Art and the Existential in En Attendant Godot

Abstract

In a recent article, Claude Mauriac remarks pertinently, “On a voulu expliquer En Attendant Godot par un improbable jeu de mots: God ne signifie-t-il pas Dieu en anglais? Façon de rendre moins inquiétante cette pièce aussi peu rassurante que les autres oeuvres de Beckett.” Although M. Mauriac may be brushing aside rather too quickly a play on words that is perhaps not so improbable after all, he points perceptively in these lines to an inadequacy that mars a number of otherwise illuminating discussions of Beckett's controversial play. Critics, professional and amateur, have, in fact, often been overly concerned with the “message” of the drama, treating it, unconsciously perhaps, as a kind of thesis play and thereby, one might argue, casting implicit aspersions on its excellence as art. The reviewer for the London Times writes, for example, “… the message of Mr. Beckett as a novelist is perhaps a message of blank despair. The message of Waiting for Godot is perhaps something nearer a message of religious consolation … Waiting for Godot—one might sum up these remarks—is thus a modern morality play on permanent Christian themes.”

SAMUEL BECKETT EN ESPAÑA, editado por José Francisco Fernández (Valladolid: Ediciones Universidad de Valladolid, 2020)

“…The reception of Samuel Beckett's literary work in Spain has been an irregular and peculiar one, marked by a combination of factors including the moral resistance to innovation on the part of the Franco regime and the aura of existential anguish surrounding Beckett's work (Harvey 1960;White 1970;Dobrez 1986). Beckett was also read as a political author whose ideas fueled the feeling of oppression and dissatisfaction with the dictatorial regime (see Chapter 3).…”