Beckett the Prophet

The peg for Robert Zaretsky’s essay on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot feels flimsy: “the 70th anniversary of its American premiere,” which lagged the show’s proper premiere, in Paris, by three years. Disregard the peg; as Zaretsky makes clear, there’s not a bad time, these days, to consider Beckett’s best-known work, a demonstration of “solidarity and compassion” set against a “featureless, colorless vista.” The stage directions for Godot have Estragon, one of the play’s leads, look out into the auditorium as an extension of the devastation. “Inspiring prospects,” he says. Let’s hope so.

Of course, Godot never arrives. In a Sesame Street parody of the play, the tree, fed up with the melodramatic and nonsensical patter of two Muppets waiting for Elmo, uproots itself and walks off the stage. But we cannot uproot ourselves and walk off the stage; instead, stuck like Didi and Gogo in a state of non-arrival, we wait. For those who waited for an answer from Beckett, none ever came. He once snapped at the English actor Ralph Richardson, who asked if Godot stood for God. If he had meant God, Beckett said, he would have written God. The play, he insisted, strove to avoid definition. This strategy of avoidance leaves us to gaze at a landscape void of meaning, one that by turns is the source of our bemusement and amusement.