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The Work of Poverty THE WORK OF POVERTY • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The Work of Poverty SAMUEL BECKEtt’S VAGABONDS AND THE THEATER OF CRISIS Lance Duerfahrd THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Duerfahrd, Lance Alfred, 1967– The work of poverty : Samuel Beckett's vagabonds and the theater of crisis / Lance Duerfahrd. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1237-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1237-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9339-3 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9339-5 (cd-rom) 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989. En attendant Godot. English—Criticism and interpreta- tion. 2. Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989—Influence. I. Title. PQ2603.E378Z618 2013 842'.914—dc23 2013022653 Cover design by Jennifery Shoffey-Forsythe Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Palatino Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents • • • • • • • • • • • List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION Begging Context 1 CHAPTER 1 Godot behind Bars 12 CHAPTER 2 Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo and New Orleans 63 CHAPTER 3 La Pensée Vagabonde: Vagabond Thought 112 CHAPTER 4 Textual Indigence: The Reader in an Aesthetics of Poverty 143 AFTERWORD Staging Godot in Zuccotti Park 178 Notes 191 Bibliography 223 Index 231 Illustrations • • • • • • • • • • • • • • FIGURE 1 Protest signs at Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street, October 2011 (photo by Stacey Mickelbart) 180 FIGURE 2 Actors bear Beckett’s tree into Zuccotti Park (photo by Alex Lukens) 184 FIGURE 3 Lucky (David Yashin) performs monologue near “Un-Repeal Glass-Steagall” (photo by Stacey Mickelbart) 185 FIGURE 4 Didi (Harold Dean James) and Gogo (Katie Schwarz) wait in front of signs reading “It’s a Scandal”; “Think, Pig”; “AT LEAST LUCKY HAS A JOB”; and “Don’t be a Gashole” (photo by Alex Lukens) 186 FIGURE 5 Didi (Harold Dean James) and Gogo (Katie Schwarz) huddle together (photo by Alex Lukens) 187 • vi • Acknowledgments • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Abundant thanks are in order to the following people: Jonathan Bernstein, for his interest in this project and his help bringing Godot to Zuccotti Park, his colorful brilliance, his idiosyncrasy, and his radical love for life; Luc Kinsch, for his camaraderie and the incredible flint of his insight; Rosanne Altstatt, for her care in copyediting the manuscript and for her profound friendship; Ben Weaver, for his wit and endless evocation of maxims and apothegms; Alex Lukens, for pinning to my refrigerator an enlarged poster of Beckett that read, “Let us not waste time in idle discourse,” and for documenting the production of Godot on Wall Street; Amy Pommerening, for marking up a copy of the manuscript as if it were a find-a-word; Rob Richardson, for proofreading a chapter and being a mensch; and my stu- dents Megha Anwer, Matt Varner, and Sean Purvines, for their support and kindness. I am particularly grateful to Rick Cluchey for sharing his incredible the- atrical work and life story with me, by phone and in correspondence, and for reading my manuscript. A boxer who learned his craft in San Quentin, Rick signed all his letters to me, “Keep punching.” Thanks go to Sidney Homan for sharing his unpublished memoir, Embarrassment of Swans, and for discussing with me his production of Waiting for Godot in the Florida State Penitentiary system. Alan Mandell kindly endured several phone con- • vii • viii • AcKNOWLEDGMENTS versations and my umpteen questions about his experience bringing Godot to San Quentin in 1957. I thank my advisors at Yale University, Shoshana Felman and Susan Blood, who mentored me on an early version of this work, and my col- leagues in the English Department at Purdue University. My particular gratitude goes out to Arkady Plotnitsky, Geri Friedman, Dino Felluga, Dan Morris, Nancy Peterson, Aparajita Sagar, and Bill Mullen for their creative and supportive responses to my text. Thanks go to my colleague Scott Schroeder for making the images from the Zuccotti Park Godot so much crisper. A travel grant from Purdue University allowed me to conduct research at the Beckett Archives in Reading, England. I could not have completed this project without the expertise and bril- liant navigation provided by Senior Editor Sandy Crooms, the meticulous attention to the manuscript from Copyediting Coordinator Maggie Diehl, and the support of Director Malcolm Litchfield at The Ohio State Univer- sity Press. This book is dedicated to my mother, Janet Duerfahrd, my brother, Kurt Duerfahrd, and to the memory of my father, Clement Duerfahrd, and to the memory of my aunt, Bernice Rossi. They were agents in easing me out of my dumbfounded state when I first took Beckett on as the subject of my dissertation at Yale University. My aunt proceeded to check out all of Beck- ett’s books from her local library. She made herself fluent in absurdity and then read my dissertation. My father and mother also encouraged my Beck- ett thinking. They drove one night to a one-man Beckett monologue per- formed at a small theater in Providence, Rhode Island, even though they had little interest in Beckett. The fact that my parents endured a Beckett performance on my behalf moves me to this day. Before the show they purchased a small tape recorder and secretly concealed it my dad’s breast pocket. My dad became the first man to officially bootleg Beckett. When I received the tapes in the mail two days later, I was astonished to find that all they had recorded was the noise of my dad’s restlessness during the performance, a brushing static sound made whenever he crossed his arms or nodded off. Beckett, who described art as a stain on silence, would have approved of the way his own words were scrubbed away, and how the voice of the performer murmured faintly beneath the vast aerial surf formed by the contact of coat on shirt. That nothing sensible was recorded did not stunt my curiosity. On the contrary, I had a greater hunger for what might have been said. My dad went like a spy into a Beckett monologue and emerged from a small theater in Providence having managed to record the sound of an ocean. Introduction • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Begging Context This book is about Samuel Beckett’s destitute art. Though his body of work seems to offer audiences very little by way of lesson or entertainment, it nevertheless has an unusual performance history within settings of real- world crisis. In landscapes of ruin, Waiting for Godot emerges unexpectedly and Beckett’s impoverished aesthetic begins to resonate. A focus on poverty is in keeping with the primary trajectory in Beckett’s career, eliminating all excess from his work and seeking what Beckett calls “ultimate penury” in art.1 Beckett offers us not a rich but a poor—and ever poorer—prose, and subject matter likewise stricken by poverty. Entwined with creation, poverty is for Beckett a dynamic condition, a “worsening” rather than an achieved state.2 In conversation with Lawrence Harvey, Beckett observes, “What complicates it all is the need to make. Like a child in mud but no mud. And no child. Only need.”3 Beckett’s work undertakes an endless sub- tractive movement, removing first mud, then child, leaving only need and then perhaps something less than need. His texts explore an aesthetic of worsening suitable to the inherent dispossession of his itinerant subjects, figures in a perpetual state of emergency. This enterprise to deplete rep- resentation places Beckett firmly in the camp of the avant-garde. Perform- ances of Waiting for Godot in prisons, in Sarajevo during a civil war, and in post-Katrina New Orleans, however, reveal an alternative potential for his • 1 • 2 • INTRODUCTION work. Abstruse to many critics, Beckett’s postdramatic minimalism makes under these circumstances an immediate and unexpectedly emotive appeal, as the survivors of flood, siege, and carceral institutions become literate in Beckett through their predicament. This study explores the illuminating encounter between Beckett’s theater and these environments. The Work of Poverty is a discussion of “poor Beckett,” but it also aspires to add to existing discourses about poverty and worklessness. I isolate four key Beckettian tropes: need, exposure/abandonment, enough, and beg- ging the question.4 Beckett uses the terms “exposure” and “abandonment” to describe the unsheltered condition of his evicted vagabond figure, for whom privation has supplanted privacy, similar to Walter Benjamin’s “new poverty.”5 Beckett’s term “enough,” his measure for the barely adequate, resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare” or “naked life,” the biopolitical status to which the individual is reduced in the modern state. The way Beckett’s work begs questioning provides us with the antithesis of Franz Kafka’s literature of petition. The Trial and stories such as “The Build- ing of the Chinese Wall” honor petitio principii to the letter: they situate their narratives around the investigation of a missing premise, for example, the basis of Joseph K’s guilt and cause of his arrest.6 Whereas Kafka actively raises questions within the text, thereby encouraging a hermeneutical response from the reader, Beckett begs questions and invites an interroga- tive relation to his work. Beckett’s defense of the remainder and his pursuit of the barely adequate are key to the recurrent but critically underappreci- ated place of poverty in modern thought. Beckettian poverty differs sharply from depictions of the struggling poor in novels of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, which trade on “mere misery where destitute virtuous moth- ers may steal bread for their starving brats.”7 The Work of Poverty explains why Hugo’s Les Misérables lands on Broadway while Beckett’s hobos turn up in Sarajevo.
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