FROM THE ARCHIVES:Poet Patrick Kavanagh explained why he liked Waiting for Godotin this piece – JOE JOYCE
TO THOSE of us who cannot abide the theatre with its flatulent pieties, its contrivances and its lies, Waiting for Godotis a wonderful play, a great comedy. I do not set out to interpret Godot, merely to say why I like it, which is probably the only valid criticism.
Take a play like The Bishop's Bonfire, which was well received in Dublin. There you have the old unhappy shibboleths paraded, the theme of "Ireland" as a moral reality, and the last refuge of the weak, the theme that our failure to ramble out into those flowery lanes of liberty which O'Casey is always talking about, is due to forces outside ourselves. In O'Casey's case the restrictions of religion are the villain of the melodrama.
All of us who are sincere know that if we are unhappy, trying to forget our futility in pubs it is due to no exterior cause, but to what is now popularly called the human condition. Society everywhere today and its benefits are pastiche; there is no overall purpose, no large umbrella of serenity.
This world-wide emotion has seeped through national boundaries. It flowed into Ireland many years ago, but the “Ireland” writers continued as if nothing had happened. Now and again one noticed their discomfiture; why, they seemed to be asking themselves, was no one giving them any heed?
These “Ireland” writers, who are still writing, of course, could not see that the writers of Ireland were no longer Corkery and O’Connor and the others, but Auden and George Barker – anyone anywhere who at least appreciated, if he could not cure, their misfortune.
Saying this is liable to make one the worst in the world, for a national literature, being based on a convention, not born of the unpredictable individual and his problem, is a vulnerable racket and is protected by fierce wild men. A national literature is the only thing that some men have got, and men will not relinquish their hold on the only thing that gives them a reason for living.
It is because of its awareness of the peculiar sickness of society and a possible remedy suggested that I like Beckett’s play. The remedy is that Beckett has put despair and futility on the stage for us to laugh at them. And we do laugh.
I am not going to say that Godotis a great illuminating, hope-creating masterpiece like King Lear. But then, that is the present condition of humanity. Beckett is an honest writer. Academic writers and painters are always ready to offer the large illuminating symbol; they give us gods and heroes, and they write and paint as if society were a solid, unified Victorian lie.
I know that I am not being very direct in my statements about Waiting for Godot, but that is part of this play's importance; it both holds a mirror up to life and keeps reminding you that the reason you couldn't endure the theatre hitherto was that it was tenth-rate escapism, not your dish at all.
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