58
RICHARD GILMAN
scribed the difficulty more precisely: "A new form always seems to
be more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is uncon–
sciously judged by reference to
cons~crated
forms."
The new forms or dramatic methods that Beckett and others
introduced in the early fifties found their own consecration in
the collective designation "theater of the absurd"; along with
Eugene Ionesco, whose work his in fact scarcely resembles,
Beckett continues to be identified as one of that artificially
created "movement's" chief practitioners. Dissimilar as their plays
are, Beckett and Ionesco did however share a common ground in
the abandonment of sequential action (their ancestors, though not
their conscious influences, being Buechner and the early Brecht),
their exclusion of almost everything that could be thought of as
"plot," and their creation of a general atmosphere of illogic, of
not "adding up."
If
anything, Ionesco's first plays satisfied more
strictly than did Beckett's the dictionary definition of absurdity as
being "that which is contrary to reason"; Beckett's dramas have
always been closer to Camus's meaning in his description of the
absurd as "that divorce between the mind that desires and the
world that disappoints."
This separation between desire and reality is in the largest
sense what
Waiting for Godot
is about; it is a play of absence, a
drama whose binding element is
what does not take place.
The
fierce paradox of this provoked the search for the identity of the
Godot of the title, as a way of uncovering the play's meaning, that
became a minor critical industry in France and elsewhere. Richard
Coe and others have found the source of the name in a well-known
French racing cyclist, Godeau; Eric Bentley has pointed out the
existence of an obscure play of Balzac's in which someone named
Godeaux is expected throughout the evening but never arrives; and
Roger Blin has said that Beckett told him the name comes from
the French slang word for boot --
godillot
--
and was chosen
simply because of the importance in the play of boots and shoes as
physical properties.
It has become clear that whever the origin of the name,
Godot is not to be sought outside the boundaries of the play itself,
just as he is not to be encountered within them. What the two
tramps do encounter is his possibility; they are held to their
places, their stripped, rudimentary existence on "a country road"
