62
RICHARD GILMAN
us); all they know is that they do not know and that the hole their
ignorance makes, Pascal's void felt at one's fingertips, must be
filled in by words, the way space is filled by a juggler's balls or an
acrobat's parabola.
Such analogies to the world of the circus and the music hall
have often been made in regard to Beckett's theater, Hugh Kenner
having gone so far as to locate the antecedents of his plays not in
previous drama but in "Emmet Kelly's solemn determination to
sweep a circle of light into a dustpan." The perception is shrewd
but is a bit beyond the mark. For while the plays do indeed rise
from the atmosphere and morale of circus rings and vaudeville
stages, as well as from those of American silent-film comedy, their
historic action is to have used those sources for a regeneration of
theatrical art, whose elemental shapes and procedures were always
firmly in Beckett's grasp.
It
was the desperate nonsense, the
splendidly adroit accomplishment of insignificant acts (in a literal
sense: without meaning or use) of trapeze artists, one-man bands,
and people who stand on their index fingers -- or the equally
grand failure on the part of clowns and stooges to attain the
simplest physical results -- that Beckett borrowed in order to
compose dramas of immediate presence as opposed to narrative
unfoldings and of gratuitous being instead of portentous humanis–
tic conviction.
These influences are much more directly physical than verbal
in
Waiting for Godot:
the bowlers and baggy pants, the ill-fitting
shoes and difficulties with laces, the carrots and turnips -–
fundamental, inane foods eaten like haute cuisine - - the vaude–
ville routine of exchanging hats, the general impression of a
succession of "turns" being done, unsequential, self-contained
epiphanies of corporeal wisdom and folly. But the speech
also
emerges shaped and ordered like a program on an announcement
board: now we say this, now we say that, we fill up the time. In
actuality the circus is a place of pure physicality, as is of course
the silent screen, and what Beckett has done, the essence of his
innovating or renovating method, is to have thrown language , the
chief bearer of our weighty significances, into a physical world of
farcical gesture and knockabout comedy whose effect is to under–
mine all intellectual pretensions. One cannot speak "meaning-
