PARTISAN REVIEW
65
incarnate capitalist exploitation and Lucky proletarian subjection.
More broadly Lucky's relationship to Pozzo has been taken to be
that of intellect enslaved by materialism, and the former's pres–
ence with a rope around his neck (the mind at the end of its
tether) and his famous speech - - a broken, mad onrush of scraps
of theology, philosophy, and scientific information -- does sug–
gest some such structure. But there is a danger in this kind of
interpretative pursuit.
Waiting for Godot
is no allegory but a
marvelously concrete work to which we are asked to lend our
sense, our unrationalized affective capacities as spectators; the
social or political relevance mayor may not follow.
The difficulty is of course that we are used to experiencing in
drama emotions we have felt in life, enhanced and given formal
structure on the stage, and that these emotions are always at–
tached to narrative situations, however brief or self-contained. We
live by telling ourselves tales out of the materials of our experience
or reveries: stories of love, hatred, moral or physical triumph or
disaster, anecdotes of happiness or regret, all with progressive
movements and outcomes, endings. But there is no recognizable
story in
Waiting for Godot
and hence no development, no
suspensefulness (except that of whether or not Godot will come;
but to respond to the play at all is to understand at once that he
will not), and no denouement, the very principles of dramatic
interest, as we have been taught.
Moreover, the emotions that are thus offered in suspension,
as
it were, are continually balked, stifled, canceled out. Whenever
a character appears to be feeling some definite emotion or to have
entered some decisive area of commitment, it is all undone, by an
opposing remark, a corrosive scornfulness, a physical jape. This
process of undoing is also one of the chief functions of Beckett's
famous pauses and silences, intervals of emptiness which resemble
those in Chekhov and which in both playwrights serve as agencies
of negation or ironic undermining. In one sequence Gogo asks "if
we're tied." "To Godot?" Didi replies. "Tied to Godot? What an
idea! No question of it. (Pause.) For the moment." Into the pause
ru~hes
our own awareness that there is every question of it, and
Didi's subsequent "for the moment" simply adds a further irony
to the exchange.
