PARTISAN REVIEW
61
country" -- to an unknown end, through their own resources,
unaided and unjustified by anything outside themselves.
In this regard they are almost wholly theatrical, for in its
essence theater is that which shows us life being fabricated, so to
speak, from scratch; when an actor steps on to a stage he appears
to have emerged as by spontaneous generation and he must live in
this artificial environment by the inventions -- the created words
and gestures -- of the playwright. What modem realism had done
(and continues to do) however was to disguise behind a multi–
plicity of detail a surface of likeness to our ordinary lives, this
radical nakedness and ab ovo quality of both theater and the life it
is designed to illumine. One central strand of
Waiting for Codot's
originality is its having recovered a lost principle of theater at the
same time as it displays us to ourselves in our root condition.
It is the tramps'
presence
on the stage which, like ours on the
earth, is at bottom unaccountable; as Robbe-Grillet has written,
"they must explain themselves," defending their right to be there,
although the plea is not offered to any judge or jury but to the
void, which it helps to fill. Once again the connection between
theater and life is intimate. The tramps are compelled to speak, are
indeed, as Estragon says, "incapable of keeping silent," just as we
are, since it is only through our words, those most abstract and
insubstantial of our possessions, that we overcome -- temporarily
and with an illusory solace -- our actorlike isolation and sense of
arbitrary being.
And the truth they utter is not "about" anything external to
themselves or even about their internal state;
Waiting for Codot
doesn't give information of the world or of the emotions or
psyche but of what it is like to "be there," to have to be.
In doing this it offers no meanings in the traditional sense, an
absence ,which is the source of its being designated absurd. Like
Beckett's fiction, the play works tirelessly against just that desire
for explicit meaning that has so often forced literature and the
theater into a pedagogic function at odds with their aesthetic one.
"I do not teach, I am a witness," Ionesco has said, a remark that
applies with even more pertinence to Beckett and his tramps. For
neither he nor they know why they are waiting or for whom
("If
I
had known who Godot is, I would have said," Beckett has told
