Richard Gilman
BECKETT
By now there is a large body of criticism of Beckett's
theater, some of it of a very high order: Jacques Guicharnaud's,
Hugh Kenner's, Ruby Cohn's, among writings in English. But like
that of the fiction this criticism often suffers from a scanting of
the works' aesthetic reality, their mysterious functioning as drama,
in favor of their being seen as closed philosophical utterances,
histrionic forms of the vision Beckett had previously shaped into
intense, arid tales, structures of intellectual despair placed on stage.
Or else, if they are accepted as proper dramas, they are made local,
particularized into anecdotes or fables of circumscribed and idio–
syncratic conditions.
Thus an observer as acute and wrongheaded as Norman
Mailer could detect the motif of impotence in
Waiting for Godot
but interpret it as sexual, delivering the play over to his own
anxious concerns and so bru tally shrinking its dimensions. In the
same wayan astute critic like the Yugoslavian scholar Darko Suvin
can call Beckett's entire theater "relevant" only in "random and
closed situations of human existence: in war, camps, prisons ,
sickness, old age, grim helplessness." Yet if these plays are not
"relevant" to everything, coherent with human situations every–
where, then they are merely peripheral games of the imagination,
grim and transient jests. But they are nothing of the kind.
Waiting for Godot
was a commercial failure in the United
States in 1956. Its critical reception was very much like that in
France : bewildermen t and distaste among the middlebrow re-
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a shortened version of a chapter from Richard Gilman's
forthcoming book
The Making ofModern Drama.
