I feel self-conscious writing in relation to Beckett.  That is to say, I love his words enough to want to possess them, making it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish his sentiments from mine – his words from mine; his words become mine.  To then project from within a discussion of Beckett’s work to another – to you – when I hardly know you, can only imagine you – I can only ‘join the dots’ as I see them and attempt to make those dots, and those lines with which I draw them together, visible to you.  The result for me is somewhat uncanny; perhaps, so it will be for you, if not it may seem alien – other – but we are only human and what choice do we have – will I have any other choice in the end?

Adorno warns me, and others, against this subjective familiarization of Beckett’s work: ‘Understanding it can mean nothing other than understanding its incomprehensibility.’[1]  And yet, I cannot help (am helpless) but to hear Beckett’s words as my own in this case: ‘The translations of text are my own.’[2]  Nature, to me, is a network of intersecting sines (waves) rendered within as a network of intersecting signs, things, objects that I have experience with, that I have previously possessed – and so I ‘join the dots’.  But, I can never fully possess these objects; I can shackle them – ‘Estragon: Remind me to bring a bit of rope tomorrow.’[3]  And yet, still, Lucky will think[4] much to my embarrassment; I cannot deny him that right, try as I might.  So, while all I can do, should do, is present things to others, to you, as near as I can to how I perceive them, I reserve the right to be mistaken when I think, and thus write, of these things – because I may well have, could only have, mis-taken them.  Proust gives a prudent demonstration of the precarious nature of interpretation – mourning, he confuses the words of Gilberte, his other love, for those of his lost love Albertine:

‘The telegram I had received a few days earlier, and had supposed to be from Albertine, was from Gilberte…  [With] the somewhat laboured originality of Gilberte’s handwriting… it was quite natural that the clerk who dispatched the telegram should have read the loops of s’s or y’s in the line above as an ‘-ine’ attached to the word ‘Gilberte’.  The dot over the i of Gilberte had climbed up to make a full stop.  As for her capital G, it resembled a Gothic A…  How many letters are actually read into a word by a careless person who knows what to expect, who sets out with the idea that the message is from a certain person?  How many words into the sentence?  We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow… extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same starting-point, are all quite natural.  A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with an obstinacy equaled only by our good faith, springs from an original mistake in our premises.’[5]

‘The danger is in the neatness of identifications’[6] – and yet ‘I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’[7]  The bow I draw may be long, perhaps too long in another’s opinion, but it is the bow I have and I can do nothing other than aim for the target – any target – as I see it – for now, and thus hope to maintain and present this present habit of mine.

        So, what does Waiting for Godot mean to me?  I saw it – performed – felt drawn in and cautiously drew back for clarity to seek authority in a system of shared sines, and this is what I found:

‘At the best, all that is realized in Time (all Time produce), whether in Art or Life, can only be possessed successively, by a series of partial annexations – and never integrally and at once….  Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer…  The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit.  Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability…  Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit.  Life is habit.  Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectivation of the individual’s will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed…  The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day…  The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddling clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.’[8]

This he created, or rather recreated from Proust, twenty years prior to putting his pen to paper with Godot and yet to me it could be the same day.  Here I imagine I can see, or rather see what I can imagine to be, a fertile environment for the inhabitants of the play to come: the setting - gray, evening, bare, a country road – as a ‘dull inviolability’; the timing – same time, same place – taking ‘place every day’; the couples – Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, the Boy and his absent Brother – as memories; more particularly, Estragon, Lucky and the absent, perhaps repressed Brother as organic eccentricities and Vladimir, Pozzo and the Boy as creatures of ‘Habit’ or compromises ‘effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities’; Pozzo as ‘the ballast that chains’ Lucky to ‘his vomit’; each couple as ‘a succession of individuals’; the play itself as ‘the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness’ – moments where and when the ‘boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.’  Estragon the eccentric, seems to me to demonstrate an uncanny possession of these sacred, heterogeneous truths in regard to ‘this [internal] dualism in multiplicity… in relation to Proust’s perspectivism,’[9] and still he is continually, naturally denied by force of Habit:

Estragon:     I knew it was him.

Vladimir:      Who?

Estragon:     Godot.

Vladimir:      But it's not Godot.[10]

And then there’s the Boy: A Freudian slip? A slip of the pen? Perhaps simply a mistaken premise?  When together, the Boy and Estragon are both denied by Vladimir, by the presumption of Habit – this because Godot is Vladimir’s mis-taken possession, his obsession, his other I.

Act I

Boy:            Mister Albert… ?                                  [Question]

Vladimir:      Yes.

          […]

Boy:            Mr Godot…                                         [Statement]

Vladimir:      Obviously…[11]

          […]

Estragon:     I’m unhappy.

Vladimir:      Not really!  Since when?

Estragon:     I’d forgotten.

Vladimir:      Extraordinary the tricks that memory plays! (Estragon tries to speak, renounces, limps to his place, sits down and begins to take off his boots. To Boy.) Well?

Boy:            Mr. Godot?

Estragon the eccentric becomes here the ‘extraordinary’ (and ironic) trickster while the Boy is compelled to transform his address to Vladimir from a statement into a question.  Vladimir peremptorily refuses to give the Boy a chance to reclaim his original position in the second act:

Act II

Boy:            Mister… (Vladimir turns.) Mister Albert…        [Statement]

          […]

Vladimir:      You have a message from Mr Godot.            [Presumption]

Boy:            Yes sir.                                                         [Forced response]

But, if this analysis causes you some apprehension, as well it might, as I perhaps unfairly presume it might, all I can say is the Boy and the others are mine for the time being, so please forgive my long bow.  And, of course, there is more, there is always some-thing more (albeit perhaps no-thing in particular) but now that I feel I can see the tree for the leaves, my tree for its leaves, these sines now my signs, my wavelength projected out there to be joined - if you will - it is time for me to move on to other things, for your sake, for the sake of an-other, for the sake of one and the same.

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        Waiting for Godot in a sense, to my sense in particular, is well described by the expression Strangers to Ourselves.[12]  In the book with this title, Kristeva traces an otherness that is still familiar, if only barely, by way of the exchange between He (the Nephew) and I in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew[13] so as to better frame the question: ‘is a society without foreigners possible?’[14]

‘Who is the Nephew?  The philosopher’s opponent or his hidden self? The opposite other or the nocturnal double that comes to the surface?  A clear-cut answer… would bring the pantomime to an end and betray the “mental trollops” that Diderot, in an extraordinary flight of polyphonic fancy, presents in fact through [their] confrontation…  Different and accomplices, others and same, [I] and He are in conflict, agree, even change places.’[15]

‘The nephew is the cynic’s cynic… remaining up to the end foreign to ethical identity,’[16] an eccentric, a ‘man without a kingdom.’[17]  And from this she concludes that:

‘Being frank to the point of strangeness reveals modern man on the political level as a man without a country.  His pantomimic positions could only be assumed by cutting through the kingdom, by going across the borders of wobbly sovereignties.’[18]

Beckett concurs, ‘Nec tecum nec sine te,’[19] but only if I, ‘for the purposes of this synthesis… adopt the inner chronology of the … demonstration, and to examine in the first place that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation – Time.’[20]  By way of this synchronism I can begin to imagine, with Kristeva, that ‘the good is bad, the bad is good, they live together;’[21] like:

Vladimir:      Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. One?

Estragon:     Our what?

Vladimir:      Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other . . . (he searches for the contrary of saved) . . . damned.

Estragon:     Saved from what?

Vladimir:      Hell.

Estragon:     I'm going.[22]

(And Estragon again reveals his uncanny knack for the truth about where he is going, or at least a truth with which one can occupy oneself despite or perhaps because of the optimistic, nay, pessimistic fancies of Habit.)  Who am I, then, to suppose that I be ‘saved and the other … damned?’  Despite He, I tends toward the self-same cosmopolitan position:

He:              But if nature were as powerful as she is wise why, when she made them great, didn’t she make them equally good?

I:                 But don’t you see that with such a line of argument you overthrow the universal order of things, and that if everything were excellent here below nothing would stand out as excellent.

He:              You are right.  The main things is that you and I should exist, and that we should be you and I.  Apart from that let everything go as it likes.  The best order of things, to my way of thinking, is the one I was meant to be part of, and to hell with the most perfect of worlds if I am not of it.  I would rather exist, even as an impudent argufier, than not exist at all.

I:                 There is nobody who doesn’t share your opinion and criticize the existing order of things without realizing that he is thereby denying his own existence.[23]

But I exist, despite my own denials, despite my refusal of the other, and yet others remain – for me, for the moment.  So, if this is the case, if we can admit this bare, existential, ‘dualism in multiplicity’ evident in both Beckett and Diderot, then where and how am I, with others, to construct tomorrow’s, generally inclusive rather than particularly exclusive, nation.  Kristeva asserts that the human psyche, my psyche, is modifiable and thus can incorporate:

‘universality for the rights of man, provided we integrate in that universality not only the smug principle according to which ‘all men are brothers’ but also that portion of conflict, hatred, violence, and destructiveness that for two centuries since the Declaration has ceaselessly been unloaded upon the realities of wars and fratricidal closeness and that the Freudian discovery of the unconscious tells us is a surely modifiable but yet constituent portion of the human psyche.’[24]

This seems reasonable at first, and I tend to (want to) believe it – no, less, I realize, as I remember, with the help of Estragon’s sullen sagacity, ‘Cain’ and ‘Abel’ representing ‘all humanity’[25]; and of the others whom may want to kill me yet and whom I may want to kill in return.

Estragon:     The best thing would be to kill me, like the other.

Vladimir:      What other? (Pause.) What other?

Estragon:     Like billions of others.[26]

And so Kristeva responds (because I still, for the moment, wish to help her in realizing her dream, her dream all the time becoming mine) that the way is:

‘as Hegel saw it, constituted by culture – political, economic, social, intellectual… - as estrangement of the natural being…  Individuality becomes stable only by giving up the self for the universal: that is the role of [I] the philosopher.[27]

But even so, before I perform the sacrificial role of I the philosopher and thereby give my ‘self up for the universal,’  I need more than just this purely imagined sine, this theoretical ‘cultural constitution.’ I need a more recognizable sign, some-thing more concrete if I, along with the others who remain, am to adopt any-thing.  Otherwise, I am forced to return to the beginning, to Estragon, and his consolation that there is ‘nothing to be done.’[28]  Thus, keeping all this in mind, I feel the need to look elsewhere for some-thing to hang my hat on, some-thing, perhaps, more corpo-real, before I permit Lucky to think and dance freely in the ‘wobbly’ kingdom of I.

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        This life, my life, the life of any-body, is, if nothing else, precarious; remembering once again (and perhaps at the same time) Beckett’s feelings in relation to Proust:

‘The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddling clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.’[29]

And now it is Butler’s Precarious Life[30] that begins to resonate within me:

‘I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled.  One finds oneself fallen.  One is exhausted but does not know why.  Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.[31]

And I am reminded of Vladimir’s great project – Waiting for Godot – and of finding ‘oneself fallen’: Estragon throwing himself in the Rhone only to be rescued by Vladimir,[32] and the perseverance of Pozzo and Lucky, now become blind and dumb, whom ‘wait till we can get up. Then we go on. On!’[33] if they fall far from help.  These all moments of ‘the suffering of being’ that punctuate the ‘boredom of life’ which provide the ‘periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations.’  Here, in adaptation, I have found a possible mechanism for Kristeva’s ‘modifiable but yet constituent portion of the human psyche,’ one which Butler suggests occurs within, with the process of mourning: ‘one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever.’  In the words of Proust I can see a clear projection of this very sentiment:

For the death of Albertine to have been able to eliminate my suffering, the shock of the fall would have had to kill her not only in Touraine but in myself.  There, she had never been more alive…   A person… is a product of memory, and our memory of a moment is not informed of everything that has happened since; this moment that it has recorded endures still, lives still, and with it the person whose form is outlined in it.  And moreover, this disintegration does not only make the dead live, it multiplies them.  In order to be consoled I would have to forget not one but innumerable Albertines.  When I had succeeded in bearing the grief of losing this Albertine, I must begin again with another, with a hundred others.  So then my life was entirely altered.’[34]

This shared by Beckett, who once felt that ‘the tragedy of the Marcel-Albertine liaison is the type-tragedy of the human relationship whose failure is preordained.’[35]  But Beckett goes on to make Proust’s words his own and thus transforms them:

‘He knows that this woman has no reality, that ‘our most exclusive love for a person is always our love for something else,’ that intrinsically she is less than nothing, but that in her nothingness there is active, mysterious and invisible, a current that forces him to bow down and worship an obscure and implacable Goddess, and to make sacrifices of himself before her.  And the Goddess who requires this sacrifice and humiliation, whose sole condition of patronage is corruptibility, and into whose faith and worship all mankind is born, is the Goddess of Time.  No object prolonged in this temporal dimension tolerates possession, meaning by possession total possession, only to be achieved by the complete identification of object and subject.  The impenetrability of the most vulgar and insignificant human creature is not merely an illusion of the subject’s jealousy.  So that we can understand the position of Proust: ‘We imagine that the object of desire is a being that can be laid down before us, enclosed within a body.  Alas!  It is the extension of that being to all the points of space and time that it has occupied and will occupy.  If we do not possess contact with such a place and with such an hour we do not possess that being.  But we cannot touch all these points.’  And again: ‘A being scattered in space and time is no longer a woman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of problems that cannot be solved, a sea, like Xerxes, we thrash with rods in an absurd desire to punish it for having engulfed our treasure.’[36]

And finally I recognize that I cannot possess the other ‘being scattered in space and time,’ I cannot ‘touch all these points,’ resolve these ‘problems that cannot be solved,’ for my perception of the other, of any- and every-body was always already an illusion – just as Godot is an illusion, an-other I, by an-other name.  As I acknowledge the unity of loss, loss of the real and imagined other, I am left ec-static, ‘literally… outside [my]self… beside [my]self with rage or grief’ and I and the others (an indissoluble we) can begin to build a ‘cultural constitution’ in communion with ‘those of use who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage’[37] – and perhaps, just perhaps, cosmopolitanism becomes possible.  Godot, Albert, Albertine and Gilbertine were never real to me but, if I include along with them all the other I’s – as I must so as not to deny ‘something fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation’[38] – then they are nothing other than really me: ‘Who am ‘I’, without you?’[39]  Now, despite Adorno, Waiting for Godot becomes comprehensible:

‘a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing.’[40]

        Now, I can, if I will, if you will with me, incorporate my enraptured self, myself outside myself: ‘ourselves outside ourselves [which] seems to follow from bodily life, from its vulnerability and its exposure.’[41]  I feel the signs dissolving back into sines, into harmony, the many dots, from the many i's, joining to form a circle, an unmistakably Beckett-like circularity, because I fall, again and again, as I must, if only to get up again, like all the others – ‘billions of them’ – and share in their story, now my story, maybe, one day, our story: like ‘Clotide, a 15-year-old girl from Bujumbura, Burundi [who tells us after being raped that]… “I think about committing suicide, but my heart tells me not to.  I am ashamed.  I am not myself…”’[42] and yet she continues to speak;  like the unnamed ‘woman, 30, from Bunia, [Democratic Republic of Congo] tells her story: “I was sleeping with my children.  They shot outside our door.  I opened… They ordered me to remove the child from my back with threats to kill me.  I obeyed and they raped me… I never went to the hospital.  I have been so depressed, life seems to have stopped for me.  I am so lost for words…”’[43] and yet she continues to speak.  ‘Vulnerability and exposure,’ ecstasy, felt exquisitely in the end by The Unnamable, and by I, say I, who tells every-body, that ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me.’[44]  And thus we return to the beginning where ‘I shall not be alone… I am of course alone.  Alone.  That is soon said.  Things have to be soon said.  And how can one be sure, in such darkness?  I shall have company.  In the beginning.’[45]  In the end, as in the beginning, every-body is beside themselves; in the end, as in the beginning, ‘they don’t move’[46] because they have no-where-else to go; in the end, as in the beginning, when we recognize there is absolutely no-where-else to go, we finally find the gift, if no-thing; zoe, if no-other; all alone without, all others within, with only Time for company.

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