“That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.”
— Pozzo in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
I read Waiting for Godot this morning, which was probably the first time I’ve read it all the way through, though I can’t be sure. I may have read it in my 20s, when I was engulfed in modernist writers, but I don’t know. I can’t remember — which is appropriate, I think.
I knew the basic plot and have read critiques that connect it both to the existential movement in philosophy and literature, and to both modernism and post-modernism. But what struck me is the focus on memory, Estragon’s constant failure to remember not only his plans with Vladimir to meet Godot, but what has just happened, and the larger issues of failing memory that hang over the entire play.
Here is a passage from Act II, one that brought this into clearer focus for me:
VLADIMIR: The tree, look at the tree.
Estragon looks at the tree.
ESTRAGON: Was it not there yesterday?
VLADIMIR: Yes, of course, it was there. Do you not remember?
We nearly hanged ourselves from it. But you wouldn’t. Do you not remember?
ESTRAGON: You dreamt it.
VLADIMIR: Is it possible you’ve forgotten already?
ESTRAGON: That’s the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget.
Later, this failing memory leads to frustration and anger.
VLADIMIR: Where else do you think? Do you not recognize the place?
ESTRAGON: (suddenly furious). Recognize! What is there to recognize? All my lousy life I’ve crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery! (Looking wildly about him.) Look at this muckheap! I’ve never stirred from it!
VLADIMIR: Calm yourself, calm yourself.
ESTRAGON: You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms!
VLADIMIR: All the same, you can’t tell me that this (gesture) bears any resemblance to . . . (he hesitates) . . . to the Macon country for example. You can’t deny there’s a big difference.
ESTRAGON: The Macon country! Who’s talking to you about the Macon country?
VLADIMIR: But you were there yourself, in the Macon country.
ESTRAGON: No I was never in the Macon country! I’ve puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Cackon country!
VLADIMIR: But we were there together, I could swear to it!
Picking grapes for a man called . . . (he snaps his fingers) . . . can’t think of the name of the man, at a place called . . . (snaps his fingers) . . . can’t think of the name of the place, do you not remember?
ESTRAGON: (a little calmer). It’s possible. I[…]
VLADIMIR: But down there everything is red!
ESTRAGON: (exasperated). I didn’t notice anything, I tell you!
What struck me about these two passages — and made me reconsider my reading of the first act — was how similar this feels to the conversations my dad has with my mom. Mom’s in mid- to late-stage Alzheimer’s. From day to day, we cannot be certain what she’ll remember or whether she will zone out into a fabricated world. The relationship between Vladimir and Estragon (Didi and Gogo) is one of dependence, one we initially do not see.
As the (lack of) action moves forward, the dependence becomes clear. They are forever linked, and we assume it is Gogo who is dependent on Didi. Gogo is the one with the apparently faulty memory. Gogo is the one wh gets angry with Didi when they are apart. But by play’s end, we are less certain — can we be sure that Didi’s memories of the precious day are accurate and that GOgo’s memory is the faulty one?
Again, I think of my mom and the shadow memories or echo-memories she seems to have. My dad will be sitting with her watching TV. He’ll get up and go in the other room, come back and say something to her and leave. Very mundane stuff. In her mind — at least, this is what I assume from her descriptions — he has left with “the other guy.” The “other guy” was sitting where my dad had been sitting, is my dad. Her mind can no longer process this basic function, which is confusing to those around her and infuriating to those who have to deal with her everyday.
Didi’s own connections to the play’s reality make more sense to me when seen through this lens. Gogo cannot remember what Didi remembers, but neither do any of the other characters. Pozzo, for instance is blind in Act II but not in Act I, and he has no memory of meeting Didi and Gogo the day before. Who is right? How do we, as the audience, make sense of this? And can we?
Waiting for Godot is not “about” the onset of dementia, but the struggles my family — that my dad has endured taking care of my mom and that the rest of us, my brother, my sister, our spouses, me — has endured in recent months as the condition has deteriorated are the lens through which I am forced to view this play. I know I’m filtering everything through an Alzheimer’s lens — not just Beckett’s play, but each of my own memory fails, my wife’s, etc. I’m on high alert.
And yet, I’m not imposing something on the play that’s not there. Waiting for Godot lends itself to such interpretations, as so many of the great works or European modernist literature do. If Modernism is about one thing, it is about memory and forgetting in the aftermath of the First World War, about the break with the past and the instability of the hyper-industrialized future.
For me, though, at the moment, Waiting for Godot is a parable of my own obsessions, my own framing. It’s difficult to read it any other way.
***
I rarely talk with my mom these days. It is too difficult for both of us. We inhabit different realities, her mind obscured and refracted through her Alzheimer’s. She sees people who aren’t there, or that’s what she tells us — that my dad is with the other guy, or the kids came into her house and messed it up.
It is always her house, her kitchen, her things. It’s frustrating for me when I’m there and difficult to follow when I’m on the phone. For my dad, it is absolutely maddening and brings out the worst within him, hat selfish streak that has often defined his relationship with me. I try to give him leeway, to understand, but I struggle with his response as much as he struggles with her receding sense of reality.
This is normal, as everyone tells me. There are scientific and psychological studies that explain all of this, both her behavior as the patient and his as the caregiver. It is part of the inevitable nature of aging, of the disease my mother endures, that my father must drag himself through like a spectator who is powerless as his team collapses.
“That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth,” Pozzo says in Waiting for Godot, as he stares at the fading sky, at a day that “begins to lose its effulgence, to grow pale” until, it is in his words, “pppfff! finished! it comes to rest.”
The Irish version of the play — captured in a brilliant 2003 television production directed by Michael Lindsay Hogg — puts the emphasis on God, underscoring the traditional existentialist interpretation that Didi and Gogo, like all of humanity, are looking for a god that will not come.
That’s too reductive. Beckett has created a blank canvas on which our minds’ struggles are projected. The dialogue is unmoored, circular, spiral. Murphy’s face as Gogo, Estragon, is suitably plaintive and blank. McGovern’s face as Didi, Vladimir, carries the confusion of life in its every twitch and turn.
Godot is an elliptical play, one that exists not in its language but between the words given by Beckett to his characters. It is a play in which there is no real, but also little understanding. The characters talk at each other and past each other. They ignore each other and mishear each other, and their memory falters and completely fails.
VLADIMIR: The tree, look at the tree.
Estragon looks at the tree.
ESTRAGON: Was it not there yesterday?
VLADIMIR: Yes of course it was there. Do you not remember?
We nearly hanged ourselves from it. But you wouldn’t. Do you not remember?
ESTRAGON: You dreamt it.
VLADIMIR: Is it possible you’ve forgotten already?
ESTRAGON: That’s the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget.
The play, when I read it (reread it) recently, felt oddly familiar, as if I’ve seen it playing out in my parents’ house in Las Vegas, the incomprehension that leads to anger and mistrust that boils over. She misstates her age. He corrects her. She misstates it again, and the cycle begins. She stops to admire a child. He walks off, watches from a distance, and she keeps talking.
Vladimir and Estragon. Pozzo and Lucky. Language circles meaning, but rarely lands. Power is used for power’s sake, but is ultimately ineffective. It is arbitrary, as are the chances that anyone will meet anyone else on the road, that what was known yesterday will be recalled today.
Vladimir asks Estragon if he recalls a tree they’d passed before, a question that elicits a furious explosion of words: “Recognize! What is there to recognize? All my lousy life I’ve crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery! (Looking wildly about him.) Look at this muckheap! I’ve never stirred from it!
VLADIMIR: Calm yourself, calm yourself.
ESTRAGON: You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms!
VLADIMIR: All the same, you can’t tell me that this (gesture) bears any resemblance to . . . (he hesitates) . . . to the Macon country for example. You can’t deny there’s a big difference.
ESTRAGON: The Macon country! Who’s talking to you about the Macon country?
VLADIMIR: But you were there yourself, in the Macon country.
ESTRAGON: No I was never in the Macon country! I’ve puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Cackon country!
VLADIMIR: But we were there together, I could swear to it!
Picking grapes for a man called . . . (he snaps his fingers) . . . can’t think of the name of the man, at a place called . . . (snaps his fingers) . . . can’t think of the name of the place, do you not remember?
ESTRAGON: (a little calmer). It’s possible. I[…]
VLADIMIR: But down there everything is red!
ESTRAGON: (exasperated). I didn’t notice anything, I tell you!
***
My grandmother was in her 70s when we finally realized she had succumbed to Alzheimer’s. She was relatively healthy, but clouded in a way that she had manage to mask — mostly, by relying to a greater and greater degree on my grandfather, by narrowing her responsibilities, by receding into a cocoon of family until my grandfather died and she was left alone in their small house in Tamarack, Fla. That was the spring of 1976. My grandfather was approaching his 71st birthday, was still to my eyes the virile, powerful man he had always been. He was her provider, in the old-fashioned sense, her protector and, on some level, her enabler.
When he died — just a half year or so after missing my bar mitzvah with a bleeding ulcer that no one knew about — my grandmother was left to her own devices. She lived near relatives — her cousin, his brother — but she still spent much of her time by herself puttering in her kitchen, around the house, and taking walks.
She managed for about two years, until several incidents occurred — my memory of this is compromised by my age (15 at the time) and distance. But what I remember and what my dad has confirmed is that she almost burned her house down after she left a pot on the stove, and that she was found wandering by herself down near one of the canals that ringed her neighborhood, canals into which she could have slipped and drowned, or from which she might have faced the not-so-random hungry alligators prevalent in southern Florida.
So, we moved her north, moved her in with us, where she continued her decline. She never fully accepted — or even grasped, I guess – that this was a permanent move, that there was no going back to Florida. She would head out the front door and start walking up the street. One of us would realize she’d slipped out and give chase, turn her around and try to explain that there was no bank for her to visit, no plane ticket for her to buy. We’d get her back into the house, but inevitably it would happen again.
***
ESTRAGON: We came here yesterday.
VLADIMIR: Ah no, there you’re mistaken.
ESTRAGON: What did we do yesterday?
VLADIMIR: What did we do yesterday?
ESTRAGON: Yes.
VLADIMIR: Why . . . (Angrily.) Nothing is certain when you’re about.
ESTRAGON: In my opinion we were here.
VLADIMIR: (looking round). You recognize the place?
ESTRAGON: I didn’t say that.
VLADIMIR: Well?
ESTRAGON: That makes no difference.
My dad recedes to his small TV to watch the game. My mom doses on the couch in front of a cop show, the TV blaring. I state this matter-of-factory — no judgment. It is just the way it is now, difficult.
This has become life in my parents’ house. My mother either remembers or doesn’t, and when she doesn’t she travels down a rabbit hole of absurdity sending my father down his own deep hole of frustration and anger.
Just the way it is. Yes. That’s what it seems. I call, ask “how are things?” I know the answer.
“Same shit.” Same answer.
Estragon, Gogo, pulls at his boot, pulls “with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again,” says “Nothing to be done.”
Nothing. Just the way it is. The television is on in the background. Duke is playing, or so I imagine. Curtains are closed. A lamp is on. He’s disconsolate. Angy. Racked with guilt. He is frozen, waiting for reprieve.
The despair is in the syntax. The passive voice. What is to be done? What can be done? If no one will act — assuming, of course, that action is possible.
“I’m beginning to come round to that opinion,” says Vladimir. He “All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.”
Works Cited:
Becket, Samuel. Waiting For Godot, Grove/Atlantic, 1982. E-book version. “Waiting for Godot.” YouTube, YouTube, uploaded by Akira, 19 July 2015, https://youtu.be/izX5dIzI2RE. This is a video of the 2003 British television version of the play on RTE/Channel 4 (part of the Beckett on Film series), directed by Michael Lindsay Hogg. The film Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy as Didi and Gogo, and Alan Stanford as Pozzo, Conor Lovett as Lucky.
***
Photo by Michael Bourgault on Unsplash
