By Lechi Eke
It is imperative to understand that the prefix “post” in Postmodernism does not indicate a new era, but it indicates a reaction against modernism. The 1969 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, Samuel Beckett, was a major player in the advent of Postmodernism Literature. His work helps celebrate the development of Literature away from modernism.
It is recorded that Beckett who was friends with James Joyce (author of the stream-of-consciousness novel, Ulysses) had a revelation that in order to escape the modernism influence of Joyce, he would have to focus on “the poverty of language and man as a failure.” In his world-renowned play, Waiting for Godot (1955), he depicted the inability of man to communicate with language. His two major characters in the play are caught in an inescapable situation trying ineffectively to communicate.
World War II with its disregard for human rights as seen in the Geneva Convention demonstrated by the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, Katyn massacre, Tokyo fire-bombing and the Japanese American internment brought about a revolution in the perception that spread to literary writing. Also, Postmodernism implies a reaction to significant postwar events, the beginning of the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, post colonialism and post-colonial Literature. Still on its heel was the rise of personal computer (cyberpunk and hypertext fiction).
Some literary critics have pinned the beginning of Postmodernism to John Hawke’s novel The Cannibal published in 1949. But other books were in tow, books like Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot or the performance of the play which took place in 1953 with a French title En attendant Godot, or the first publication of a collection of poems, Howl (for Carl Solomon) by Allen Ginseng written in 1956 or The Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs) in 1959. Also Jacques Derrida’s 1966 lecture in critical theory titled Structure, Sign and Play has been regarded by many as that which marked the beginning of Postmodernism Literature.
While modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominance, postmodernism are primarily concerned with questions of ontology (that which deals with abstract entities as a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature and relations of being).
One writer wrote this about Samuel Beckett:
Beckett’s works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres… Beckett’s last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988) breaks down the barriers between drama, fiction & poetry) with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work… He was definitely one the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters.
Waiting for Godot is a play in which two men meet near a tree and spend time conversing about different topics which later reveal they are both waiting for the same person, a man named Godot, who never comes.
As they wait and chat, two other men enter, one named Pozzo, and his slave named Lucky. Pozzo is on his way to the market to sell his slave, Lucky. While they stop briefly to chat with Vladimir and Estragon, the slave, Lucky, entertains them by dancing and thinking.
When these two depart, a boy enters who tells the two men that he’s a messenger from Godot and that he will not come that day. The two men thereafter decide to go, but do not move until the curtain falls.
Another night, the following night, the two men meet again near the tree. Pozzo and his slave, Lucky come by again, but this time, Pozzo is blind and does not remember meeting Vladimir and Estragon the previous night, and Lucky is dumb. After they are gone, the boy from Godot enters again with the same message of the previous night that Godot won’t come today, but will definitely come tomorrow, and he denies that he saw them the previous night.
The boy leaves; the two men decide to leave, but do not, until curtain falls again, which is the final curtain.
Godot in Waiting for Godot can be taken for God, and Waiting for Godot is a satire on Christianity, an attack on man’s dependence on religion which the playwright regards as an illusion. The two major characters (Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo)) in the play exhibit a hopelessness which marks the meaninglessness of existence. The themes of the play are nihilism and absurdism, the human condition, and friendship.
Below are excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s play categorized under the genre, Theatre of the Absurd:
A country road. A tree. Evening.
Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.
As before. Enter Vladimir.
ESTRAGON:
(giving up again). Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR:
(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.
ESTRAGON:
Am I?
VLADIMIR:
I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.
ESTRAGON:
Me too.
VLADIMIR:
Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
ESTRAGON:
(irritably). Not now, not now.
VLADIMIR:
(hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?
ESTRAGON:
In a ditch.
VLADIMIR:
(admiringly). A ditch! Where?
ESTRAGON:
(without gesture). Over there.
VLADIMIR:
And they didn’t beat you?
ESTRAGON:
Beat me? Certainly they beat me.
VLADIMIR:
The same lot as usual?
ESTRAGON:
The same? I don’t know.
VLADIMIR:
When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . (Decisively.) You’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.
ESTRAGON:
And what of it?
VLADIMIR:
(gloomily). It’s too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) 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 nineties.
ESTRAGON:
Ah stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing.
VLADIMIR:
Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it’s too late. They wouldn’t even let us up. (Estragon tears at his boot.) What are you doing?
ESTRAGON:
Taking off my boot. Did that never happen to you?
VLADIMIR:
Boots must be taken off every day, I’m tired telling you that. Why don’t you listen to me?
ESTRAGON:
(feebly). Help me!
VLADIMIR:
It hurts?
ESTRAGON:
(angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
VLADIMIR:
(angrily). No one ever suffers but you. I don’t count. I’d like to hear what you’d say if you had what I have.
ESTRAGON:
It hurts?
VLADIMIR:
(angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
ESTRAGON:
(pointing). You might button it all the same.
VLADIMIR:
(stooping). True. (He buttons his fly.) Never neglect the little things of life.
ESTRAGON:
What do you expect, you always wait till the last moment.
VLADIMIR:
(musingly). The last moment . . . (He meditates.) Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?
ESTRAGON:
Why don’t you help me?
VLADIMIR:
Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer. (He takes off his hat, peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.) How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time . . . (he searches for the word) . . . appalled. (With emphasis.) AP-PALLED. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it.) Funny. (He knocks on the crown as though to dislodge a foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.) Nothing to be done. (Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot. He peers inside it, feels about inside it, turns it upside down, shakes it, looks on the ground to see if anything has fallen out, finds nothing, feels inside it again, staring sightlessly before him.) Well?
ESTRAGON:
Nothing.
VLADIMIR:
Show me.
ESTRAGON:
There’s nothing to show.
VLADIMIR:
Try and put it on again.
ESTRAGON:
(examining his foot). I’ll air it for a bit.
VLADIMIR:
There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it, feels about inside it, knocks on the crown, blows into it, puts it on again.) This is getting alarming. (Silence. Vladimir deep in thought, Estragon pulling at his toes.) One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It’s a reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo.
ESTRAGON:
What?
VLADIMIR:
Suppose we repented.
ESTRAGON:
Repented what?
VLADIMIR:
Oh . . . (He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details.
ESTRAGON:
Our being born?
Vladimir breaks into a hearty laugh which he immediately stifles, his hand pressed to his pubis, his face contorted.
VLADIMIR:
One daren’t even laugh any more.
ESTRAGON:
Dreadful privation.
VLADIMIR:
Merely smile. (He smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly.) It’s not the same thing. Nothing to be done. (Pause.) Gogo.
ESTRAGON:
(irritably). What is it?
VLADIMIR:
Did you ever read the Bible?
ESTRAGON:
The Bible . . . (He reflects.) I must have taken a look at it.
VLADIMIR:
Do you remember the Gospels?
ESTRAGON:
I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured 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:
You should have been a poet.
ESTRAGON:
I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
Where was I . . . How’s your foot?
ESTRAGON:
Swelling visibly.
VLADIMIR:
Ah yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story?
ESTRAGON:
No.
VLADIMIR:
Shall I tell it to you?
ESTRAGON:
No.
VLADIMIR:
It’ll pass the time. (Pause.) Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. One—
ESTRAGON:
Our what?
VLADIMIR:
Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other . . . (he searches for the contrary of saved) . . . damned.
ESTRAGON:
Saved from what?
VLADIMIR:
Hell.
ESTRAGON:
I’m going.
He does not move.
VLADIMIR:
And yet . . . (pause) . . . how is it –this is not boring you I hope– how is it 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. (Pause.) Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a while?
ESTRAGON:
(with exaggerated enthusiasm). I find this really most extraordinarily interesting.
VLADIMIR:
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.
ESTRAGON:
Who?
VLADIMIR:
What?
ESTRAGON:
What’s all this about? Abused who?
VLADIMIR:
The Saviour.
ESTRAGON:
Why?
VLADIMIR:
Because he wouldn’t save them.
ESTRAGON:
From hell?
VLADIMIR:
Imbecile! From death.
ESTRAGON:
I thought you said hell.
VLADIMIR:
From death, from death.
ESTRAGON:
Well what of it?
VLADIMIR:
Then the two of them must have been damned.
ESTRAGON:
And why not?
VLADIMIR:
But one of the four says that one of the two was saved.
ESTRAGON:
Well? They don’t agree and that’s all there is to it.
VLADIMIR:
But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?
ESTRAGON:
Who believes him?
VLADIMIR:
Everybody. It’s the only version they know.
ESTRAGON:
People are bloody ignorant apes.
He rises painfully, goes limping to extreme left, halts, gazes into distance off with his hand screening his eyes, turns, goes to extreme right, gazes into distance. Vladimir watches him, then goes and picks up the boot, peers into it, drops it hastily.
VLADIMIR:
Pah!
He spits. Estragon moves to center, halts with his back to auditorium.
ESTRAGON:
Charming spot. (He turns, advances to front, halts facing auditorium.) Inspiring prospects. (He turns to Vladimir.) Let’s go.
VLADIMIR:
We can’t.
ESTRAGON:
Why not?
VLADIMIR:
We’re waiting for Godot.
ESTRAGON:
(despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure it was here?
VLADIMIR:
What?
ESTRAGON:
That we were to wait.
VLADIMIR:
He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others?
ESTRAGON:
What is it?
VLADIMIR:
I don’t know. A willow.
ESTRAGON:
Where are the leaves?
VLADIMIR:
It must be dead.
ESTRAGON:
No more weeping.
VLADIMIR:
Or perhaps it’s not the season.
ESTRAGON:
Looks to me more like a bush.
VLADIMIR:
A shrub.
ESTRAGON:
A bush.
VLADIMIR:
A—. What are you insinuating? That we’ve come to the wrong place?
ESTRAGON:
He should be here.
VLADIMIR:
He didn’t say for sure he’d come.
ESTRAGON:
And if he doesn’t come?
VLADIMIR:
We’ll come back tomorrow.
Editor’s Note: Your favourite Inside Literature column which has been on recess in the last two weeks is back with a bang. Sit down and savour the intellectual meal as we serve you two articles in one day hot and spicy.