Against Narrative and Hermeneutics: Boredom as an Aesthetic Strategy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Against Narrative and Hermeneutics:
Boredom as an Aesthetic Strategy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

© William Heidbreder 2011

Introduction: Narration and Catharsis

            At the center of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is a theory of its narrative structuring, subordinate to which is the famous theory of emotional catharsis that provides tragedy’s defining effect according to Aristotle.   The theater of the non-event in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which is part of what can be called an anti-hermeneutic theater of boredom, can be seen as instantiating a negation and reversal of Aristotelian dramatic principles by abandoning both narration and emotional intensity in the eclipse of the event, around whose significant absence the play is structured both thematically and formally.   The impossibility of any sort of cathartic discharge is consequent upon the absence of narrative engagement in Beckett.   This counter-example points to the limits of the traditional model of theater centered around action.

Tragedy for Aristotle is about action (hence plot), not character, and action is a matter of happiness or misery: “The most important of the six [elements of tragedy] is the combination of the incidents of the story.  Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life. (All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality.  Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions that we are happy or the reverse)” (Poetics 6, 1450a15-20).[1]

For a tragedy to have the desired effect, which is to arouse the emotions of pity and fear that register the significance of the events for the spectator, we must observe a hero who is relatively noble going from happiness to misery as a result of error on the part of the hero. In a typical tragic plot, one character narrowly avoids killing a family member unwittingly thanks to an anagnorisis (recognition) that reveals the family connection. The hero must have good qualities appropriate to his or her station and should be portrayed realistically and consistently. Since both the character of the hero and the plot must have logical consistency, Aristotle concludes that the untying of the plot must follow as a necessary consequence of the plot and not from stage artifice, like a deus ex machina (a machine used in some plays, in which an actor playing one of the gods was lowered onto the stage at the end).

A well-formed plot must have a beginning, which is not a necessary consequence of any previous action; a middle, which follows logically from the beginning; and an end, which follows logically from the middle and from which no further action necessarily follows. The plot should be unified, meaning that every element of the plot should tie in to the rest of the plot, leaving no loose ends. This kind of unity allows tragedy to express universal themes powerfully, which makes it superior to history, which can only talk about particular events. Episodic plots are bad because there is no necessity to the sequence of events. The best kind of plot contains surprises, but surprises that, in retrospect, fit logically into the sequence of events. The best kinds of surprises are brought about by peripeteia, or reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis, or discovery. A good plot progresses like a knot that is tied up with increasingly greater complexity until the moment of peripeteia, at which point the knot is gradually untied until it reaches a completely unknotted conclusion.

The plot of a story, as the term is used in the Poetics, is not the sequence of events so much as the logical relationships that exist between events. For Aristotle, the tighter the logical relationships between events, the better the plot. Oedipus Rex is a powerful tragedy precisely because we can see the logical inevitability with which the events in the story fall together. The logical relationships between events in a story help us to perceive logical relationships between the events in our own lives. In essence, tragedy shows us patterns in human experience that we can then use to make sense of our own experience.

            Thus, classical theater, if we take Aristotle as its most significant theoretician, is narratively structured. Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in the Poetics centers around the plot elements of reversal and recognition. These are moments of intensity in action and speech that are organized by a causal logic: the hero’s crime sets in motion a chain of events leading to his downfall, and his key moment of insight is a recognition of this cause and its effects. To speak of narrative is normally to speak of such a causal and explanatory logic and also of a desire and expectation directed at a closure that is a fulfillment or realization. It is thus to speak of arche and telos, origin and end. (And also of the resolution which effects a catharsis for the audience).  However, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the expectation is not that the plot organizing the events will work itself out in some specific way; it is that that an event, a particular expected event but more broadly any event, will take place at all; that something will happen; that there will in fact be a plot connecting the otherwise monotonous and essentially meaningless non-events that Vladimir and Estragon, and also the spectators, are witness to in their dialogue.

Aristotle uses the term catharsis only once in the Poetics, though he says a lot about pity and fear, its objects.  The term appears in a definition of tragedy: “A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories . . . ; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form [Aristotle here means that the events are acted out rather than described, not that it does not involve a significant sequence of events], with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions” (Poetics 6, 1449b24-28). The discussion of the arousal of pity and terror occurs in a discussion of “the construction of the plot, and the kind of plot required for tragedy” (Poetics 14, 1454a.14-15).   The arousal of pity and fear are direct functions of the plot. Pity and fear are aroused by a discovery and a reversal (Poetics 11, 1452a30-39).   “Pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves” (Poetics 13, 1453a4-5).   Thus, catharsis is a function of narrative.    

We could suppose — adopting the simple model of pleasure that is taken up by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle — that to the arousal of emotions corresponds their discharge, and that that is what catharsis effects.   Aristotle places the emphasis on the arousal, which is the function of the plot and, apparently, of what takes place on stage more generally.   It is as if catharsis follows the arousal of emotion as a matter of course.   “Arousing pity and fear . . . is the distinctive function of this kind of imitation” (Poetics 13, 1452b31-33).   But there is a resolution in tragic works: a denouement occurring through reversal and recognition.   (The plots of tragedy consist of complication and denouement) (Poetics 18, 1455b24-25).   But these are elements of the plot, and so must be thought to arouse emotion as much as discharge it.   

Pity and fear are emotions, and they are aroused by the narration of actions and events.  We can expect therefore that a theater that is dedramatized, in some important way devoid of narration or actively negating the principle of narration, which is the logical and meaningful sequence of actions and events, will also be devoid of emotion and will not work by means of catharsis, at least in the traditional sense.  Such a work will be experienced as, or will be an experience and perhaps an interrogation of the phenomena of, meaninglessness and boredom, where boredom can be defined as the absence of an object of interest that would engage an emotional response.  And this is exactly what we find in Waiting for Godot: a theater that stages the conspicuous absence of the desired and meaningful event, and that actively invokes and plays with boredom. Beckett can be seen to be ultimately significant in part for the way the experience of boredom registers the failure to signify and thereby displaces and facilitates the ruin of the narrative theatricality of classical theater.

            A theater of narration and catharsis is a theater that is meaningful; thus, the Aristotelian model can be called hermeneutic.  Artaud’s theater of cruelty, focused on the evocation of emotional intensities, may be the most famous departure from this model in modern theater.  It doesn’t abandon catharsis but de-links emotion from meaning and thus from narration.

For Beckett it is a matter not so much of abandoning a hermeneutic idea of theater as radically calling it into question, and in fact, staging that very idea of theater. The very different “cruelty” in Beckett is the experience of impotence or failure, and of a specifically hermeneutic impotence: the failure of the savior Godot to arrive, the failure of meaning, and the failure of both meaning and enjoyment, which is experienced as boredom. This failure, a consistent theme in Beckett’s oeuvre, is part of a certain aesthetics of negativity, and to a large extent what is negated is the form and content of traditional theater.  Godot articulates and embodies a specific kind of frustration, because what happens, fundamentally, is that nothing happens. In fact, systematically, nothing happens — as Estragon says (Beckett, 1954, 28): “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” —  and the characters and the reader alike experience keenly the very inability to experience which the absence of anything happening involves and reveals.  (Although it is not a question of unhappiness necessarily: Estragon says, “What do we do now, now that we are happy?” Or rather, it is more than that, because the sense of malaise encompasses states of supposed contentment — thereby of course revealing them to be inadequate and false). The spectator is clearly implicated by the play’s anti-hermeneutic aesthetic strategy in a way analogous to the situation of Vladimir and Estragon. This might be seen as leaving the spectator with no way out — indeed, with no opportunity for the sort of redemption, into or out of the space of theatrical representation and its hermeneutic desire, that is figured in the nonexistent Godot.    

Waiting for Godot, Departing from Theater

            Impotence and failure of one kind or another are persistent themes in Beckett’s oeuvre. Deprived of possession and often limbs, the characters in his novels and plays are often reduced to the functions most essential to their role therein.  In the novel Unnamable, failure as a theme is present in the inability of the authorial speaking subject to name himself and write the story that would define and situate himself as both beginning and ending; and at the end, he heroically announces “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett, 1970). In Worstward Ho, failure is announced as a heroic aesthetic project: “Fail better,” Beckett proposes paradoxically (Beckett, 1983).

            Waiting for Godot presents two characters who experience themselves as failures in every sense, and it moves between two different kinds of radical negation: the failure of the event to happen, specifically of Godot to arrive, and the absolute failure of happening as such; that is to say, between the frustration that is inscribed within a structural of deferral, and boredom, as the absence of meaning and significant presence.  In performing this dual negation, the play inscribes the viewer in the same position as the characters and brings about an absence of meaning not only within the play but of the play, its failure to be meaningful at all in any of the usual senses.

Godot takes up traditional narrative-based theatrical structures of employment and expectation and it shows the failure to arrive, the disappointment of the expectation. Furthermore, it demonstrates this negation as not only contained within but directed at this narrative structure, and so this boredom is actually a more radical kind of negation than the disappointment that it accompanies. Boredom does not negate the fulfillment of desire; it negates the very pursuit of that fulfillment. It is one thing not to get what you desire; it is another to become unable to sustain any desire. Indeed, in its presentation and effectuation of boredom, the play negates the desires for both meaning and presence.  And in this respect the experiences of the characters are paralleled in that of the spectator.

Waiting for Godot embodies a search for satisfaction; the characters wait endlessly, for a character named Godot who is some kind of authority figure, but the vague satisfaction he promises is continually deferred and never arrives, as neither does Godot himself. The failure of the promised satisfaction to arrive does manifest a constant deferral of satisfaction and is not unlike the Lacanian theory of desire in that sense. Moreover, the desire for resolution, meaning, and certainty on the part of Vladimir and Estragon is mirrored by that of the audience, which is also continually presented with a promise of resolution and then denied it, which may be a comment on our desire for order and meaning. In fact, and here is at a structural level where dissatisfaction morphs into meaninglessness and boredom, there is effectively no plot and no character development, no discovery or recognition. The play’s systematic denial of satisfaction is also mirrored in a repeated rhythmic structuring involving the introduction of a motif or an incipient action or line of thought that is then interrupted or that dissipates. 

            This frustration is enacted partly in terms of a rhythm, which works to constantly play with the expectations of the spectator. An example of is in the following passage, with its repeated mention of arrested movement and speech, of stopping and of silence (I have bolded the references to stopping and silence):

Vladimir: STOP IT!

Exit Vladimir. Estragon gets up and follows him as far as the limit of the stage. Gestures of Estragon like those of a spectator encouraging a pugilist. Enter Vladimir. He brushes past Estragon, crosses the stage with bowed head. Estragon takes a step towards him, halts.  

Estragon: (gently). You wanted to speak to me? (Silence. Estragon takes a step forward.) Didi  . . .

Vladimir: (without turning). I’ve nothing to say to you.

Estragon: (step forward). You’re angry. (Silence. Step forward.) Forgive me. (Silence. Step forward. Estragon lays his hand on Vladimir’s shoulder.) Come, Didi. (Silence.) Give me your hand. (Vladimir half turns.) Embrace me! (Vladimir stiffens.) Don’t be stubborn! (Vladimir softens. They embrace. Estragon recoils.) You stink of garlic!

Vladimir: It’s for the kidneys. (Silence. Estragon looks attentively at the tree.) What do we do now?

Estragon :Wait. (Beckett, 1954, 11, bold emphasis mine)

Here speech and contact are invoked only to be interrupted or halted, as when Estragon asks, “You wanted to speak to me?” followed by Vladimir’s response, without turning to face him, “I’ve nothing to say to you.”  The failure of meaningful experience here also corresponds with a failure of love or friendship, which is the theme of this passage, which culminates in Vladmir and Estragon embracing only for one of them to recoil because the other smells bad.        

            An example of a dissipation or fizzling out of tentatives of thought is the following discussion of a series of questions about Godot. The exchange is a repetition of a structure whereby a question is posed and the answers offered lead nowhere (I have bolded what I think are the key questions):

E: What exactly did we ask him for?

V: Were you not there?

E: I can’t have been listening.

V: Oh. . . . Nothing very definite.

E: A kind of prayer.

V: Precisely.

E: A vague supplication.

V: Exactly.

E: And what did he reply?

V: That he’d see.

E: That he couldn’t promise anything.

V: That he’d have to think it over.

E: In the quiet of his home.

V: Consult his family.

E. His friends.

V: His agents.

E: His correspondents.

V: His books.

E: His bank account.

V: Before making a decision.

E: It’s the normal thing.

V: Is it not?

E: I think it is.

V: I think so too.

Silence.

E: (anxious). And we?

V: I beg your pardon?

E: I said, and we?

V: I don’t understand.

E: Where do we come in?

V: Come in?

E: Take your time.

V: Come in? On our hands and knees.

E. As bad as that?

V: Your worship wishes to assert his prerogatives? (ibid., 14)

In this passage, three major questions are asked: “What exactly did we ask him for?” “And what did he reply?” and “Where do we come in?” That is to say: What do we want from him? What does he offer us? And what does this have to do with us? These questions parallel narrative enigmas that the audience may ponder: What is this story about? What does the author tell us, or offer us? And what does it mean for me as a reader? To the extent that the spectator’s experience of meaning is similar to that of the characters, these questions must be unanswered by the play, which suggests that in some sense it is intended to resist interpretability, to not only negate meaning but positively not to be meaningful, to have no meaningful interpretation. Or to the extent that that is impossible in a theatrical work with characters and dialogue, that its meaning in some sense becomes precisely the negation and an absence of meaning. It is a rejection of meaning that is made explicit in Endgame, in this exchange:

Hamm:  We’re not beginning to…to…mean something?

Clov: Mean something? You and I mean something? (brief laugh). Ah, that’s a good one!

Boredom as an Aesthetic Strategy

            The peculiar affect wherein one registers that nothing happens and that not just meaning but experience itself is in a certain way negated is boredom. Indeed, it is not merely that the characters, and the reader, are frustrated by being denied full or indeed any satisfaction. They, and we, are not merely dissatisfied; more fundamentally, the experience is one of boredom, a possible definition of which is that it is an experience of nothing happening, an experience of the absence of experience. And in that sense it is more than just meaning that is negated, because we can be bored not only because nothing is given to us to understand, but also because there is nothing to experience or do.  

Boredom thus is not particular to what Gumbrecht (2003) calls “meaning-culture”; it can express the absence of presence as well as that of meaning. However, the play’s use of boredom particularly facilitates its negation of meaning: Godot’s presence is awaited because he represents not just a promise of happiness but also a hermeneutic promise. In narrative and dramatic texts in which a promise of meaning is merely deferred until a climactic moment rather than negated altogether, there are events that lead to other events, whereas in Godot nothing leads anywhere, nothing fundamentally changes (Godot is expected on the second day as on the first, as on the previous and subsequent days), and there is no such emplotment or meaningful sequence. There is no real story; it is, or it approaches, theater without narrative. And since the absence of plot means the absence of events, there is an experience of boredom because nothing happens.  It is the logic of this anti-narrative structuring more than the psychology of character that drives the failure of meaning in the play.

Since the evacuation of experience means that nothing can happen, structurally it is a dramatic necessity that Godot cannot arrive, and the desire of which he is the privileged object is curiously flattened out, at least if we accept, for instance, the Lacanian theory of desire as endlessly deferred satisfaction, since here the absence is not a mere deferral but a radical impossibility, a denial not of complete satisfaction but of any satisfaction at all, not of the finality of experience but of its possibility, and not of the attainment of the object of desire but the pursuit of that desire. There is a sense that desire in the ordinary sense cannot even be sustained and that the desire or expectation of which Godot is the object is the meta-desire for the kind of experience that a desire that is interested rather than bored, as desires generally are, would make possible. 

            Being bored is the opposite of being entertained. If entertainment in theater is considered as distinct from aesthetic experience, it has a definite temporal structure: that of  “filling” time, particularly the otherwise “dead time” (time in which nothing happens) in between moments of intensity on the stage. Indeed, there is a sense in which spectators want, or are supposed to want, to be entertained because they are bored and want to escape their boredom.

            Entertainment may also in the process create moments of intensity of its own. A classical work of theater may be partly defined as one in which there is no dead time; all time is and must be filled, and so its time is continuous rather than marked by points of disjuncture. This means that all events are plotted, are part of a story.

           If there is an alternation between significance and insignificance, points of interest and of boredom, the spectator may well be divided. He may have a desire both to remain in the performance space and continue observing, and to escape, perhaps either into or away from the rest of the audience, or in some other form of distraction, as distraction is perhaps a futile desire to be entertained as a fundamental strategy of the bored individual. Not unlike the character in Unnamable perhaps, who cannot get either into or out of the story he hopes will be proper to him and that his discourse is expected to constitute and that in one sense does and in another cannot. The interplay of attraction and repulsion, of fascination and boredom, in Waiting for Godot can be considered in this light: it is a work of theater that repudiates entertainment and affirms boredom as it negates not only the expectation of the arrival and presence of the savior, but also every expectation of meaning. 

            In repudiating entertainment, Beckett’s theater also repudiates pleasure, specifically the pleasure attendant upon a satisfaction, intellectual or emotional.  (For Aristotle rightly notes that catharsis is a pleasure).  The expectations and emotions that are aroused are not discharged.  (In Freud, for example, this is what constitutes the distinction between pleasure and pain.) Thus, there is an absence of catharsis in the traditional sense, and this is a consequence of this theater’s rejection of a theater of meaning, and therefore of the event, which is to say, narration.  
 

Conclusion

            Godot is thus a rejection of classical theater.  Space prohibits me from more than a brief mention of the two most prominent alternatives to classical theater in the twentieth century, those of Artaud and Brecht, but it is clear that Beckett’s strategy is at least as radical and thoroughgoing as either of theirs. Beckett does not give the spectator the easy alternatives of a theater of emotional immediacy and intensity (Artaud) or of a critical distancing (Brecht). Instead, he runs classical theater into the ground, destroying it utterly and relentlessly but placing the spectator within its space so that the destruction is much more total and consequential.  He shows not only the failure of desire to achieve realization, but also its failure to constitute itself as a desire, and that is potentially more devastating. And these two failures are linked to ideas of theater, and to the position of the spectator.

            We have seen that the aesthetics of the play involve a negativity that is more profound than the frustration that is involved in a temporary deferral that has some endpoint, some point where there is a climactic resolution, in which there is plot, character, meaning, experience. One question of Beckett interpretation is whether this should be interpreted as a sign that the modern world has become a peculiarly bleak and meaningless terrain, which is Adorno’s (1991) view presented in his famous essay on Endgame, or whether it is a kind of clearing away of elements that can be regarded as inessential in order to make room for something else, which is Alain Badiou’s view in On Beckett (2003). For such an affirmative poetics, it would probably be necessary to look at other works of Beckett’s, as this play seems relentlessly focused on negation. But we can also expect that for any such affirmation this negation, in theater or in fiction, would be the necessary point of departure.

Bibliography

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Endgame,” In Notes To Literature, vol. 1, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991. Also available at http://www.faculty.missouristate.edu/W/WilliamBurling/612%20Drama/Adorno%20Endgame.pdf.

Aristotle. Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

Badiou, Alain. On Beckett.  Translated by Nina Power and Albert Toscano. Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press, 2003.

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. Translated by the author. New York: Grove Press, 1958. 

Beckett, Samuel. Unnamable.  Translated by the author. New York: Grove Press, 1970.

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Beckett, Samuel. Worstward Ho. London: Calder, 1983.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1989.

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

[1] The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).