright (3rd edn, London, I985), 47-54 and RubyCohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton, I980), I63-72.

I7. Samuel Beckett, Proust. Three Dialogues: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit(London, I965), 3I.

I8. Ibid., I9.I9. Ibid., I5.20. Ibid., I7-I8.2I. Ibid., I5.22. Cf. Michèle Foucré, Le Geste et la parole dans le théâtre de Samuel Beckett (Paris,

I970), especially the chapter "Le clown", 20-27.23. Cf. also Lawrence E. Harvey, "Art and Existential in En attendant Godot",

PMLA, lxxv (I960), I37-46, p. I37: "And art ... is here thought of as bothdestruction and re-creation, as a recordering of reality or breaking ofsurfaces that leads to an imitation of what is discovered at deeper levels ofexistence."

24. Beckett, Proust (ref. I7), 65-66.