64
RICHARD GILMAN
presence of the gap. In this way the orderly universe of utterance
followed by logically related movement, of volition succeeded by
steps taken, which we inhabit as our very air, is disrupted, pulled
asunder. And in the spaces this leaves we feel comically and
harrowingly deprived of support, for here language, instead of
controlling or shaping the world, has established its own wayward
dominion.
Pozzo and Lucky. These two are emissaries from the realm of
time and from the life of society, with its institutionalized re–
lationships, its comforts and delusions, above all its thirst for
hierarchies. Didi and Gogo live in an atmosphere in which time
barely moves forward and in which all values are flattened out
under the arc of Godot's possibility, the value whose absence
empties all judgments. Here one thing is as important or as
unimportant as any other -- a carrot or a memory, a shoe or love
-- and here nothing has power over anything else. In Pozzo and
Lucky on the contrary are embodied the very principles of human
power and exploitation, delusory, ultimately disastrous, but
maintained by them as the foundation of their lives.
They are thus a contrast to the tramps' perpetually self–
invented, powerless beings, which hunger for a net under the void
in whose air they dance, like cartoon characters arrested in mid–
fall from a cliff. For Pozzo and Lucky are creatures of the society
from which Didi and Gogo have been extricated in order that they
may wait, without histories or plans, for validation. Agents of
"reality," these intruders have been shaped by its exigencies and
values, which divert us from our condition of helplessness, and by
time, which blinds us to our fateful, deep lack of change. Unex–
pected signs of Beckett's genius, their presence in the play helps,
along with the brogans and radishes, to preserve it from an
overbouyancy, a lightness arising from its deprivation of the
ordinary materials and weights of "realistic" drama. They are
reminders of the actuality the imagination has to leave behind.
In the way Godot's identity has been sought for and worried
over, those of Pozzo and Lucky have been traced to numerous
objective sources. Bertolt Brecht is said to have been planning at
his death a socialist version of the play in which Pozzo would
