Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

June 23, 2026 · transcript

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Existence and Expectancy in “Waiting for Godot”

Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.

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Transcript

0:11 Wes: Who is Godot? Whether God objet a or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation, even if they can't remember exactly what it is that needs saving. Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy, aspirational, libidinal, political or religious, insofar as they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible, except arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts.

If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Today we pass time by discussing waiting for Godot and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I had suggested this just because I thought it might pair with Withnail and I, which we just did. I didn't think about it very carefully. It was just an association.

And then I thought, well, also, it's something we should do, because my mom wrote her master's thesis on this at Trinity in Ireland, and for some reason she was fascinated with Beckett. I've always been afraid of doing it. Just vague associations of the avant garde and boredom. You didn't sound super excited to do it. What's your experience with the play?

1:51 Erin: I didn't like it when I was younger, I'll admit. I was recalling the other day that I was taking a class. It must have been on 20th century lit. And the final was a, you know, Blue Book exam. And we had covered a bunch of plays, and the question required us to choose one of three plays to analyze. We had to pick one and then write about it. And after the exam, just in talking with people, you know, when you're all kind of staggering out of a room, I discovered I was the only one who didn't choose Beckett.

2:28 Wes: So is that because it's. Yeah. Why is that?

2:33 Erin: I think I thought in my ignorance, or maybe in my perceptiveness, I thought it was both too easy and too difficult to write about, because I think that probably what everybody else did was they were smart to choose Beckett, and. And they did an allegorical reading which was maybe a little bit more straightforward. Is that the right way to go in terms of a really deep understanding of the play? Probably not. Was it the smart thing to do in a three hour Blue Book exam. Probably I wasn't perceptive enough to see the comedy in it. And I think the extent to which this is played for humor, I think really determines the extent to which I'm going to appreciate an adaptation of it.

So the version available online from 2001 I find to have some moments of greatness, of course, and the performances are great, but mostly dour and really difficult to get through and really bleak. And the little glimpses that I've seen from the Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen Broadway adaptation from 2013, and I think they also did an earlier one. That one seems to me like a version of Godot that I would really enjoy because I think ultimately it is sort of a black comedy version of Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin, and the humor makes it work. So probably when I was in college, I didn't understand how funny it was or how funny it could be.

4:00 Wes: Yeah. And so this 2001 version, this was Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy and Alan Stanford, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. And was it BBC? Is that.

4:12 Erin: Yeah, I think so.

4:14 Wes: Yeah. So, yeah, I really like that. It's, it's. I thought it was very good. You know, Rainn Wilson was recently in a. They did a production in la. There's no video.

4:23 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I heard that.

4:25 Wes: But they have some little teaser videos that are really interesting.

4:29 Erin: Did you take a look at any of the videos from the McKellen Stewart?

4:33 Wes: No, no, I wish I had. I didn't know about it. I didn't really didn't look at. I looked at the, you know, the one BBC one, but I didn't do a lot of research into different productions because I spent so much time with the play, which I think benefits a lot from being produced. It's not the most satisfying reading experience. I know you've taken an acting class because I know you've done some acting, right? And you can get. You do an acting class and they give you an exercise and they say, say one word over and over again, but with different emotions.

You can do a lot with little. I was going to say Beckett's giving us very little, but that's not true. Famously, they say it's the play where nothing happens twice. Right. Because everything is repeated in the second half. But quite a bit does happen. It's just that a lot of it is verbal and it's wordplay and it's unclear. I don't know. How do you capture this? How do you capture this quality of the play?

5:37 Erin: It's routine based it's like vaudeville act. That's why I think comedy works for it.

5:43 Wes: It's like who's on first for the whole.

5:45 Erin: Yes. I mean, very much so. Very much so. It's Abbott and Costello, it's Laurel and Hardy. I mean, there's also quite a lot physically that is done in the play. Physical routines, the hat, the boots, falling down, trying to hold themselves up, falling down again. You know, there's a lot of business, comedy, business. Anyway, I ultimately, I think in spending a lot of time with the play, I came to a much greater appreciation of it than I had expected. And I also found it far funnier than I was expecting to find it primed, as I was sort of halfway through by looking up some of those clips from the McKellen Stewart adaptation which people said was too funny.

You know, they were making it too funny and it should have been sadder or bleaker or something. That seemed to be at least one wing of the critical consensus about that adaptation. But I started to think, really, unless you want to be punished severely in your theater going experience, really, this should be, I think, done in a comedic way. And that seemed to be the heart of it.

6:48 Wes: Absolutely. There's plenty in the wordplay and stage directions to suggest that, yeah, you should play it up. Do a lot of this with humor. Yeah. And play it up. And you can do, you know, with much of the dialogue, you can make decisions that play it up even further. And I would say, yeah, I agree with you. The way to go is to play it up and try to breathe some life into what is otherwise potentially very sparse. Right. Put a few leaves on that tree, so to speak. In a way, it is a. It does enact desolation. Right. And it enacts timelessness and placelessness.

Perhaps you can read it. Perhaps it's just allegory, which means the characters are, in a way just ciphers for something else, which is another form of desolation. There's not enough plot for the average person and there's not enough investment. You're not induced to enough investment in the characters to have some strong emotional reaction for them or to be induced by them. Right. So there's a lack of pathos, maybe, is the way to put it, Unless you go for the comedic element. But it's interesting. Yeah. Is it an allegory?

8:05 Erin: I hope not. I hate allegory.

8:08 Wes: Why do you hate allegory?

8:10 Erin: I don't know. A one to one relationship doesn't interest me. Or the allegorical reading has infected so much of art. There's this idea, I think, that people have increasingly, with, I don't know, maybe we're contributing to it with the podcast. I hope not. But people are out there trying to retrieve information easily. The CliffsNotes version of something. They want to know, what is this really about? And this is particularly pernicious in. In poetry, you know, what is the poem really about? As though everything is just these two levels. There's the veneer and then there's whatever is underneath it.

And that's the level that you have to access. And you can ignore the veneer entirely and just sort of capture the meaning underneath. And that's the way that you have of rather, that's the way in which you can master the material. So suddenly you figured it out. You have the secret knowledge. And I think increasingly, no matter how complex or interesting or multivarious the potential interpretations of a work of art, people are looking for that sort of snappy way to get their arms around something. So people are trying to boil things down to a sort of an allegorical or something that looks like an allegorical read to me.

And so that's. I think it flattens it, I think, to say that this play is allegorical on the one hand is probably true in a way. I mean, you know, it can be allegorical. But I think it's also. It's more than that. And insofar as I think what Godot maybe ultimately represents is something like the impossibility of an easy reading or the impossibility of settled meaning itself, even if that is, say, the allegorical answer, that immediately also complicates that one to one ratio. If you. The meaning is that there is no meaning, or if the meaning is that meaning is absent, then that automatically kind of complicates that one to one ratio that allegory would seem to suggest.

10:19 Wes: Well, as you know, I unapologetically read with a view to finding out what it's about. That's why, like, Subtext is the name of the book podcast. And I do it, you know, and. And so I'm.

10:32 Erin: But you don't do it in that way.

10:33 Wes: And I think there is. Right, well, I'm about to elaborate on that. So it's. So I do think there's something, you know, that. That works of art are about, even if they don't know they're about that, or if the. The creators don't know what they've written about, and it doesn't even require attribution of some unconscious intent or something, something like that. I just Think that the material itself has a certain dynamic and has a layer of manifest content, but there's something underneath and. Or there's something that's being expressed, a sense that goes beyond the mere reference.

But in analog, right, that doesn't mean. So in other words, we can read. You know, we can read anything we want with a view to some sort of symbolic element or with a view to the thematic. It doesn't have to be symbolic or a view to the effective truth, the emotional truth that might underlie what's going on. But now, allegory, I guess, is a little bit more rigid, right? So you have the literal level, and there's this really systematic coordination between that literal level and some other. Right. So the literal level, characters and action and setting, and then what they're supposed to represent some conceptual level.

So, for instance, you know, the allegory where warriors are fighting and the warriors represent virtues or something like that, it deadens the surface layer. It kind of saps it of content, makes it desolate, Right. Much like the setting here in this place. So perhaps he's speaking to the fact in the desolation of the setting for this play. He might already be speaking to the fact or warning you that if you read this allegorically, you're. You are sapping it of content and perhaps participating in this very thing that's going to be associated with waiting or expectation of a certain kind.

So then. Yeah, then the question is, how do we read the play? I think it invites allegory, right? It certainly invites it. It strongly invites it because we get. Give me a few biblical allusions up front and. Right. It invites it because it's so sparse. It invites it because we're not learning necessarily a great deal about the inner lives of the characters and invites it because of the sparseness of the plot. I think we are tempted into simply reading it in an allegorical way. So what does Vladimir represent? What does Estragon represent? These are very suggestive names, right?

Estragon is just French for. For what is it? Tarragon for French herb, Bernaise sauce and other things. Vladimir sounds Russian, and maybe there's some kind of regal aspect to it. Vladimir is more coherent and directive, maybe like an ego or a superego. Estragon is much more disorganized and can't remember. In fact, it's not even clear that he's actually waiting for Godot. In a way, maybe it's just Vladimir because estragon can't remember enough and has to be reminded constantly by Vladimir, that they can't leave because they're waiting for Godot, so he could be assimilated to the id, or at least to some aspect of the psyche which is not rational, maybe what Freud calls primary process, something more primitive and associative and dreamlike.

And you can do that all day long with this play and do it in various different ways. And I think there's some worth to at least taking note of those parallels. Right. But if you get stuck in a Freudian reading or a social reading or one reading or another. Yeah. It quickly becomes a bit barren and unrewarding. On the other hand, how do you read a play in which. Right. Vladimir and Estragon, it seems like there aren't even full people. They do seem like psychological moments or moments within a psyche representing different psychological functions.

But on the other hand, they're not just that. So I just want to reinforce your point that it's. And I know it's a point that's been made by critics as well, but it really does put you in an odd position as a spectator or reader. Right. Is it an allegory? Isn't it? How should I receive it?

14:58 Erin: I purposely didn't look at any secondary literature because I didn't want to be. I was familiar with it way, way back when I read this in college. And of course, I'm familiar with some of the pervading allegorical readings of the play, but I was really cautious to not be contaged by anyone in particular. You know, you said it invites allegory. I think at the same time, it disinvites it for the reasons that you've already outlined. You know, the play is not really. It's not, to me, very systematic in its symbols or its series. Right.

15:33 Wes: It invites you only to confound you because it's so disorganized. But you.

15:39 Erin: You know, the biblical allusion that you talk of is also immediately toyed with, deconstructed in a way by the characters who, as you've already said, have no. You know, Vladimir also has a very limited memory. Pozzo has a limited memory. Lucky we can intuit sort of from his speech, also has a limited memory. So the fact that they're so disengaged even from their own history, and then you have the repertory quality of the play itself in that Act 1 and Act 2 are simply recapitulations of each other, but maybe with something like entropy, a bit of entropy that has happened in the second replay or what have you.

You know, this idea of a play in which nothing happens twice, or this idea of nothingness, or this idea of maybe having it both ways, allegorical and anti. Allegorical is reflected linguistically in the play quite a bit. I did a lot of tracking of words across the play. My big obsession for a while became pronouns, specifically the pronoun it and how squishy and unlocatable the referent sometimes is for for it. Which made me think a lot about nothingness and ultimately led me to a reading of the play which was almost mathematical. I started to think that the play was a lot about math and a lot about zero and nothingness.

But if we want to start, for instance, with the first line of the play, Nothing to be done. The concept of nothingness, I think ties together a lot of where we're already going. I mean, in a way that's sort of comedy. Like the question of what actually goes on in the play, whether things actually happen. They do in fact happen. One of the things that we could say happens is simply these routines of speech which ultimately don't really lead anywhere. You know, these are things which in comedy would be like vamping or distraction maybe from whatever the structure of the plot is, would be a comedy routine sort of inserted into a film.

Like the who's on first Routine.

17:50 Wes: Right.

17:50 Erin: If you've ever seen the film, which that is, in which I have seen several times and I can't think of the name of the film right now, but you know, obviously there's a scene with a baseball game and then they. They basically pause the action of the larger plot to do that who's on first routine. So it's as if the entire play is made up of those types of vamping comedy vamping moments where you do these verbal routines or these physical slapstick routines which would be a break from the plot in any other plot based film or play or whatever, but here make up the entirety of the plot, more or less.

I started thinking a lot about nothingness and idling or vamping or of some kind of stasis or looping back on yourself. Returning the song that Vladimir sings about the dog having a kind of cyclical structure to it and the cyclical nature of the entire play and whether or not the whole play is an expression of this kind of circular rather than of nothingness as negation and cancellation. The nothingness of idling and stasis, which I take to be a sort of different kind of nothingness.

19:04 Wes: The work that nothing here is doing in the beginning of the play involves estragon trying to take off his boots and not being able to. So it's nothing to be done. He's giving up. Although I think at various points in the play. I mean, okay, so this is repeated several times in the play. Vladimir says it, Estragon says it. And in fact, Vladimir says it shortly after. It's actually, it's not much further into play that Vladimir says it. He says, sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer, how shall I say? Relieved. And at the same time, appalled, Appalled.

Funny, Nothing to be done. And he's referring to that line that I mentioned before, which he says, prior to that, the last moment, hope deferred maketh the something sick. That's a reference to Proverbs. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. But when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. And so, of course, he leaves out the more hopeful second part. Although, of course, the tree of something or other is right there on the set. So what is it? You know, what is it he's referring to when he says I feel it coming? I think that's one of the questions that the play invites us to answer.

What is it they're waiting for? And there's some obvious invitations, right, Godot. God. But we might think more generally that they're waiting for some sort of salvation. They even say it, something to save them. And that salvation, right, it can be God. But people seek this in a secular way as well. Sometimes it's just associated with grandiose ambitions. Hey, when I'm a great such and such, I will be saved. I was reminded of the saying by Seneca, the fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of tears. Its course lies wholly toward the future.

He is always, and he says elsewhere, he's always getting ready to live. And the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. We are arranging what lies in fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours. Seneca, of course, was stoic. So that's a very stoic sort of idea. That kind of idea recurs through ancient classical literature. This idea that a focus on the future can kind of denature the present, that it can devitalize it. It can take you out of the present and prevent you from enjoying life, prevents you from appreciating what you have.

So I think when he says, you know, sometimes I feel it coming on. I mean, what do you. What do you think of that? Sometimes I feel it coming all. All the same. What is it referring to?

21:51 Erin: Well, I wonder that myself I, you know, it could be hope, it could be sickness. I think ultimately it is plot, really. Any kind of plot. They are waiting for the plot. That's as close as I'll get to an allegorical reading of the play, I suppose. So they're stuck waiting for something to happen to move things forward. So sometimes he feels the whatever coming to relieve him from the position that he's in of kind of not having anything to do. What you read of the Seneca also, I think speaks to that in a way. Right. You're sort of in the anteroom of action. And action is ultimately what plot is made of. And their anxiety and their heartsickness over this waiting and anticipation, their depression is over the fact that they are stuck in this anteroom before the action can commence or something like that.

22:53 Wes: Yeah. I think of them as living in the setting of the play is almost representative of the state of expectancy that Seneca talks about. I think that the sexiest way to read the play is make it self referential about playwriting. And it's the least. It's the most. Every other reading can be attacked as sort of reductive, maybe, but there's something. If it's become self referential, it's less reductive. But I'm also, I think also the sort of. The psychological essence of it, it gets at something worthwhile. So they live in a place. They don't live there, but they are in a place that is.

Right. It can't be located. It's sort of barren that There's a timeless quality to it. It's without memory. So the word utopia literally means no place. Right. The. The utopia that one might expect or might yearn for in a state of expectancy can't come. And so the shadow of that. Right. Is the. Is the sort of no place that you find yourself in that you might find yourself in psychologically. If you are oriented entirely towards a utopian future or towards a, you know, conception of the object of desire, which as something that might complete, you know, when nothing can really complete us.

Right. Just sort of these unrealistic expectations about life, they produce a desiccated present on the reading where in a way it's self referential. The state of expectancy maybe is a little bit of teasing about the state of expectancy of the audience. Right. We are kind of teased for the possibility that we might be bored in the way that Vladimir and Estragon often seem to be bored. And they're often contemplating, well, what comes next. And is this entertaining enough and, yeah, Estragon will say, yeah, that's the idea. Let's insult each other now as if they themselves are the playwrights.

But playwrights without any real memory figuring out how it is that they're going to produce some interest in the audience. And that usually is the goal. At least one of the goals of a storyteller is to introduce some element of suspense or pathos or whatever. But here we're not getting that sort of satisfaction. And so that kind of breaks down or deconstructs the typical experience of a theater audience, maybe, and speaks to, I don't know, their state of expectancy as an audience.

25:26 Erin: You're making me think about what dialogue normally, let's say, amounts to. The interiority of character. Maybe something in the past that is revealed over the course of a conversation. Maybe some conclusion. Because, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking of is that how much does really happen in a play? You know what I mean, as opposed to a film, say, how much really happens in a play at the level of action versus, say, of dialogue? I don't know. I'm going off the track of where my train of thought was originally taking me.

26:00 Wes: But, yeah, it depends. But usually it's quite confined in terms of time span and place. Not always. There are Shakespeare plays in which the. Yeah, there's a lot of different settings and scenes. And a lot he conveyed, just like a film would. There's the. The scope. That sort of background scope feels much bigger than what we actually ever see on stage. You know, we get a sense of time passing and big events going on and a world beyond. But usually we are getting restricted, quite restricted to some very local space and time.

26:39 Erin: Right? That's true. There are murders on stage. There are all kinds of things. But also, I think a lot. A lot in plays is, say, moved out of the realm of physical action and inserted into speech. It's put into speech. You know, an obvious example that springs to mind is Oedipus, where everything that he's done really kind of precedes the action of the play. And in the play, through dialogue, we're watching him come to the realization of the significance of events which predate, you know, the start of the action of the play. So, I don't know, it just occurs to me that maybe rather than doing something insanely different from what we come to expect from a play or an experience in the theater, Godot is radical for leaning into an already present phenomenon all the way.

So that the action of the play really Just does become word games, circular types of constructions where we're waiting for one or the other character to get back to their original train of thought or to think of the thing that they wanted to say, or to finish the other's, or give a counterpoint to the other's idea. In other words, maybe it's just an exaggerated. You know, it's not doing something different. It's just doing something sort of metatheatrical. Maybe that's just an obvious point and I've taken the long way to get there. But in this opening line that you've already pointed to, where Estragon is saying nothing to be done, and he's talking about the difficulty of pulling off his boot, I thought about this sentence quite a bit and the implications of it.

Nothing to be done. So, you know, it's a passive construction, obviously. It removes the actual subject from the sentence and takes the object and puts it into the subject position. So not we can do nothing, but nothing to be done. It got me thinking about, because of that, that passive construction, this difference between the idea of doing nothing and the idea of being nothing, the nothing that is idling and stasis and just sort of, say, vamping, for lack of a better term, since that's kind of a comedy word or a vaudeville wor. And then the nothing of cancellation or negation, the nothing of being.

I think with idling and vamping, what sustains the doing nothing is a kind of circularity rather than the canceling out of the being nothing. Obviously, you can't do a play about being nothing because it would just be. The curtains would open and there would be nothing there, and then you would go home, which I think Beckett, like, almost did something like that. Didn't he just do a play where there was just a mouth talking on stage and that was it.

29:29 Wes: Ye.

29:30 Erin: So he almost got there. All of that to say that Estragon starts by saying nothing to be done. It actually has a kind of application to the boot. Even though the boot ultimately leaves him nowhere, his efforts leave him nowhere. But the action of trying to pull that off and repeatedly failing, the result is ultimately nothing. And then Vladimir's words which follow. I'm beginning to come round to that opinion, hint at the circularity inside the nothingness, the sort of tempest in a teapot quality that I think recurs over and over again in these bits throughout the play.

And then the longer speech that he begins with, you know, all my life I tried to put it from me saying, vladimir, be reasonable. You haven't yet tried everything, and I resumed the struggle. So that too, I see often in Vladimir's speech a kind of circularity in it. And so in this he's describing, like, trying to get his arms around something and then ultimately failing and he's back at the beginning.

30:36 Wes: Yeah, it really reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus a bit.

30:40 Erin: Absolutely.

30:41 Wes: A lot in this. And of course, there's a lot of, you know, existentialist readings of the play.

30:45 Erin: But, yeah, I'm interested in all of these various expressions of nothingness, which ultimately are about traveling quite, quite a ways to get back to the beginning. So to get functionally nowhere versus in almost like a taxonomy of nothingness, a sort of more negative view of life. An idea of total negation that one would think would be suggested by some of this language. One of the most famous lines, certainly from the play, about giving birth astride a grave, that seems to me an expression of the idea of being nothing or of nothing being right.

The play doesn't end in a death or anything like that. Instead it ends in this sort of perpetual vamping and dilation of time. Maybe another way of putting this is they're not being metabolized in the play, though the play exists in pairs of characters. The two are not canceling each other out. They're persistent. They refuse to be defeated by the play. Neither of them ends up dead. Neither of them ends up saved either.

31:58 Wes: If you're trying to write a scene in a play or movie, you're told there's gotta be some element of conflict and struggle in order to elicit the attention of the audience. And that you're right. And that attention is very picky and discriminating and not easy to hold. And then in scenes that are very dialogue based rather than action based, right, you might introduce an element of something, some sort of visual struggle, like people might be, or even just activity. A character might be doing something while talking to another character just so that there's something happening, so that there's some sort of action.

And I think there's a kind of gesture to that, right? With Estragon trying to take off his boots in the beginning and not being able to. That's a perfectly fine premise for an entire scene, especially a slapstick scene, right? You could bake as much of that as you want. And then he gives up. And then Vladimir sort of picks up on that and thematizes it or dramatizes it. Makes it more about life, right? Assimilates it to the idea that he's been struggling and he's tried everything, but here they are again. And of course, what he actually says is, so there you are again, Estragon says.

Am I right? He seems to speaking to your concept of nothing. He seems to have forgotten whether or not he even exists or at least whether he's standing in this particular place at this particular time. You're given a little bit of hope in the beginning that, oh yeah, maybe this will be about some well defined significant life struggle, as it would be in an ordinary play, and it'll be resolved tragically in one way, or there'll be a happy ending or something like that, but it's never going to be given any content except for the waiting for Godot.

And so Godot is. The whole. Is a little. Right. The whole concept of it is a bit of a parody of suspense and dramatic resolution. Godot is just the stand in. It's a way of referring to plot structure in a way. And instead of being told the content of suspense, we are just given something, a name, something very hollow, and asked to be curious about that, whether you know, who Godot is and whether he's going to actually show up and all that. But none of that is ever going to be satisfied.

34:25 Erin: Yeah, I love that. The boot sort of being transformed in speech into life itself in Vladimir's misapprehension of Estragon. So we have something material then transposed in language into something abstract, which is then commented on for its own meaninglessness. So it's almost like the boot disappears and goes out into the ether over the course of that little exchange. And that routinely, I think, happens over the course of the play, another place maybe where we can go and sort of talk of this pronoun thing. Nothing to be done, you know, has a sort of maybe implied pronoun like nothing to be done about it, which later, Vladimir will supply.

All my life I've tried to put it from me, as we've already said, but then on page two in the discussion of, you know, maybe of suicide, which you don't really understand that it's about suicide until part of the way into it, Vladimir says, when I think of it all these years, but for me, where would you be? You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute. No doubt about it. Estragon says, and what of it? And Vladimir, it's too much for one man. On the other hand, what's the good of losing heart? Now? That's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago.

In the 90s. So the. It just keeps being. It's so actually difficult to track. It keeps being changed or displaced. But, you know, at first, when I think of it, the it there is the abuse, I guess, that's being visited on Estragon every night. He's getting beaten up, and then he says, no doubt about it. Which is. I guess you'd call that a situational pronoun where you're just referring to kind of a whole circumstance rather than any one. One particular thing. And then it's too much for one man. Again, situational. We should have thought of it a million years ago in the 90s.

And the it. We learn later when he says, hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, that it is actually suicide.

36:29 Wes: Yeah. So what is. And they wouldn't even let us up. They tried to go up and commit suicide, but weren't let up.

36:35 Erin: Yeah. Now they wouldn't let us up. He's imagining that they wouldn't be let up. Yeah.

36:41 Wes: Yeah. I was wondering if the suggestion is that again, we're being invited to give these symbolic readings, but these guys, they're in purgatory or hell because they've committed suicide. I think that seems to be the suggestion.

36:54 Erin: Oh, I see. No, interesting.

36:57 Wes: Or they were thinking about it. They're caught in the situation where they're constantly thinking about suicide. Isn't that. I may be misreading this. Isn't that the suggestion? Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. Among the first to jump off in the 90s. When was the Eiffel Tower built?

37:13 Erin: Yeah, I think in the late 1880s.

37:16 Wes: We get almost no proper name, references to places. We get this, and then we get Macon.

37:24 Erin: Yeah, I never thought of that.

37:26 Wes: Those sort of transcend this weird world that they're in. Right. It's almost like they pierce the veil and speak to some previous concrete, richer realities. So I want to point that out, even though I think you're right. We're meant to sort of reject, ultimately, an allegorical reading or a symbolic reading or it's supposed to fall apart at some point, but we certainly are invited to it in various ways, especially in the beginning, and then we'll get to this in a second. But the talk of Christ and all

37:56 Erin: that stuff, I'm really intrigued by that. I never saw it that way. So you're saying, in other words, you could take the purgatorial reading of this even more literally by assuming that they have already done this, but that they are in fact dead.

38:09 Wes: Or. What's the alternative reading of this?

38:13 Erin: We should have thought of it a million years. So we should have killed ourselves before it got to this point. So we should have killed ourselves long ago. And now we've been vamping ever since. So they're in the sort of afterlife of their usefulness.

38:27 Wes: No, I think you're right about this. And I was confused because. Yeah, I mean, literally. Right. We should have thought of it. We would have been among the first, I think. Must be what it meant, what it means. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. Yeah. So they had the opportunity.

38:42 Erin: Okay, Right.

38:44 Wes: Which is the way I initially read it. And then I thought, well, if they're in purgatory, maybe they actually did it.

38:48 Erin: So anyway, yeah, that's really interesting.

38:50 Wes: But I think, yeah, the reading that they had the chance to do and didn't, I mean, that is, you know, the reading that's more faithful to what. To what the text actually is saying. So. Well, thinking about suicide's a sin too. Just kidding.

39:01 Erin: Yeah. So another rich moment for pronouns is when they start to talk about the thieves. So we should get into that parable. This is getting alarming. Vladimir says. And then he says, one of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage, I suppose. 50% is the meaning of it. And it's a reasonable percentage because there are two thieves. Suppose we repented. I'll tell you the truth. These lines. Suppose we repented. Repented what? Oh, we wouldn't have to go into the details. Our being born is maybe the weakest part of the play for me. I'm not convinced by this part at all.

The idea of repentance. I don't know what they would have to repent for. And they don't know either, since they can't remember anything anyway. Vladimir asks Estragon, did you ever read the Bible? Estragon says, the Bible? I must have taken a look at it. Do you remember the Gospels? Vladimir asks. Estragon replies, I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Colored. They were very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy.

Vladimir says, you should have been a poet. And Estragon says, I was gesturing towards his rags. Isn't that obvious? Anyway, so Vladimir says, ah, yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story? No. Shall I tell it to you? No, it'll pass the time. Two thieves crucified at the same time as our Savior. One estragon cuts in our what? Vladimir says our Savior. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other damned estragon. Saved from what? Vladimir? Hell, I'm going. Vladimir. And yet how is it this is not boring you, I hope? How is it that four of the evangelists, that of the four evangelists, only one speaks of a thief being saved?

The four of them were there or thereabouts, and only one speaks of a thief being saved. And then a bit later, one out of four of the other three, two don't mention any thieves at all. And the third says that both of them abused him. So it seems like good odds at first. Basically, one of the thieves is saved of the two. But then it occurs to Vladimir, actually the numbers are not as promising because one of the two is saved. In one of the four of the stories and in the other three evangelists accounts, in the other three gospels, the thief being saved story is not mentioned at all.

So this, I guess, erodes his coin toss faith in salvation and turns it into more like less than an eighth of. An eighth of a chance that you would be saved. Something like that.

42:04 Wes: Right. I think we're meant to wonder perhaps whether they are thieves or, you know, that's again, what they're doing in this purgatory like place. And what they're waiting for perhaps is salvation. I mean, they even say it's to be saved and it's salvation is what they're waiting for. They'll be saved if only Godot comes. But there's also an element to this which seems like a crisis of faith, Right? Based on testimonial evidence. Is the testimonial evidence reliable? Is the Bible reliable? In other words, are we actually. Is the thing that we're waiting for, does that actually exist?

Meanwhile, estragon is not even attuned to that function of the Bible. For him, it was a vacation brochure and a very ironic one because I don't think the Dead Sea is supposed to think that you're going to slake your thirst. Right. So what are the associations of the Dead Sea in the Bible? Sodom and Gomorrah. How's that related to the Dead Sea? The Jordan Valley is once lush and fertile, and the Dead Sea is kind of the result of God laying waste. I think that might be true. I think so it's at the border of the. I mean, it's east of Eden Right.

It's on the eastern side. And I guess the prophecy is that there are prophecies concerning the sea, that it will come alive or something. I think the association is to some sort of desolation. Right. And they're in a desolate place themselves Right. Now, maybe they are at the Dead Sea, so to speak. But for Estragon, it's the fact that the maps were colored and therefore that because the Dead Sea was in blue, he took the signifier as the signified. Right. So if it's pale blue on the map, then it must be something that's going to slake my thirst.

And as usual. Right. Estragon is very attuned to this. Right. His. He's hungry or he's thirsty or this or that. He's very attuned to satisfying various bodily needs or whatever. Whereas Vladimir can get more abstract and philosophical. So here they just. As usual, they just talk past each other. I don't know why Vladimir thinks this makes him a poet. I guess that's a way of giving a very generous reading to what it is that Estragon is saying.

44:23 Erin: You don't think it's. You don't think this moment is lovely?

44:26 Wes: Yeah.

44:26 Erin: I think what Estragon says is really nice.

44:28 Wes: They do, you know, they do have a lot of affection for each other.

44:32 Erin: Yeah. Is this their honeymoon? I know it's not, but.

44:35 Wes: Yeah. Well, the word honeymoon is also an odd. Right. We'll go there for a honeymoon.

44:40 Erin: Yeah.

44:41 Wes: Lovers.

44:42 Erin: One can imagine. Yeah. That he's talking about his prior life, his prior existence. But this too makes me think of. Makes me think of Laurel and Hardy expressing a sort of male female dynamic, often in the two Men comedy routine where they're kind of in a marriage, and often one or the other of them, but primarily one will express more of the feminine characteristics of that pairing than the other, which then, of course makes me think about estrogen. But, yeah, you know, I'm sure there are lots of readings of that, but it is in Laurel and Hardy.

45:18 Wes: Yeah. With regard to estragon. So. Yeah. Meaning tarragon, which makes me think of tarragon. So it's like a, you know, very commonly used French herb or commonly used in French cooking, including in bearnaise sauce, which I immediately associated to. Just because we read it recently, Julius Caesar and Casca. Right. Brutus thinks he's dull, and then Cassius says, well, he gives sauce to his wits or something like that. By basically being like a common man and speaking the way the common people speak, almost like a Politician sauce to his wit so that it'll go down easier.

And I thought, well, maybe the idea is that Estragon is supposed to balance out the wit. He's supposed to, in a way, be sauce to the wit of Vladimir. In other words, he's much more concrete and much more focused on the body and much more. That's the kind of concreteness that you need in writing or performance to keep it too interesting. If it gets too abstract, then you lose interest. But of course, he's not very saucy. He's not rich enough to actually rise to the level of the sauce. So he's just stuck being tarragon. He's not balancing out. He's not balancing out Vladimir's wit or Vladimir's sort of rational consciousness very much.

He's just being stuck in. Or maybe he is, but I prefer Estragon.

46:49 Erin: I think he. I'm just. I don't know.

46:51 Wes: Yeah, well, I mean, I prefer neither of them, but.

46:54 Erin: No, I was gonna say. I'm just making that up.

46:58 Wes: I think the second part of the play is a bit boring. The first part, I think, is quite entertaining, actually. But to see it redone and with that entropy aspect that I think you mentioned. Right. To see it fall apart even more, there's something a bit painful about that and tedious. So I enjoy. You know, I especially enjoyed the first act and I enjoy these two characters and their relationship, but I can't say that they. Right. Are they fully fleshed out? Are they not? There's actually. That's a difficult question to answer. Again, so it's not just allegory.

They're not just symbols. You know, it's not like Vladimir is just ego and Estragon is ID or something like that. And they don't have any. They don't have a life of their own. They do have a life of their own. They are characters. It's just that they are caught in this timeless, memoryless place. Right. There's not much content that they can use to give to their characters. So, for instance, they can't really. We get the one Eiffel Tower reference and a couple of other references, but otherwise there's no memory. There's no talk of what they did in the past.

We don't know what their jobs are. If they were. Maybe they're tramps, as they're usually a bum anyway. Tramps.

48:07 Erin: Yeah. Wes, maybe we can talk just a little bit about the tramp at the beginning of part two. I do think that's an interesting element of These characters, something that helps them to maybe take on a bit more shape as characters or gives them a little bit of a history in the cultural imagination that they can use to sort of get along in our minds. That helps to advance them as characters for us a little bit.

48:33 Wes: Lucky and Pozzo.

48:34 Erin: Yes, Lucky and Pozzo. That's right.

48:36 Wes: All right, thank you.

48:37 Erin: Thank you.

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IN THIS EPISODE

Samuel Beckett

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TRANSCRIPT 🔗

WEBVTT
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Who is Godot? Whether God objet a or an abstraction from any object that is supposed
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to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation, even if they
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can't remember exactly what it is that needs saving. Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy, aspirational,
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libidinal, political or religious, insofar as they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that
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is impossible, except arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts.
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If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or
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do nothing at all? Today we pass time by discussing waiting for Godot and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes
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better than either violating or gratifying them. This is Wes Alwan.
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And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
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So, Erin, I had suggested this just because I thought it might pair with Withnail
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and I, which we just did. I didn't think about it very carefully.
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It was just an association. And then I thought, well, also, it's something we should do, because my mom wrote her master's
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thesis on this at Trinity in Ireland, and for some reason she was fascinated with Beckett.
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I've always been afraid of doing it. Just vague associations of the avant
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garde and boredom. You didn't sound super excited to do it. What's your experience with the play?
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I didn't like it when I was younger, I'll admit. I was recalling the other day that I was taking a class.
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It must have been on 20th century lit. And the final was a, you know, Blue Book exam.
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And we had covered a bunch of plays, and the question required us to choose one of three plays
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to analyze. We had to pick one and then write about it. And after the exam, just in talking with people, you
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know, when you're all kind of staggering out of a room, I discovered I was the only one who didn't choose Beckett.
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So is that because it's. Yeah. Why is that?
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I think I thought in my ignorance, or maybe in my perceptiveness, I thought it was both too easy
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and too difficult to write about, because I think that probably what everybody else did was they were smart to choose Beckett,
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and. And they did an allegorical reading which was maybe a little bit more straightforward.
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Is that the right way to go in terms of a really deep understanding of the play?
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Probably not. Was it the smart thing to do in a three hour Blue Book exam.
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Probably I wasn't perceptive enough to see the comedy in it.
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And I think the extent to which this is played for humor, I think really determines the extent to which I'm going to
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appreciate an adaptation of it. So the version available online from 2001 I find to have
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some moments of greatness, of course, and the performances are great, but mostly dour and really difficult to get through and
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really bleak. And the little glimpses that I've seen from the Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen
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Broadway adaptation from 2013, and I think they also did an earlier one.
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That one seems to me like a version of Godot that I would really enjoy because I think ultimately it is sort of a
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black comedy version of Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin, and the humor makes it work.
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So probably when I was in college, I didn't understand how funny it was or how funny it could be.
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Yeah. And so this 2001 version, this was Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy and Alan Stanford,
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director Michael Lindsay-Hogg And was it BBC? Is that.
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Yeah, I think so.
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Yeah. So, yeah, I really like that. It's, it's. I thought it was very good.
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You know, Rainn Wilson was recently in a. They did a production in la.
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There's no video.
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Yeah, yeah, I heard that.
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But they have some little teaser videos that are really interesting.
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Did you take a look at any of the videos from the McKellen Stewart?
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No, no, I wish I had. I didn't know about it. I didn't really didn't look at.
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I looked at the, you know, the one BBC one, but I didn't do a lot of research into different productions because I spent so much time with the play,
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which I think benefits a lot from being produced. It's not the most satisfying
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reading experience. I know you've taken an acting class because I know you've done some acting, right?
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And you can get. You do an acting class and they give you an exercise and they say, say one word over and over again, but with
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different emotions. You can do a lot with little. I was going to say Beckett's giving us very little, but that's not true.
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Famously, they say it's the play where nothing happens twice.
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Right. Because everything is repeated in the second half. But quite a bit does happen.
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It's just that a lot of it is verbal and it's wordplay and it's
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unclear. I don't know. How do you capture this? How do you capture this quality of the play?
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It's routine based it's like vaudeville act. That's why I think comedy works for it.
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It's like who's on first for the whole.
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Yes. I mean, very much so. Very much so. It's Abbott and Costello, it's Laurel and Hardy.
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I mean, there's also quite a lot physically that is done in the play.
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Physical routines, the hat, the boots, falling down, trying to hold themselves up, falling down again.
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You know, there's a lot of business, comedy, business. Anyway, I ultimately, I think in
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spending a lot of time with the play, I came to a much greater appreciation of it than I had expected.
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And I also found it far funnier than I was expecting to find it primed, as I was sort of halfway through by looking up some of those
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clips from the McKellen Stewart adaptation which people said was too funny.
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You know, they were making it too funny and it should have been sadder or bleaker or something.
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That seemed to be at least one wing of the critical consensus about that adaptation.
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But I started to think, really, unless you want to be punished severely in your theater going experience,
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really, this should be, I think, done in a comedic way. And that seemed to be the heart of it.
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Absolutely. There's plenty in the wordplay and stage directions to suggest that, yeah, you should play it up.
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Do a lot of this with humor. Yeah. And play it up. And you can do, you know, with much of the dialogue, you can make decisions
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that play it up even further. And I would say, yeah, I agree with you.
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The way to go is to play it up and try to breathe some life into what is otherwise potentially very sparse.
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Right. Put a few leaves on that tree, so to speak. In a way, it is a.
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It does enact desolation. Right. And it enacts timelessness and placelessness.
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Perhaps you can read it. Perhaps it's just allegory, which means the characters are, in a way just ciphers for something
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else, which is another form of desolation. There's not enough plot for the average
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person and there's not enough investment. You're not induced to enough investment in the characters to have some strong
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emotional reaction for them or to be induced by them. Right.
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So there's a lack of pathos, maybe, is the way to put it, Unless you go for the comedic element.
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But it's interesting. Yeah. Is it an allegory?
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I hope not. I hate allegory.
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Why do you hate allegory?
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I don't know. A one to one relationship doesn't interest me.
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Or the allegorical reading has infected so much of
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art. There's this idea, I think, that people have increasingly, with, I
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don't know, maybe we're contributing to it with the podcast.
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I hope not. But people are out there trying to retrieve information easily.
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The CliffsNotes version of something. They want to know, what is this really about?
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And this is particularly pernicious in. In poetry, you know, what is the poem really about?
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As though everything is just these two levels. There's the veneer and then there's whatever is underneath it.
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And that's the level that you have to access. And you can ignore the veneer entirely and just sort of capture the meaning underneath.
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And that's the way that you have of rather, that's the way in which you can master the material.
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So suddenly you figured it out. You have the secret knowledge.
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And I think increasingly, no matter how complex or interesting or multivarious
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the potential interpretations of a work of art, people are looking for that sort of snappy way to get their arms around something.
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So people are trying to boil things down to a sort of an allegorical or something that looks like an allegorical read to
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me. And so that's. I think it flattens it, I think, to say that this play is allegorical on the one hand is
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probably true in a way. I mean, you know, it can be allegorical.
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But I think it's also. It's more than that. And insofar as I think what Godot maybe ultimately represents is something
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like the impossibility of an easy reading or the impossibility of settled meaning
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itself, even if that is, say, the allegorical answer, that immediately also complicates that one to one ratio.
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If you. The meaning is that there is no meaning, or if the meaning is that meaning is absent, then that
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automatically kind of complicates that one to one ratio that allegory would seem to suggest.
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Well, as you know, I unapologetically read with a view to finding out what it's about.
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That's why, like, Subtext is the name of the book podcast. And I do it, you know, and.
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And so I'm.
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But you don't do it in that way.
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And I think there is. Right, well, I'm about to elaborate on that.
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So it's. So I do think there's something, you know, that. That works of art are about, even if they don't
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know they're about that, or if the. The creators don't know what they've written about, and it doesn't even require attribution
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of some unconscious intent or something, something like that.
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I just Think that the material itself has a certain dynamic and has a layer of manifest content, but there's something underneath and.
00:11:03.420 --> 00:11:08.620
Or there's something that's being expressed, a sense that goes beyond the mere reference.
00:11:08.940 --> 00:11:12.620
But in analog, right, that doesn't mean. So in other words, we can read.
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You know, we can read anything we want with a view to some sort of symbolic element or
00:11:19.980 --> 00:11:27.420
with a view to the thematic. It doesn't have to be symbolic or a view to the effective truth, the emotional truth that might
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underlie what's going on. But now, allegory, I guess, is a little bit more rigid, right?
00:11:32.490 --> 00:11:39.890
So you have the literal level, and there's this really systematic coordination between that literal
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level and some other. Right. So the literal level, characters and action and setting, and then what they're supposed
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to represent some conceptual level. So, for instance, you know, the allegory where warriors
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are fighting and the warriors represent virtues or something like that, it deadens the surface layer.
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It kind of saps it of content, makes it desolate, Right. Much like the setting here in this place.
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So perhaps he's speaking to the fact in the desolation of the setting for this play.
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He might already be speaking to the fact or warning you that if you read this allegorically, you're.
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You are sapping it of content and perhaps participating in this very thing that's going to be
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associated with waiting or expectation of a certain kind. So then.
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Yeah, then the question is, how do we read the play? I think it invites allegory, right?
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It certainly invites it. It strongly invites it because we get.
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Give me a few biblical allusions up front and. Right. It invites it because it's so sparse.
00:12:48.090 --> 00:12:55.170
It invites it because we're not learning necessarily a great deal about the inner lives of the characters and invites it because of
00:12:55.170 --> 00:13:02.210
the sparseness of the plot. I think we are tempted into simply reading it in an allegorical way.
00:13:02.290 --> 00:13:06.770
So what does Vladimir represent? What does Estragon represent?
00:13:08.050 --> 00:13:11.730
These are very suggestive names, right? Estragon is just French for.
00:13:12.210 --> 00:13:16.770
For what is it? Tarragon for French herb, Bernaise sauce and other things.
00:13:17.890 --> 00:13:23.730
Vladimir sounds Russian, and maybe there's some kind of regal aspect to it.
00:13:23.810 --> 00:13:30.930
Vladimir is more coherent and directive, maybe like an ego or a superego.
00:13:30.930 --> 00:13:38.090
Estragon is much more disorganized and can't remember. In fact, it's not even clear that he's actually waiting for Godot.
00:13:38.090 --> 00:13:45.140
In a way, maybe it's just Vladimir because estragon can't remember enough and has to be reminded constantly by Vladimir, that they can't
00:13:45.140 --> 00:13:52.420
leave because they're waiting for Godot, so he could be assimilated to the id, or at least to some aspect of the psyche
00:13:52.420 --> 00:14:00.660
which is not rational, maybe what Freud calls primary process, something more primitive and associative and dreamlike.
00:14:00.900 --> 00:14:07.580
And you can do that all day long with this play and do it in various different ways.
00:14:07.580 --> 00:14:11.700
And I think there's some worth to at least taking note of those parallels.
00:14:11.700 --> 00:14:17.120
Right. But if you get stuck in a Freudian reading or a social reading or one reading or another.
00:14:18.080 --> 00:14:25.920
Yeah. It quickly becomes a bit barren and unrewarding. On the other hand, how do you read a play
00:14:26.000 --> 00:14:31.680
in which. Right. Vladimir and Estragon, it seems like there aren't even full people.
00:14:32.000 --> 00:14:39.440
They do seem like psychological moments or moments within a psyche representing different psychological
00:14:40.150 --> 00:14:45.110
functions. But on the other hand, they're not just that. So I just want to reinforce your point that it's.
00:14:46.310 --> 00:14:53.590
And I know it's a point that's been made by critics as well, but it really does put you in an odd position as a spectator or reader.
00:14:53.750 --> 00:14:58.230
Right. Is it an allegory? Isn't it? How should I receive it?
00:14:58.470 --> 00:15:02.390
I purposely didn't look at any secondary literature because I didn't want to be.
00:15:02.630 --> 00:15:06.390
I was familiar with it way, way back when I read this in college.
00:15:07.060 --> 00:15:14.180
And of course, I'm familiar with some of the pervading allegorical readings of the play, but I was really cautious
00:15:14.180 --> 00:15:19.540
to not be contaged by anyone in particular. You know, you said it invites allegory.
00:15:19.780 --> 00:15:23.460
I think at the same time, it disinvites it for the reasons that you've already outlined.
00:15:23.460 --> 00:15:31.540
You know, the play is not really. It's not, to me, very systematic in its symbols
00:15:31.540 --> 00:15:33.780
or its series. Right.
00:15:33.860 --> 00:15:37.540
It invites you only to confound you because it's so disorganized.
00:15:37.540 --> 00:15:37.940
But you.
00:15:39.200 --> 00:15:46.240
You know, the biblical allusion that you talk of is also immediately toyed with, deconstructed in a way by the characters
00:15:46.640 --> 00:15:52.640
who, as you've already said, have no. You know, Vladimir also has a very limited memory.
00:15:52.640 --> 00:15:59.680
Pozzo has a limited memory. Lucky we can intuit sort of from his speech, also has a limited memory.
00:15:59.920 --> 00:16:07.370
So the fact that they're so disengaged even from their own history, and then you have the repertory
00:16:07.610 --> 00:16:14.770
quality of the play itself in that Act 1 and Act 2 are simply recapitulations
00:16:14.770 --> 00:16:22.170
of each other, but maybe with something like entropy, a bit of entropy that has happened in the second replay
00:16:22.170 --> 00:16:29.570
or what have you. You know, this idea of a play in which nothing happens twice, or this idea of nothingness,
00:16:29.570 --> 00:16:35.110
or this idea of maybe having it both ways, allegorical and anti.
00:16:35.110 --> 00:16:39.310
Allegorical is reflected linguistically in the play quite a bit.
00:16:39.470 --> 00:16:46.550
I did a lot of tracking of words across the play. My big obsession for a while became pronouns, specifically
00:16:46.550 --> 00:16:53.230
the pronoun it and how squishy and unlocatable the referent sometimes is for for it.
00:16:53.630 --> 00:17:01.310
Which made me think a lot about nothingness and ultimately led me to a reading of the play which was almost mathematical.
00:17:01.310 --> 00:17:06.990
I started to think that the play was a lot about math and a lot about zero and nothingness.
00:17:07.630 --> 00:17:13.310
But if we want to start, for instance, with the first line of the play, Nothing to be done.
00:17:13.870 --> 00:17:18.110
The concept of nothingness, I think ties together a lot of where we're already going.
00:17:18.110 --> 00:17:25.270
I mean, in a way that's sort of comedy. Like the question of what actually goes on in the play, whether things
00:17:25.270 --> 00:17:32.710
actually happen. They do in fact happen. One of the things that we could say happens is simply these routines
00:17:32.710 --> 00:17:39.750
of speech which ultimately don't really lead anywhere. You know, these are things which in comedy would be like
00:17:39.750 --> 00:17:46.950
vamping or distraction maybe from whatever the structure of the plot is, would be a comedy routine sort of inserted
00:17:47.110 --> 00:17:50.390
into a film. Like the who's on first Routine.
00:17:50.390 --> 00:17:50.750
Right.
00:17:50.750 --> 00:17:57.880
If you've ever seen the film, which that is, in which I have seen several times and I can't think of the name of the film right now, but you know, obviously there's
00:17:57.880 --> 00:18:05.120
a scene with a baseball game and then they. They basically pause the action of the larger plot to do that who's on first routine.
00:18:05.600 --> 00:18:12.800
So it's as if the entire play is made up of those types of vamping comedy vamping moments where you do these verbal routines
00:18:12.960 --> 00:18:20.070
or these physical slapstick routines which would be a break from the plot in any other plot based
00:18:20.390 --> 00:18:25.270
film or play or whatever, but here make up the entirety of the plot, more or less.
00:18:25.510 --> 00:18:32.630
I started thinking a lot about nothingness and idling or vamping
00:18:32.950 --> 00:18:40.230
or of some kind of stasis or looping back on yourself. Returning the song that Vladimir
00:18:40.230 --> 00:18:47.630
sings about the dog having a kind of cyclical structure to it and the cyclical nature of the entire play and whether or not the
00:18:47.630 --> 00:18:54.690
whole play is an expression of this kind of circular rather than of nothingness as
00:18:55.250 --> 00:19:02.530
negation and cancellation. The nothingness of idling and stasis, which I take to be a sort of different kind
00:19:02.530 --> 00:19:03.970
of nothingness.
00:19:04.530 --> 00:19:12.010
The work that nothing here is doing in the beginning of the play involves estragon trying to take off his boots and not
00:19:12.010 --> 00:19:19.160
being able to. So it's nothing to be done. He's giving up. Although I think at various points in the
00:19:19.160 --> 00:19:23.120
play. I mean, okay, so this is repeated several times in the play.
00:19:23.280 --> 00:19:28.720
Vladimir says it, Estragon says it. And in fact, Vladimir says it shortly after.
00:19:28.720 --> 00:19:32.880
It's actually, it's not much further into play that Vladimir says it.
00:19:33.040 --> 00:19:39.240
He says, sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer, how shall I say?
00:19:39.240 --> 00:19:46.180
Relieved. And at the same time, appalled, Appalled. Funny, Nothing to be done.
00:19:46.900 --> 00:19:54.020
And he's referring to that line that I mentioned before, which he says, prior to that, the last moment, hope
00:19:54.020 --> 00:19:58.460
deferred maketh the something sick. That's a reference to Proverbs.
00:19:58.460 --> 00:20:04.180
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. But when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.
00:20:04.420 --> 00:20:08.620
And so, of course, he leaves out the more hopeful second part.
00:20:08.620 --> 00:20:14.380
Although, of course, the tree of something or other is right there on the set.
00:20:14.780 --> 00:20:20.460
So what is it? You know, what is it he's referring to when he says I feel it coming?
00:20:20.940 --> 00:20:24.780
I think that's one of the questions that the play invites us to answer.
00:20:24.780 --> 00:20:29.660
What is it they're waiting for? And there's some obvious invitations, right, Godot.
00:20:29.660 --> 00:20:36.060
God. But we might think more generally that they're waiting for some sort of salvation.
00:20:36.060 --> 00:20:40.120
They even say it, something to save them. And that salvation, right, it can be God.
00:20:40.120 --> 00:20:47.920
But people seek this in a secular way as well. Sometimes it's just associated with grandiose
00:20:47.920 --> 00:20:52.400
ambitions. Hey, when I'm a great such and such, I will be saved.
00:20:52.960 --> 00:20:57.840
I was reminded of the saying by Seneca, the fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of tears.
00:20:57.840 --> 00:21:04.160
Its course lies wholly toward the future. He is always, and he says elsewhere, he's always getting ready to live.
00:21:04.760 --> 00:21:11.160
And the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.
00:21:11.720 --> 00:21:17.880
We are arranging what lies in fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours.
00:21:18.120 --> 00:21:21.800
Seneca, of course, was stoic. So that's a very stoic sort of idea.
00:21:22.280 --> 00:21:25.960
That kind of idea recurs through ancient classical literature.
00:21:26.200 --> 00:21:33.270
This idea that a focus on the future can kind of denature the present, that it
00:21:33.270 --> 00:21:40.510
can devitalize it. It can take you out of the present and prevent you from enjoying life, prevents you from appreciating
00:21:40.510 --> 00:21:44.590
what you have. So I think when he says, you know, sometimes I feel it coming on.
00:21:44.590 --> 00:21:47.710
I mean, what do you. What do you think of that? Sometimes I feel it coming all.
00:21:47.870 --> 00:21:51.150
All the same. What is it referring to?
00:21:51.310 --> 00:21:56.830
Well, I wonder that myself I, you know, it could be hope, it could be sickness.
00:21:57.900 --> 00:22:04.900
I think ultimately it is plot, really. Any kind of plot. They are waiting for the
00:22:04.900 --> 00:22:11.260
plot. That's as close as I'll get to an allegorical reading of the play, I suppose.
00:22:12.460 --> 00:22:17.900
So they're stuck waiting for something to happen to move things forward.
00:22:18.460 --> 00:22:25.650
So sometimes he feels the whatever coming to relieve him from the position that he's in
00:22:25.650 --> 00:22:32.010
of kind of not having anything to do. What you read of the Seneca also, I think speaks to that in a way.
00:22:32.010 --> 00:22:38.810
Right. You're sort of in the anteroom of action. And action is ultimately what plot is made of.
00:22:39.289 --> 00:22:46.730
And their anxiety and their heartsickness over this waiting and anticipation,
00:22:46.810 --> 00:22:53.520
their depression is over the fact that they are stuck in this anteroom before the action can commence or something like that.
00:22:53.600 --> 00:23:01.120
Yeah. I think of them as living in the setting of the play is almost representative of the state of expectancy
00:23:01.280 --> 00:23:08.680
that Seneca talks about. I think that the sexiest way to read the play is make it self referential about
00:23:08.680 --> 00:23:15.680
playwriting. And it's the least. It's the most. Every other reading can be attacked as sort of reductive,
00:23:16.170 --> 00:23:20.490
maybe, but there's something. If it's become self referential, it's less reductive.
00:23:20.570 --> 00:23:26.130
But I'm also, I think also the sort of. The psychological essence of it, it gets at something worthwhile.
00:23:26.130 --> 00:23:30.410
So they live in a place. They don't live there, but they are in a place that is.
00:23:30.890 --> 00:23:35.930
Right. It can't be located. It's sort of barren that There's a timeless quality to it.
00:23:36.330 --> 00:23:41.770
It's without memory. So the word utopia literally means no place.
00:23:41.770 --> 00:23:49.230
Right. The. The utopia that one might expect or might yearn for in a state of expectancy can't come.
00:23:49.470 --> 00:23:56.670
And so the shadow of that. Right. Is the. Is the sort of no place that you find yourself in that
00:23:56.670 --> 00:24:04.150
you might find yourself in psychologically. If you are oriented entirely towards a utopian
00:24:04.150 --> 00:24:11.190
future or towards a, you know, conception of the object of desire, which as something that might
00:24:11.190 --> 00:24:15.140
complete, you know, when nothing can really complete us. Right.
00:24:15.140 --> 00:24:22.340
Just sort of these unrealistic expectations about life, they produce a desiccated present on
00:24:22.340 --> 00:24:29.460
the reading where in a way it's self referential. The state of expectancy maybe is a little bit of teasing about the
00:24:29.460 --> 00:24:36.460
state of expectancy of the audience. Right. We are kind of teased for the possibility that we might be bored in the way
00:24:36.460 --> 00:24:42.220
that Vladimir and Estragon often seem to be bored. And they're often contemplating, well, what comes next.
00:24:42.220 --> 00:24:47.900
And is this entertaining enough and, yeah, Estragon will say, yeah, that's the idea.
00:24:47.900 --> 00:24:52.460
Let's insult each other now as if they themselves are the playwrights.
00:24:52.460 --> 00:25:00.020
But playwrights without any real memory figuring out how it is that they're going to produce some interest in
00:25:00.020 --> 00:25:07.020
the audience. And that usually is the goal. At least one of the goals of a storyteller is to introduce
00:25:07.020 --> 00:25:14.470
some element of suspense or pathos or whatever. But here we're not getting that sort of satisfaction.
00:25:14.470 --> 00:25:21.590
And so that kind of breaks down or deconstructs the typical experience of a theater audience, maybe, and
00:25:21.830 --> 00:25:26.150
speaks to, I don't know, their state of expectancy as an audience.
00:25:26.470 --> 00:25:30.550
You're making me think about what dialogue normally, let's say, amounts to.
00:25:30.790 --> 00:25:37.790
The interiority of character. Maybe something in the past that is revealed over the course of a conversation.
00:25:38.510 --> 00:25:45.510
Maybe some conclusion. Because, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking of is that how much does really
00:25:45.510 --> 00:25:52.630
happen in a play? You know what I mean, as opposed to a film, say, how much really happens in
00:25:52.630 --> 00:25:56.990
a play at the level of action versus, say, of dialogue? I don't know.
00:25:57.070 --> 00:26:00.630
I'm going off the track of where my train of thought was originally taking me.
00:26:00.630 --> 00:26:05.750
But, yeah, it depends. But usually it's quite confined in terms of time span and place.
00:26:05.750 --> 00:26:11.710
Not always. There are Shakespeare plays in which the. Yeah, there's a lot of different settings and scenes.
00:26:11.710 --> 00:26:16.590
And a lot he conveyed, just like a film would. There's the. The scope.
00:26:17.470 --> 00:26:23.510
That sort of background scope feels much bigger than what we actually ever see on stage.
00:26:23.510 --> 00:26:29.790
You know, we get a sense of time passing and big events going on and a world beyond.
00:26:29.790 --> 00:26:37.230
But usually we are getting restricted, quite restricted to some very
00:26:37.230 --> 00:26:39.430
local space and time.
00:26:39.510 --> 00:26:43.590
Right? That's true. There are murders on stage. There are all kinds of things.
00:26:43.830 --> 00:26:51.110
But also, I think a lot. A lot in plays is, say, moved out of the realm of physical action
00:26:51.110 --> 00:26:58.150
and inserted into speech. It's put into speech. You know, an obvious example that springs to mind is
00:26:58.550 --> 00:27:04.380
Oedipus, where everything that he's done really kind of precedes the action of the play.
00:27:04.380 --> 00:27:11.500
And in the play, through dialogue, we're watching him come to the realization of the significance of events which
00:27:11.740 --> 00:27:19.020
predate, you know, the start of the action of the play. So, I don't know, it just occurs to me that maybe rather than doing something
00:27:19.020 --> 00:27:26.140
insanely different from what we come to expect from a play or an experience in the theater,
00:27:26.460 --> 00:27:33.700
Godot is radical for leaning into an already present phenomenon all the way.
00:27:34.500 --> 00:27:42.180
So that the action of the play really Just does become word games, circular types
00:27:42.180 --> 00:27:49.500
of constructions where we're waiting for one or the other character to get back to their original
00:27:49.500 --> 00:27:56.540
train of thought or to think of the thing that they wanted to say, or to finish the other's, or give
00:27:56.540 --> 00:28:01.370
a counterpoint to the other's idea. In other words, maybe it's just an exaggerated.
00:28:02.090 --> 00:28:06.090
You know, it's not doing something different. It's just doing something sort of metatheatrical.
00:28:06.330 --> 00:28:10.170
Maybe that's just an obvious point and I've taken the long way to get there.
00:28:10.490 --> 00:28:17.530
But in this opening line that you've already pointed to, where Estragon is saying nothing to be done, and he's talking about the difficulty of pulling
00:28:17.530 --> 00:28:24.170
off his boot, I thought about this sentence quite a bit and the implications of it.
00:28:24.330 --> 00:28:28.560
Nothing to be done. So, you know, it's a passive construction, obviously.
00:28:28.560 --> 00:28:34.840
It removes the actual subject from the sentence and takes the object and puts it into the subject position.
00:28:35.240 --> 00:28:42.680
So not we can do nothing, but nothing to be done. It got me thinking about, because of that, that passive
00:28:42.680 --> 00:28:50.000
construction, this difference between the idea of doing nothing and the idea of being nothing, the nothing
00:28:50.000 --> 00:28:57.320
that is idling and stasis and just sort of, say, vamping, for lack of a better term, since that's kind of a comedy word
00:28:57.320 --> 00:29:02.740
or a vaudeville wor. And then the nothing of cancellation or negation, the nothing of being.
00:29:03.140 --> 00:29:10.420
I think with idling and vamping, what sustains the doing nothing is a kind of
00:29:10.900 --> 00:29:16.420
circularity rather than the canceling out of the being nothing.
00:29:16.420 --> 00:29:19.500
Obviously, you can't do a play about being nothing because it would just be.
00:29:19.500 --> 00:29:25.700
The curtains would open and there would be nothing there, and then you would go home, which I think Beckett, like, almost did something like that.
00:29:25.700 --> 00:29:29.020
Didn't he just do a play where there was just a mouth talking on stage and that was it.
00:29:29.020 --> 00:29:29.460
Ye.
00:29:30.240 --> 00:29:36.800
So he almost got there. All of that to say that Estragon starts by saying nothing to be done.
00:29:37.280 --> 00:29:44.520
It actually has a kind of application to the boot. Even though the boot ultimately leaves
00:29:44.520 --> 00:29:51.560
him nowhere, his efforts leave him nowhere. But the action of trying to pull that off
00:29:51.560 --> 00:29:57.360
and repeatedly failing, the result is ultimately nothing. And then Vladimir's words which follow.
00:29:58.000 --> 00:30:05.050
I'm beginning to come round to that opinion, hint at the circularity inside the
00:30:05.290 --> 00:30:11.610
nothingness, the sort of tempest in a teapot quality that I think recurs over and over again in these bits throughout the play.
00:30:11.930 --> 00:30:19.050
And then the longer speech that he begins with, you know, all my life I tried to put it from me saying, vladimir, be reasonable.
00:30:19.050 --> 00:30:22.490
You haven't yet tried everything, and I resumed the struggle.
00:30:23.210 --> 00:30:29.660
So that too, I see often in Vladimir's speech a kind of circularity in it.
00:30:29.820 --> 00:30:36.140
And so in this he's describing, like, trying to get his arms around something and then ultimately failing and he's back at the beginning.
00:30:36.380 --> 00:30:39.900
Yeah, it really reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus a bit.
00:30:40.540 --> 00:30:41.180
Absolutely.
00:30:41.180 --> 00:30:45.740
A lot in this. And of course, there's a lot of, you know, existentialist readings of the play.
00:30:45.740 --> 00:30:53.180
But, yeah, I'm interested in all of these various expressions of nothingness, which ultimately
00:30:53.180 --> 00:30:58.900
are about traveling quite, quite a ways to get back to the beginning.
00:30:58.900 --> 00:31:06.100
So to get functionally nowhere versus in almost like a taxonomy of nothingness, a sort of more
00:31:06.100 --> 00:31:13.380
negative view of life. An idea of total negation that
00:31:13.380 --> 00:31:17.260
one would think would be suggested by some of this language.
00:31:17.500 --> 00:31:24.540
One of the most famous lines, certainly from the play, about giving birth astride a grave, that seems to me an expression of the idea
00:31:24.540 --> 00:31:31.660
of being nothing or of nothing being right. The play doesn't end in a death or anything
00:31:31.660 --> 00:31:37.300
like that. Instead it ends in this sort of perpetual vamping and dilation of time.
00:31:37.539 --> 00:31:44.580
Maybe another way of putting this is they're not being metabolized in the play, though the play exists in pairs of
00:31:44.580 --> 00:31:50.550
characters. The two are not canceling each other out. They're persistent.
00:31:50.550 --> 00:31:54.910
They refuse to be defeated by the play. Neither of them ends up dead.
00:31:55.310 --> 00:31:58.110
Neither of them ends up saved either.
00:31:58.590 --> 00:32:06.310
If you're trying to write a scene in a play or movie, you're told there's gotta be some element of conflict and struggle in order to elicit
00:32:06.310 --> 00:32:13.750
the attention of the audience. And that you're right. And that attention is very picky and discriminating and not
00:32:13.750 --> 00:32:20.800
easy to hold. And then in scenes that are very dialogue based rather than action based, right, you
00:32:20.800 --> 00:32:28.600
might introduce an element of something, some sort of visual struggle, like people might be, or
00:32:28.600 --> 00:32:35.720
even just activity. A character might be doing something while talking to another character just so that there's
00:32:35.720 --> 00:32:40.240
something happening, so that there's some sort of action. And I think there's a kind of gesture to that, right?
00:32:40.240 --> 00:32:46.040
With Estragon trying to take off his boots in the beginning and not being able to.
00:32:46.040 --> 00:32:50.600
That's a perfectly fine premise for an entire scene, especially a slapstick scene, right?
00:32:50.600 --> 00:32:54.480
You could bake as much of that as you want. And then he gives up.
00:32:54.720 --> 00:33:01.760
And then Vladimir sort of picks up on that and thematizes it or dramatizes it.
00:33:02.160 --> 00:33:10.270
Makes it more about life, right? Assimilates it to the idea that he's been struggling
00:33:10.510 --> 00:33:18.310
and he's tried everything, but here they are again. And of course, what he actually says is, so there you are again, Estragon
00:33:18.310 --> 00:33:22.390
says. Am I right? He seems to speaking to your concept of nothing.
00:33:22.390 --> 00:33:29.470
He seems to have forgotten whether or not he even exists or at least whether he's standing in
00:33:29.470 --> 00:33:37.240
this particular place at this particular time. You're given a little bit of hope in the beginning that, oh yeah, maybe this will be about some well
00:33:37.240 --> 00:33:44.400
defined significant life struggle, as it would be in an ordinary play, and it'll be resolved tragically
00:33:44.400 --> 00:33:51.520
in one way, or there'll be a happy ending or something like that, but it's never going to be given any content except for the waiting for
00:33:51.520 --> 00:33:58.720
Godot. And so Godot is. The whole. Is a little. Right. The whole concept of it is a bit of a parody of
00:33:58.720 --> 00:34:02.560
suspense and dramatic resolution. Godot is just the stand in.
00:34:02.560 --> 00:34:11.040
It's a way of referring to plot structure in a way. And instead of being told the content of suspense,
00:34:11.440 --> 00:34:18.480
we are just given something, a name, something very hollow, and asked to be curious about
00:34:18.480 --> 00:34:23.440
that, whether you know, who Godot is and whether he's going to actually show up and all that.
00:34:23.440 --> 00:34:25.200
But none of that is ever going to be satisfied.
00:34:25.440 --> 00:34:33.600
Yeah, I love that. The boot sort of being transformed in speech into life itself in Vladimir's
00:34:33.600 --> 00:34:41.760
misapprehension of Estragon. So we have something material then transposed in language into something abstract,
00:34:42.480 --> 00:34:50.160
which is then commented on for its own meaninglessness. So it's almost like the boot disappears and goes
00:34:50.160 --> 00:34:57.780
out into the ether over the course of that little exchange. And that routinely, I think, happens over the course of the play, another
00:34:58.020 --> 00:35:02.980
place maybe where we can go and sort of talk of this pronoun thing.
00:35:02.980 --> 00:35:09.980
Nothing to be done, you know, has a sort of maybe implied pronoun like nothing to be done about it, which later, Vladimir will supply.
00:35:09.980 --> 00:35:17.100
All my life I've tried to put it from me, as we've already said, but then on page two in the discussion of, you know, maybe
00:35:17.100 --> 00:35:24.190
of suicide, which you don't really understand that it's about suicide until part of the way into it, Vladimir says, when I think of it
00:35:24.270 --> 00:35:31.070
all these years, but for me, where would you be? You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute.
00:35:31.070 --> 00:35:37.870
No doubt about it. Estragon says, and what of it? And Vladimir, it's too much for one man.
00:35:38.030 --> 00:35:41.230
On the other hand, what's the good of losing heart? Now? That's what I say.
00:35:41.390 --> 00:35:44.350
We should have thought of it a million years ago. In the 90s.
00:35:44.830 --> 00:35:48.310
So the. It just keeps being. It's so actually difficult to track.
00:35:48.310 --> 00:35:55.600
It keeps being changed or displaced. But, you know, at first, when I think of it, the it
00:35:55.600 --> 00:36:00.640
there is the abuse, I guess, that's being visited on Estragon every night.
00:36:00.640 --> 00:36:05.120
He's getting beaten up, and then he says, no doubt about it.
00:36:05.120 --> 00:36:12.920
Which is. I guess you'd call that a situational pronoun where you're just referring to kind of a whole circumstance
00:36:12.920 --> 00:36:17.690
rather than any one. One particular thing. And then it's too much for one man.
00:36:17.690 --> 00:36:22.290
Again, situational. We should have thought of it a million years ago in the 90s.
00:36:22.530 --> 00:36:29.010
And the it. We learn later when he says, hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, that it is actually suicide.
00:36:29.170 --> 00:36:35.810
Yeah. So what is. And they wouldn't even let us up. They tried to go up and commit suicide, but weren't let up.
00:36:35.810 --> 00:36:40.770
Yeah. Now they wouldn't let us up. He's imagining that they wouldn't be let up.
00:36:40.770 --> 00:36:41.170
Yeah.
00:36:41.510 --> 00:36:48.830
Yeah. I was wondering if the suggestion is that again, we're being invited to give these symbolic readings, but these
00:36:48.830 --> 00:36:53.150
guys, they're in purgatory or hell because they've committed suicide.
00:36:53.150 --> 00:36:54.710
I think that seems to be the suggestion.
00:36:54.790 --> 00:36:57.270
Oh, I see. No, interesting.
00:36:57.590 --> 00:37:02.950
Or they were thinking about it. They're caught in the situation where they're constantly thinking about suicide.
00:37:03.030 --> 00:37:05.750
Isn't that. I may be misreading this. Isn't that the suggestion?
00:37:05.750 --> 00:37:09.060
Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first.
00:37:09.380 --> 00:37:13.660
Among the first to jump off in the 90s. When was the Eiffel Tower built?
00:37:13.660 --> 00:37:15.940
Yeah, I think in the late 1880s.
00:37:16.500 --> 00:37:24.020
We get almost no proper name, references to places. We get this, and then we get Macon
00:37:24.180 --> 00:37:26.260
Yeah, I never thought of that.
00:37:26.340 --> 00:37:31.860
Those sort of transcend this weird world that they're in. Right.
00:37:32.500 --> 00:37:39.440
It's almost like they pierce the veil and speak to some previous concrete, richer realities.
00:37:39.440 --> 00:37:43.320
So I want to point that out, even though I think you're right.
00:37:43.320 --> 00:37:50.400
We're meant to sort of reject, ultimately, an allegorical reading or a symbolic reading or it's supposed to fall apart at some point, but we certainly are invited
00:37:50.400 --> 00:37:55.440
to it in various ways, especially in the beginning, and then we'll get to this in a second.
00:37:55.440 --> 00:37:56.840
But the talk of Christ and all
00:37:56.840 --> 00:38:00.720
that stuff, I'm really intrigued by that. I never saw it that way.
00:38:00.880 --> 00:38:07.940
So you're saying, in other words, you could take the purgatorial reading of this even more literally by assuming that they have already done this, but
00:38:07.940 --> 00:38:09.660
that they are in fact dead.
00:38:09.900 --> 00:38:13.020
Or. What's the alternative reading of this?
00:38:13.420 --> 00:38:17.900
We should have thought of it a million years. So we should have killed ourselves before it got to this point.
00:38:18.140 --> 00:38:22.860
So we should have killed ourselves long ago. And now we've been vamping ever since.
00:38:22.860 --> 00:38:27.420
So they're in the sort of afterlife of their usefulness.
00:38:27.820 --> 00:38:31.420
No, I think you're right about this. And I was confused because.
00:38:32.320 --> 00:38:34.400
Yeah, I mean, literally. Right. We should have thought of it.
00:38:34.720 --> 00:38:38.080
We would have been among the first, I think. Must be what it meant, what it means.
00:38:38.160 --> 00:38:42.720
Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. Yeah. So they had the opportunity.
00:38:42.720 --> 00:38:44.000
Okay, Right.
00:38:44.160 --> 00:38:48.279
Which is the way I initially read it. And then I thought, well, if they're in purgatory, maybe they actually did it.
00:38:48.279 --> 00:38:50.080
So anyway, yeah, that's really interesting.
00:38:50.080 --> 00:38:55.760
But I think, yeah, the reading that they had the chance to do and didn't, I mean, that is, you know, the reading that's more faithful to what.
00:38:55.760 --> 00:39:00.330
To what the text actually is saying. So. Well, thinking about suicide's a sin too.
00:39:00.890 --> 00:39:01.610
Just kidding.
00:39:01.610 --> 00:39:08.250
Yeah. So another rich moment for pronouns is when they start to talk about the thieves.
00:39:08.410 --> 00:39:12.410
So we should get into that parable. This is getting alarming.
00:39:12.730 --> 00:39:17.050
Vladimir says. And then he says, one of the thieves was saved.
00:39:17.770 --> 00:39:24.090
It's a reasonable percentage, I suppose. 50% is the meaning of it.
00:39:24.170 --> 00:39:27.450
And it's a reasonable percentage because there are two thieves.
00:39:28.600 --> 00:39:35.960
Suppose we repented. I'll tell you the truth. These lines. Suppose we repented.
00:39:35.960 --> 00:39:42.040
Repented what? Oh, we wouldn't have to go into the details. Our being born is maybe the weakest part of the play for me.
00:39:42.440 --> 00:39:47.240
I'm not convinced by this part at all. The idea of repentance.
00:39:47.400 --> 00:39:52.440
I don't know what they would have to repent for. And they don't know either, since they can't remember anything anyway.
00:39:52.680 --> 00:39:57.650
Vladimir asks Estragon, did you ever read the Bible? Estragon says, the Bible?
00:39:57.730 --> 00:40:01.090
I must have taken a look at it. Do you remember the Gospels?
00:40:01.170 --> 00:40:04.610
Vladimir asks. Estragon replies, I remember the maps of the Holy Land.
00:40:04.610 --> 00:40:10.290
Colored. They were very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty.
00:40:10.450 --> 00:40:13.810
That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon.
00:40:13.810 --> 00:40:17.570
We'll swim. We'll be happy. Vladimir says, you should have been a poet.
00:40:17.810 --> 00:40:22.210
And Estragon says, I was gesturing towards his rags. Isn't that obvious?
00:40:26.000 --> 00:40:30.560
Anyway, so Vladimir says, ah, yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story?
00:40:31.200 --> 00:40:38.200
No. Shall I tell it to you? No, it'll pass the time. Two thieves crucified at
00:40:38.200 --> 00:40:45.120
the same time as our Savior. One estragon cuts in our what? Vladimir says our Savior.
00:40:45.200 --> 00:40:51.770
Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other damned estragon.
00:40:51.930 --> 00:40:58.930
Saved from what? Vladimir? Hell, I'm going. Vladimir.
00:40:58.930 --> 00:41:06.130
And yet how is it this is not boring you, I hope? How is it that four of the evangelists, that of the four evangelists, only one
00:41:06.130 --> 00:41:13.130
speaks of a thief being saved? The four of them were there or thereabouts, and only one speaks of a thief being saved.
00:41:14.250 --> 00:41:18.770
And then a bit later, one out of four of the other three, two don't mention any thieves at all.
00:41:18.850 --> 00:41:24.650
And the third says that both of them abused him. So it seems like good odds at first.
00:41:24.650 --> 00:41:31.690
Basically, one of the thieves is saved of the two. But then it occurs to Vladimir, actually the numbers are not
00:41:31.690 --> 00:41:39.250
as promising because one of the two is saved. In one of the four of the stories and
00:41:39.730 --> 00:41:46.800
in the other three evangelists accounts, in the other three gospels, the thief being saved
00:41:46.800 --> 00:41:53.880
story is not mentioned at all. So this, I guess, erodes his coin toss faith
00:41:53.960 --> 00:41:59.480
in salvation and turns it into more like less than an eighth of.
00:41:59.480 --> 00:42:04.280
An eighth of a chance that you would be saved. Something like that.
00:42:04.600 --> 00:42:12.560
Right. I think we're meant to wonder perhaps whether they are thieves or, you know, that's again, what
00:42:12.560 --> 00:42:18.680
they're doing in this purgatory like place. And what they're waiting for perhaps is salvation.
00:42:18.680 --> 00:42:22.680
I mean, they even say it's to be saved and it's salvation is what they're waiting for.
00:42:23.240 --> 00:42:29.040
They'll be saved if only Godot comes. But there's also an element to this which seems like a crisis of faith, Right?
00:42:29.040 --> 00:42:33.480
Based on testimonial evidence. Is the testimonial evidence reliable?
00:42:33.560 --> 00:42:40.630
Is the Bible reliable? In other words, are we actually. Is the thing that we're waiting for, does that actually
00:42:40.790 --> 00:42:47.990
exist? Meanwhile, estragon is not even attuned to that function
00:42:47.990 --> 00:42:55.110
of the Bible. For him, it was a vacation brochure and a very ironic one because I don't think the Dead
00:42:55.110 --> 00:42:59.830
Sea is supposed to think that you're going to slake your thirst.
00:42:59.830 --> 00:43:02.870
Right. So what are the associations of the Dead Sea in the Bible?
00:43:03.030 --> 00:43:10.040
Sodom and Gomorrah. How's that related to the Dead Sea? The Jordan Valley is once lush and fertile, and the Dead
00:43:10.040 --> 00:43:13.760
Sea is kind of the result of God laying waste. I think that might be true.
00:43:14.160 --> 00:43:17.760
I think so it's at the border of the. I mean, it's east of Eden Right.
00:43:18.960 --> 00:43:25.920
It's on the eastern side. And I guess the prophecy is that there are prophecies concerning the sea, that it will come alive or something.
00:43:26.160 --> 00:43:30.100
I think the association is to some sort of desolation. Right.
00:43:30.100 --> 00:43:34.740
And they're in a desolate place themselves Right. Now, maybe they are at the Dead Sea, so to speak.
00:43:34.820 --> 00:43:41.860
But for Estragon, it's the fact that the maps were colored and therefore that because the Dead
00:43:41.860 --> 00:43:45.060
Sea was in blue, he took the signifier as the signified. Right.
00:43:45.300 --> 00:43:51.780
So if it's pale blue on the map, then it must be something that's going to slake my thirst.
00:43:52.180 --> 00:43:55.180
And as usual. Right. Estragon is very attuned to this. Right.
00:43:55.180 --> 00:44:02.110
His. He's hungry or he's thirsty or this or that. He's very attuned to satisfying various bodily needs or whatever.
00:44:02.350 --> 00:44:07.070
Whereas Vladimir can get more abstract and philosophical. So here they just.
00:44:07.230 --> 00:44:13.310
As usual, they just talk past each other. I don't know why Vladimir thinks this makes him a poet.
00:44:14.110 --> 00:44:21.190
I guess that's a way of giving a very generous reading to
00:44:21.190 --> 00:44:22.830
what it is that Estragon is saying.
00:44:23.120 --> 00:44:26.000
You don't think it's. You don't think this moment is lovely?
00:44:26.240 --> 00:44:26.720
Yeah.
00:44:26.720 --> 00:44:28.640
I think what Estragon says is really nice.
00:44:28.880 --> 00:44:32.240
They do, you know, they do have a lot of affection for each other.
00:44:32.400 --> 00:44:35.440
Yeah. Is this their honeymoon? I know it's not, but.
00:44:35.440 --> 00:44:39.680
Yeah. Well, the word honeymoon is also an odd. Right. We'll go there for a honeymoon.
00:44:40.480 --> 00:44:40.960
Yeah.
00:44:41.120 --> 00:44:41.760
Lovers.
00:44:42.160 --> 00:44:47.280
One can imagine. Yeah. That he's talking about his prior life, his prior existence.
00:44:47.280 --> 00:44:54.510
But this too makes me think of. Makes me think of Laurel and Hardy expressing a sort of male female
00:44:54.510 --> 00:45:01.510
dynamic, often in the two Men comedy routine where they're kind of in a marriage, and often one or the other
00:45:01.510 --> 00:45:08.590
of them, but primarily one will express more of the feminine characteristics of that pairing than the other,
00:45:08.830 --> 00:45:15.960
which then, of course makes me think about estrogen. But, yeah, you know, I'm sure there are lots
00:45:15.960 --> 00:45:18.960
of readings of that, but it is in Laurel and Hardy.
00:45:18.960 --> 00:45:26.320
Yeah. With regard to estragon. So. Yeah. Meaning tarragon, which makes me think of tarragon.
00:45:26.320 --> 00:45:33.680
So it's like a, you know, very commonly used French herb or commonly used in French cooking, including in bearnaise
00:45:33.680 --> 00:45:40.560
sauce, which I immediately associated to. Just because we read it recently, Julius Caesar and Casca.
00:45:40.790 --> 00:45:47.870
Right. Brutus thinks he's dull, and then Cassius says, well, he gives sauce to his wits or something like
00:45:47.870 --> 00:45:54.950
that. By basically being like a common man and speaking the way the common people speak,
00:45:55.030 --> 00:45:58.630
almost like a Politician sauce to his wit so that it'll go down easier.
00:45:58.630 --> 00:46:04.310
And I thought, well, maybe the idea is that Estragon is supposed to balance out the wit.
00:46:04.790 --> 00:46:09.610
He's supposed to, in a way, be sauce to the wit of Vladimir.
00:46:10.410 --> 00:46:15.610
In other words, he's much more concrete and much more focused on the body and much more.
00:46:16.170 --> 00:46:21.450
That's the kind of concreteness that you need in writing or performance to keep it too interesting.
00:46:21.450 --> 00:46:26.170
If it gets too abstract, then you lose interest. But of course, he's not very saucy.
00:46:28.490 --> 00:46:31.290
He's not rich enough to actually rise to the level of the sauce.
00:46:31.290 --> 00:46:38.320
So he's just stuck being tarragon. He's not balancing out. He's not balancing out Vladimir's wit
00:46:38.630 --> 00:46:45.910
or Vladimir's sort of rational consciousness very much. He's just being stuck in.
00:46:46.310 --> 00:46:49.350
Or maybe he is, but I prefer Estragon.
00:46:49.350 --> 00:46:51.430
I think he. I'm just. I don't know.
00:46:51.750 --> 00:46:54.070
Yeah, well, I mean, I prefer neither of them, but.
00:46:54.070 --> 00:46:56.150
No, I was gonna say. I'm just making that up.
00:46:58.550 --> 00:47:03.270
I think the second part of the play is a bit boring. The first part, I think, is quite entertaining, actually.
00:47:03.430 --> 00:47:07.110
But to see it redone and with that entropy aspect that I think you mentioned.
00:47:07.110 --> 00:47:13.090
Right. To see it fall apart even more, there's something a bit painful about that and tedious.
00:47:13.490 --> 00:47:20.490
So I enjoy. You know, I especially enjoyed the first act and I enjoy these two characters and their relationship,
00:47:20.490 --> 00:47:24.610
but I can't say that they. Right. Are they fully fleshed out?
00:47:24.610 --> 00:47:27.490
Are they not? There's actually. That's a difficult question to answer.
00:47:27.810 --> 00:47:34.810
Again, so it's not just allegory. They're not just symbols. You know, it's not like Vladimir is just ego and Estragon
00:47:34.810 --> 00:47:38.850
is ID or something like that. And they don't have any. They don't have a life of their own.
00:47:38.850 --> 00:47:46.180
They do have a life of their own. They are characters. It's just that they are caught in this timeless, memoryless place.
00:47:46.180 --> 00:47:50.340
Right. There's not much content that they can use to give to their characters.
00:47:50.340 --> 00:47:57.700
So, for instance, they can't really. We get the one Eiffel Tower reference and a couple of other references, but otherwise there's
00:47:57.700 --> 00:48:02.060
no memory. There's no talk of what they did in the past. We don't know what their jobs are.
00:48:02.060 --> 00:48:06.220
If they were. Maybe they're tramps, as they're usually a bum anyway.
00:48:06.220 --> 00:48:06.820
Tramps.
00:48:07.250 --> 00:48:11.650
Yeah. Wes, maybe we can talk just a little bit about the tramp at the beginning of part two.
00:48:11.810 --> 00:48:19.410
I do think that's an interesting element of These characters, something that helps them to maybe take on a bit more shape
00:48:19.410 --> 00:48:27.290
as characters or gives them a little bit of a history in the cultural imagination that they can use
00:48:27.290 --> 00:48:33.500
to sort of get along in our minds. That helps to advance them as characters for us a little bit.
00:48:33.500 --> 00:48:34.780
Lucky and Pozzo.
00:48:34.860 --> 00:48:36.700
Yes, Lucky and Pozzo. That's right.
00:48:36.700 --> 00:48:37.500
All right, thank you.
00:48:37.820 --> 00:48:38.460
Thank you.

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