The World of Godot

Little is mentioned about the world of Didi and Gogo in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Beckett keeps his material world explicitly minimal; any clues at all as to the ecology of space are described as such: “A country road. A tree. Evening.” The world in which Didi and Gogo occupy is sparse, and the spatial realm of the play goes no further beyond the threshold of the country road of which they fill. However, the void of Beckett’s seemingly desolate landscape is substantiated by the world in which the four characters in Godot speak of, indicating the possibility of a ‘world outside’ their own. Didi speaks enthusiastically of his existence in “The Macon County” and reminisces about thronging atop “the Eiffel Tower … in those days”. Pozzo encounters Didi and Gogo on his way to the “fair”, suggesting a going-to and coming-from, and even Gogo makes reference to “a ditch” in which he spent the night.

The ultimate totemic indication of ‘the world outside’ manifests itself in the elusive figure Godot. A physical encounter with Godot is never made: his presence is imposed upon Didi and Gogo through a messenger (“a boy”) that arbiters between his world and their world. The very premise of which “Waiting for Godot” assumes suggests the possibility of salvation which Didi faithfully reminds Gogo of, himself exclaiming “We’re saved!” when he mistakes the coming of Pozzo and Lucky for Godot’s arrival. Through this, there are three distinct worlds that occupy the realm of Godot: The Physical World of the characters and the visible landscape, the ‘World Outside’ which is indicated (the fair, Paris, Macon County, Pyrenees) through speech references, and finally, the Imagined World of Godot, a world that is continually being delayed by virtue of Godot’s non-arrival.

Despite the strong assertions of an existence of a ‘world outside’, Beckett gives us indications that the ‘world outside’ is just as ephemeral as a world constructed by the characters themselves. Gogo rebuts Didi’s musings of the “Macon County”, blurting:

Estragon: No I was never in the Macon county! I’ve puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Crackon county!

However, even Gogo’s revelation is thrown into suspicion; a while later, he contemplates what he had said, admitting that the Macon County incident could “have been possible”, although he “didn’t notice anything”. Statements about the world outside are made, contradicted and restated again, throwing the very possibility of the ‘world outside’ into suspicion as well. The ‘world outside’, as it seems, could very well have been imagined as Godot’s elusive world. After all, is memory not an active form of imagination engineered in the present? Didi contemplates the indeterminate nature of his own memory:

Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day? […] But in all that, what truth will there be?

Because of the indeterminacy of the ‘world outside’, Didi, Gogo and even Pozzo and Lucky seem to be tied to the physical world which they occupy, a physical world which opens up the opportunity for discourse and inter-personal relationships, no matter how fleeting they may be. Furthermore, their need for salvation as imagined through the world of Godot becomes cyclical. For Didi and Gogo to be “saved” from the drudgery of the immediate world they occupy requires the intervention of Godot. However it is the very act of waiting for Godot that paradoxically ties them to their surroundings, to their immediate world. As James L. Calderwood sees Pozzo and Lucky’s journeying an end in itself, waiting for salvation likewise becomes a form of salvation for Didi and Gogo.

Ultimately, the immediate World which Didi and Gogo occupies is one that is devoid of meaning, and hence waiting for Godot itself becomes a meaningful activity: one to pass the time with and an imagined possibility that locates their existence through time. Throughout the play, there is a continual interplay between the “reality” of Didi and Gogo’s meaningless existence and their persistence in fending it off. For Didi and Gogo, their continual engagement in what Richard Gilman calls “the obligation to be two, a pair, a social unit outside society ” allows both of them to track their existence through time. Especially for Didi, he capitalizes on this ‘enforced’ relationship as proof of his existence and persistence through time. Gogo becomes a witness to reiterate Didi’s existentialistic anxieties, an affirmation to the passing of time, and therefore his persistence through change and continuity. In the opening scene of Act 2, Didi shares his memory the previous day, in hope of an assurance:

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.

Gogo’s tease to Didi that he had “dreamt it” is no light joke; for Didi, proof of his existence must be assured by Gogo, since the dream-reality boundary has been blurred to the extent that he can no longer recognise waking from dreaming. His coping mechanism is one that the tramps exercise as a social unit in order to skirt the unbearable realities of their situation: ignorance. Whenever Gogo awakes from his sleep and finds the unbearable urge to reveal his dreams, Didi’s response is virtually consistent: “Don’t tell me!” as if the very utterance of the dream will put him in a state of mental disarray over a conundrum he cannot bear to contemplate. His reasons are articulated:

Estragon: (gestures towards the universe). This one enough for you? (Silence.) It’s not nice of you, Didi. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?
Vladimir: Let them remain private. You know I can’t bear that.

Didi looks for proof, not ambiguity. To Didi, dreams are the very stuff of Freudian free-associations and the slippage of meaning, a means to a world that exists beyond their own, so terrifying because of its inconceivability and therefore its antithetical nature to his search for certainty and truth. Jeffery Nealon picks up on this thread, and interprets the tramps’ anxiety as one that is defined by the realm of the postmodern outside the neat Structuralist word patterns they devise, Modernist values which they are so paranoid to sustain.

Nealon quotes Lyotard in describing the “social bond” that Didi and Gogo are tied to in the context of a “question, […] itself a language game … [that immediately] positions the person who asks, as well as the addressee and the referent asked about it ”. The social bond sustains either tramp, as well as opens up the possibilities for discourse in order to fill the void of waiting, echoing Derrida’s assertion that there is “nothing outside text”. Text is everything meaningful, and therefore text must sustain, even if it is no more than word games and linguistic routines. To this effect, Didi realises he cannot exist long in the void as an independent member of his social pact with Gogo. Discourse (text) fills the silence between them that threatens to eliminate their meaningful existence. When Gogo is rudely awakened from his sleep, Didi admits: “I felt lonely. ” In their social bond, Didi seems the more gratuitous of the two: “Get up till I embrace you”. In the same way it takes two hands to indulge in a clapping routine, Didi acknowledges his attachment to Gogo in order to give them the “impression that … [they] exist. ”

Gogo, contrary to Didi, does not look to markers in time in order to track his existence; his sense of time has withered into a fluid continuum of ambiguity and might-haves. Gogo creates a idea of “self”, of which he exerts upon their social order so as to maintain a kernel of “self” in which he can believe in and act upon. One of the ways by which Gogo constructs self is through the insistence upon taste and preference, refusing to eat the turnips that Didi has to offer in place of carrots, his favoured choice of the two. By establishing individual taste, Gogo is able to exercise choice, and it is through the illusion of choice that Gogo is able to maintain a façade of self-sovereignty and free will.

Amusement through language games, routines and play are the order of the days for Didi and Gogo, mechanisms that makes their act of waiting more bearable from day to day, as well as confers an illusion of control which either tramp can exercise. After all, the slate of their activities is wiped clean each time they transpose to a different routine, a different “diversion” that will keep them occupied. There is no seriousness in their world of play; one moment Didi’s anger at Gogo is outplayed by the comical ridiculousness of hanging and erections. Another moment they are both hurling abuses at each other for sake of amusement. Because there is no fathomable seriousness (all is a performance of sorts), the ‘control’ of meaning they derive from these games are empty in themselves. Didi’s opening lines sum up the worth of their actions: “Nothing to be done.”

Richard Gilman quotes Ionesco’s “I do not teach, I am a witness,” in terms of Beckett’s portrayal of the world of Godot . For Gilman, Beckett’s imagined world “works tirelessly against … that desire for explicit meaning”, drawing a distinction between theatre with a “pedagogic function” and “one with an aesthetic one.” For Gilman, these ends are the ends imposed by the desires of audiences in the tradition of literature and art to be able to explain itself and offer consumable meaning. Beckett neither endorses nor condemns any of the strategies employed by Didi, Gogo, Lucky or Pozzo in order to exist in his world. Beckett presents us with an angle at which to view the human condition in all it’s possibly bleakness, laying bare the illusions employed by man in search for meaning and truth. In many ways, it is like a mirror held up to the audience, but one that is presented as “a Tragicomedy”. Beckett seems to point to the notion that however tragic or bleak a worldview we may be incarcerated in, humour unlocks the chains that we are subjected to, however briefly. It compels us to laugh not only at the absurdity of Didi, Gogo, Pozzo and Lucky, but also at the absurdity of our world and the ways by which we create meaning, truth and existence.

The play ends implying continuity, the guaranteed progression of Didi and Gogo through time, as will the audience. Didi says “Let’s go”, but Beckett indicates “They do not move”. They cannot move, their duty is to persist through time and space with Godot as much as an accidental distraction as their little games and routines. Likewise, there is nowhere for the audience to go except back to their own lives of routines, illusions and imagined truths. The country road in the theatre extends out and into the ‘real’ world of the spectator, such that he or she emerges into what Zizek coined “The Desert of the Real” . That truth is the dirt and rocks beneath one’s feet, and that much alone is assured. However, perhaps Beckett also indicates that it is the only way we know how to cope with our absurd conditions in life, and that beneath the tragedy of our seemingly pathetic existence, there is the possibility of humour, laughter and comedy that is equally as absurd.