BECKETT AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING Martin Esslin The twentieth century has been a turbulent and unhappy age, dominated by fanaticisms, ideologies that proclaimed themselves as infallibly based on would-be scientific truths about race or class, and in consequence a period of unprecedented violence and cruelty. In those distant days, in nineteen-thirties Vienna, when as a school­ boy I joined an underground Communist cell and was, in hidden clear­ ings in the woods on summer Sundays, indoctrinated in the principles of Marxism, I learned that this system of thought had now become a scien­ tific truth beyond doubt, and that therefore anyone who wanted to pursue policies that contradicted it had to be liquidated for the general good. (It was the period of the great Moscow trials.) At the same time, some of my friends at school who belonged to the equally illegal and underground Hitler youth assured me that inferior races like the Jews had been scien­ tifically established as being so noxious to the future health of humanity that it was an urgent necessity to kill them all, not realizing that I, their friend, was included in this verdict. Those totalitarian creeds are now in disrepute, but the world is still threatened by violent fanaticisms and fundamentalisms of numerous varieties: the vacuum created by the decline of traditional religious be­ liefs in the nineteenth century, still far from having been filled, has grown ever wider as it has become less and less possible to accept the literal truth of events like the Resurrection. Those who still cling to them revert to the primitivism of fundamentalist cults; most others are left with an equally primitive, stultifying and barren materialism. I think that an important aspect of Samuel Beckett's significance for the new century is precisely that he shows us characters confronting a world in which all fundamentalisms, infallible orthodoxies, pseudo­ scientific totalitarian solutions, all saviors and salvations have become dead myths. Admittedly, in Waiting for Godot Lucky still speaks of a God with a white beard, yet that deity looks down from his height in di­ vine apathia, athambia and aphasia, while humanity shrinks and dwin­ dles. Christian images still pervade that play, from the thieves on the cross to the map of the Holy Land, from Cain and Abel to the sheep and the goats, but they are treated with irony, or even derision, as metaphors 27 that are already dead. And Vladimir's speech at the end, before the mes­ senger appears again, hints that the vaguely felt hope that a power outside of himself could bring salvation is an illusion that ought to be discarded, and that to accept life without any such crutches might at last bring something like true freedom. It is such a post-ideological, post-religious world that Beckett's char­ acters inhabit, that rich and colorful, almost Dickensian array of eccen­ trics, from Belacqua, Watt, Murphy, and Krapp to the protagonist of Catastrophe, from Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell to the old women in Rockaby and Ill Seen Ill Said, from Winnie and Willie to the three suffer­ ers of Comedie, from Vi, Flo and Ru to Barn, Bern, Bim and Born, from Molloy, Moran, Malone, Macmann, Mahood and the Unnamable to the figures pacing through Quad, from Mouth to the old men wandering the back roads in ... but the clouds . and Stirrings Still, or the body that pants through the mud in How It Is. For Beckett's universe, how it really is is free of illusions, consola­ tions or hopes, be they utopian or transcendental. It is a harsh region, not unlike Dante's Inferno, were it not for the fact that much laughter resounds through it - that highest form of laughter of which Arsene speaks in Watt, the risus purus, the dianoetic laugh that laughs about hu­ man unhappiness. (Dianoia, in Aristotle's Poetics, is the insight that comes at the moment when in Greek tragedy the protagonist realizes the hopelessness of his situation, only to confront it with courage and defi­ ance.) Nagg and Nell, for instance, in their bins in Endgame laugh heart­ ily when remembering how they lost their shanks when cycling on their tandem in the Ardennes, yet their laughter gradually gets less and less hearty. As Nell rightly remarks: "Nothing is .funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But - [ ... ] Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more." The funny story she has heard so often is most likely that of the tailor who refutes complaints about his botched trousers by pointing to the far more botched world. Why should human unhappiness be the funniest thing there is? Surely, for the same reason that the character in farce who slips on a ba­ nana skin causes laughter in the audience: because pain or unhappiness seen objectively is funny, however painful it may be when experienced subjectively. Seen in the context of the immensity of more or less painful events that occur at any second around us in the universe, the dispropor- 28 .