60
RICHARD GILMAN
But since the state with which all these plays from one
perspective or another deal is itself an abstraction from the
real
world,
since man only exists physically in society or by reference
to it -- as in the case of a hermit or a shipwrecked person -- the
dramatic imagination has to create, as a gesture toward reality and
to fulfill the requirements of drama itself, some kind of social
ground. That is to say, there has to be exchange, community of
some sort, dialogue; in a paradox that is at the heart of the
theater's art, the state of noncontingent existence, of pure being,
together with the feeling of what it is like to be alive whatever the
circumstances, is only rendered through contingencies and circum–
stances. Without these a play would be a philosophical dis–
quisition, just as without the presence of at least two characters it
would be a solipsistic exercise. In all Beckett's plays the necessity
of there being more than one character is met in different ways: in
Krapp's Last Tape,
for example, the "other" is simply the one's
recorded past self.
Didi's and Gogo's lifelikeness on the stage derives from their
very unfreedom, or rather from their attitude toward it. To begin
with they do not question it, since that would mean they could be
something other than what they are -- the men who must wait.
And in the face of this unfathomable compulsion to remain where
they are they devise -- it is the exact word -- a provisional,
tactical liberty, one of speech and small gestures. They are like
prisoners free to amuse one another or to take advantage of the
penitentiary's game room, the crucial difference being that for
them the prison walls are as wide as the earth . No
idea
of existence
itself being free afflicts or consoles them; and their wit and
raillery, their wry or bitter utterance within this larger unfreedom,
gives them their dignity, for if they do not rebel, neither do they
quietly submit.
Held there then without a say in the matter, they must
contrive to exist, not hopelessly but in a strange sort of inde–
terminacy in which hope is not an emotion or state of mind but an
absence of proof that one ought to despair. And they must fill out
this existence, which stretches from a vague historical beginning
-- they speak of having been together perhaps fifty years, of
having once been "respectable," and of having been "in the Macon
