Inventing Ireland (73 page)

The even deeper paradox lies in the fact that onto the
slave the master projects many of the qualities which his mastery dictates that he must suppress in himself. So Lucky, like many
subject peoples, has once pleased his master by his powers in the dance and by his uplifting, beautiful ideas: "But for him, all my thoughts, all my feelings, would have been of common things", or, again, "He even used to think very prettily once, I could listen to him for hours".
⁴⁴
Pozzo is a specialist who asks Lucky to live out on his behalf those elements which he must deny in himself; and Lucky, like the traditional clown, is given freedom to speak, but if he says too much, he can be patted on the head (or, as the case may dictate, kicked in the shins).

For here is a servant who will not just do your living, but also your dancing and your philosophy for you, and at the same time connive in his own oppression. The inevitable consequence is that the master becomes enslaved to the limitations and disabilities of his subject: and so the rope on which Pozzo "leads" Lucky becomes the cord by which Lucky confines his master. The tyranny of the weak over the strong becomes lasting indeed. In a world whose characters constantly seek and deny "likeness", the final yearning is for an escape from the endless play of metaphor into a pure declarative statement: and beyond that an escape from communication as such. Lucky exercises a strange, spellbinding power, having done just this, but he manages also to belittle the central activity of waiting for Godot with his subversive hint that the existence of a personal God would solve nothing anyway.

The relentless attempt of the tramps to demetaphorize, to stop life turning into literary material, is expressed in their aversion to theatricalization. They compel Pozzo to scale down his rhetorical excesses, in the manner of a Beckettian prose narrator who knows that
style
is less the expression of self than a means for pursuing the self:

POZZO: He wants to impress me, so that I'll keep him.

ESTRAGON: What?

POZZO: Perhaps I haven't got it quite right. He wants to mollify me, so
that I'll give up the idea of patting with him. No, that's not exactly it either.

VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him?

POZZO: He wants to cod me, but he won't.
⁴⁵

Here, already in Act One, the subservient ones (the tramps, as well as Lucky) are seen to dictate terms to the overlord at a rhetorical level, and this anticipates the second act in which they will also be his physical masters. By then, Pozzo will have been punished for his insincere, metaphorized account of a sunset in Act One by the literal and permanent fall of night over his eyes: the result, it is often said, of his refusal to see life as it really is. As Pozzo lies prostrate on the ground, Didi will deliver over his body just the kind of insincere rhetoric which Pozzo was guilty of in an earlier scene:

Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!
⁴⁶

It is a moment of rare poetic justice when such theatricality punishes the theatrical. Pozzo, the landlord who wears the clothing of English gentry, is for the moment at the mercy of mere tramps: and Didi's studied rationalizations might be seen to resemble the neutral pose adopted by most Irish in the face of England's crisis at the height of the Second World War. Instead of offering help, Didi makes a pretty speech; instead of taking upon himself the reality of Pozzo's suffering, he becomes a professor of the fact that someone else is suffering. Of course, Pozzo's punishment, like Didi's hypocrisy, is quite undeliberated: it is simply the outcome of a life spent denying the reality of his own partner's pains, which are invariably treated as mere spectacle. The atomism of life in an oppressed society leads to such a loss of communal feeling and to a disinclination among people to help one another: rather, the protagonist retreats into a posture of idiocy, in the literal sense of
idiot
as a hopelessly private person. And, ultimately, the overlord joins the underlings in a state of anomie and amnesia, becoming one of the blind from whom the things of time are hidden too.

The
attempt
by each of these protagonists to hold down a role
becomes of far more pressing concern to the audience than is any
role which each might conceivably play. The feeling which assails the audience is akin to that which might trouble friends of an amateur cast at a rickety production which is constantly verging on breakdown. It is here that the roots of Beckett's human comedy lie: in the Schopenhauerian will which pushes persons forward regardless of their capacities.
Desire is idiotic and the Beckettian protagonist is therefore ludicrous not in repose but in motion: Belacqua on his painful walks with spavined gait, Murphy on the job-hunt, Molloy on the crawl, all of them are fishes out of water. The desire of the tramps has thrust them into a locale where they are patently incongruous, and without clues as to any activity which could be other than pointless. Because they are out of role, because they are caught, indeed, between a role and a self, they are forever watching themselves, monitoring their own performances, as if living life at a remove. Their experiences are thus taken away from them even before they are completed. This is but one further reason why the suffering of Pozzo can only strike them as a distant, even ridiculous, spectacle.

In
Waiting for
Godot
the attempt to construct a person, or even a script, is finally abandoned. A stage devoid of props can provide no helpful indications as to how the protagonists might interpret their roles. Institutional behaviour, conditioned by easily visible props, might relieve a person of the task of choosing every single action with agonized deliberation, and without that support the tramps face the bleakness of freedom. But beyond all that, there is a deeper problem. The sheer energy which the tramps invest in constructing a context is one of the factors which prevents them from looking within, from "having thought", from becoming themselves. The open, undefined nature of a text, whose lines they didn't write and don't understand, alongside the extremely detailed and coercive stage directions, serves only to emphasize their unfreedom.

No sooner is a thesis or a personal attribute established in Act One than it is annulled in Act Two. Within specific scenes, a rudimentary, tentative portrait of a character might be sketched, but this impulse is always defeated within the play as a whole. The implications of this for the actor are clear: one cannot impersonate a self which just is not there. The lines must be played in the most literal sense, with a tone of irony, distance, even pointlessness. This, after all, merely mimics the authorial technique of one who asks the audience to imagine with him the making of endless "plays" and their subsequent disruption. In such a context, Pozzo's self-confident bluster, his bravura performances, may
create a momentary illusion of personality and of presence, but they cannot ultimately conceal his hollowness. Behind the mask there is no face, no authority at all. The tramps, who always suspected this, were willing for a time, as are all dependents, to indulge a superior's prevailing mood; but, in the end, they tire of a man who seems concerned only with the effect he is making. They, at least, are still obsessed with finding a self worth impersonating and, if that is not possible, of scaling down all ridiculous claims:

VLADIMIR: This is becoming really insignificant.

ESTRAGON: Not enough.
(Silence.)
⁴⁷

The play, though initially castigated for high pretentiousness, is actually not pretentious at all: it leaves a pure space between contradictory possibilities, which interpreters are wont to fill with their own desires and fore-meanings. It may well be that the safest reading is a merely descriptive account of the workings of a text which is clearly an essay on theatricality: but that will inevitably become an analysis of the power-relations which make theatricalization possible. Nor is the play a helpless diagnosis, devoid of any hope, for, although Godot fails to come, Didi does manage, very late in the proceedings, to voice his care for the sleeping Gogo and his resolution to wake from his own dream to the sufferings of the world. The speech which begins "Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?" goes on to consider a wider possibility: "At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on".
⁴⁸

In the image of that couple, bound in a rare moment of solidarity and linked to a wider chain of caring perceptors, Beckett hints at the possibility of a restored community. Yet, within a few moments, the shepherd boy reappears and reactivates Didi's faith in Godot and the entire illusion. Didi regresses and succumbs for the ignoblest of reasons: that if he didn't, he might be punished. This has been read as Beckett's commentary on the malfunction of an old-time religion based on fear, but it is much more than that. It is an indictment of all-isms – religious, colonial, political – which use the illusion of a perfect future to turn men and women away from suffering in the present.

The critic Vivian Mercier has argued that Pozzo in
Waiting for Godot
is dressed as were wicked landlords in the melodramas of Victorian Ireland (sporty bowler, riding breeches, cloak-overcoat) and Lucky in the unfastened knee-breeches, bare legs and buckled shoes which "recall
the nineteenth-century Irish peasant of
Punch
cartoons". He contends that Pozzo's insistence on the goodness of his own heart and the doglike devotion to him of Lucky are "as familiar in the mythology of the Irish landlord class as they were in that of the plantation owner of the Old South".
⁴⁹
Undeniably, Lucky conspires in his own oppression, yet, by a sort of cultivated incompetence and foot-dragging, he seems to bring his master down along with him, since even the simplest orders issued by Pozzo take an eternity to perform. Mercier's is a plausible reading, given the well-known aversion among the Irish Protestant middle class to the pretensions of a clapped-out aristocracy.

A fuller treatment of the theme, however, may be found in
Endgame,
whose central figure, the blind Hamm, barks out constant orders while doing nothing himself. He appears the very epitome of a ruling class gone rancid: "It's time it ended . . . And yet I hesitate, I hesitate ... to end".
⁵⁰
His servant yearns, on the contrary, for a "terrific" end. Clov speaks at times to Hamm with the ingratitude of a Caliban who knows that his masters language has been the medium in which his yearnings for expressive freedom have been improvised.

What keeps them onstage, however, is an unfinished script, "the dialogue".
⁵¹
Endgame
is, in fact, the most extreme example of a repeated revivalist theme: the study of the sufferings of characters who make themselves willing martyrs to an approved text. Hamm, true to his name, is a consummate actor, impersonating the sort of authority he feels he ought to be, and Clov the human nail which is driven in by the force of his master's voice. But doubts nag, and they bother Hamm as much as Clov. Hamm senses acutely enough that the authority which he represents may be non-existent, that he can never centre himself at the exact mid-point of the stage, that he is "never there".
⁵²
Clov tells him that he is lucky, for as a slave he
has
suffered and been there. If both men are marooned between an assumed role and an authentic self, then Hamm has gone far more deeply into the role, while Clov hovers painfully near to those zones in which he might become himself, those moments when he will counter what "they said to me" with "I say to myself" and become the subject of his own history.

One of the mysteries of the relationship is why Clov tolerates the tyranny of a man, who is obviously enfeebled and, in any practical sense, powerless. Hamm glories in his remaining control, taunting Clov with the possibility of opening the door to walk towards a free, beautiful landscape beyond their ravaged terrain:

HAMM: Did you ever think of one thing?

CLOV: Never.

HAMM: That here we're down in a hole. (Pause.) But beyond the hills? Eh? Perhaps it's still green. Eh? (Pause.) Flora! Pomona! (Ecstatically.) Ceres! (Pause.) Perhaps you won't need to go very far.
⁵³

This sounds like a mischievously-devised test. Earlier in their exchanges, Hamm had established that Clov will obligingly repeat whatever he chooses to decree: that there is no more nature, that there is nothing outside their shelter but a devastated landscape.

Of course, in wearily repeating these platitudes, Clov is very likely doing no more than humouring a cranky and demanding master, whose performance of despair ("Can there be misery", he stifles a yawn, "loftier than mine?")
⁵⁴
expresses more his illusion of disillusion than the real thing. A man who repeats these truisms, day in day out, may finally come to believe them: or he may not. Hamm wants to know and so he propounds his little test, but Clov doesn't take the hint. Perhaps, like Lucky, he is in love with his own servitude and cannot, at such a late stage, face the rigours of change: or perhaps, with some cunning, he divines that Hamm is testing the fidelity of his partner, employing that ultimate blackmail between lovers, when one tells the other to go, the better to savour that secret hold which usually ensures that the partner will say. When servitude is so extreme that the servant cannot contemplate freedom, then the master knows a final form of control: Clov is as in love with his subjection as Hamm is with his gloom.
Beckett, like
O'Casey, is scandalized by the apparent willingness of men and women to adapt themselves even to disaster and catastrophe. Winnie, in
Happy Days,
is but the most blatant case, buried up to her chest in sand, hating her existence, but not letting on, and thereby upsetting everybody all the more. But the lineaments of the situation were sketched most fully in
Endgame,
where habit has so deadened the servant that his eye can see only what it has been trained to see: or so it seems.