Wandering through Samuel Beckett’s 1953 absurdist play Waiting for Godot.
Did Beckett actually have an interpretation in mind, or did he deliberately write a maximally vague story that everyone could map their own interests onto?
How well does the humour hold up over time? Where does Beckett rank in the canon of absurdist and existentialist writers? What proportion of reported suicides are actually autoerotic asphyxiation accidents? etc
gooning oneself to death
Benny: Alright boys, are we going to dive into…
Rich: Let’s get into it.
Benny: We’ve been waiting around for a while, so…
Cam: Welcome to Do You Even Lit?
Rich: Fuck.
Benny: Although, to be honest, to talk about this book, we could have just had a separate conversation the whole time, and it would have been right on theme. Just distractedly waiting for us to actually start talking about the book, and then we’d end by…
Rich: Yeah, everyone has to make sure that they ignore what the other person is saying and just reply with a continuation of their own chain of thoughts and monologue. So not unlike our normal format, but just exaggerate it even more.
Cam: Who’s going first if we hang ourselves?
Rich: I’m about 75 kgs at the moment, so I might go first.
Cam: Oh shit.
Rich: Where are you weighing in at, Benny?
Benny: Oh, I don’t know. KGs is the issue. Look it up.
Cam: Process and power, man.
Benny: I’m at about 70.
Cam: I’m not saying what I am. I’m actually the lightest I’ve been in ages. I’m like 86.
Benny: Nice dude.
Rich: Sigh
Benny: You definitely poop your pants, right? That’s 100%.
Cam: Apparently you do that when you take ayahuasca, like the mother of all trips — just like comes out both ends.
Benny: Really?
Cam: And you kind of like interpret it metaphorically.
Rich: Just imagine cracking like the hardest boner of your life and you’re also like shitting uncontrollably and vomiting. It’d be so confusing.
Cam: It wasn’t fair if you go to the physio, you know.
Rich: Or in this case also being asphyxiated. Oh, people get off doing this, right? Choke themselves out.
Cam: Oh yeah, if you ever did that you need like a friend or something, yeah.
Rich: So maybe it does give you a boner.
Benny: Really?
Rich: Yeah.
Cam: And just in case, you know, come and check on me, clean it all up, take the belt off. Like you don’t want to be found like that, you know what I mean?
Benny: Oh you mean — you mean in case it goes sideways, not to save your life?
Cam: Just pull the pants up, yeah. You need a close friend. Yeah, no, afterwards come pull the pants up. Just hang on stuff normally, you know what I mean?
Rich: So many reported suicides are actually auto-erotic asphyxiation, where they were too embarrassed to say what happened and they’re like, yeah, it’s so sad. We didn’t even see it coming.
Cam: Like 80%.
Rich: Imagine being like their partner or whoever finds them. It’s like your dad or something and you stumble in and like their pants are down and they’ve got a boner. They’ve got a porno mag or something. Jesus Christ.
Cam: I don’t know, it’s so tragic because it’s like this sacred, depressing thing and then just like that image.
Benny: And also you wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone about it if you’re the parents — like who you’re gonna be able to tell?
Rich: If you guys accidentally choked yourself to death while jerking off, would you rather it was reported as a suicide rather than a fatal masturbation accident?
Cam: Going out in glory. Yeah I mean, probably. But it’s interesting — comment on like taboo-ness in society, or what we find embarrassing. Because it might misrepresent you, because otherwise you’re coming across as depressed. Have we got like — choking the chicken every other day?
Rich: Yeah, but people are definitely gonna make fun of you and somewhat think less of you, right? Like you fucking gooned yourself to death. Whereas if you’re depressed, it’s like — I mean, especially in the current environment, it’s kind of like you’re a delicate sad boy.
Benny: Do you want people to think well of you after you’ve died? Is that an important…
Rich: I mean, I guess I don’t really care, but it probably matters for my family and friends and stuff.
Benny: Yeah, for their sake I can understand that. But also for their sake, being depressed is not a great look either. Like this guy, you know, had this family, and you know, this rig outside, and he still killed himself. What more could you want in life? He had a nice bookshelf, and you just bought a nice microphone.
Rich: Oh no, I just had a vision of me hanging from that freaking pull-up bar with my dick out and —
Benny: I never got a muscle up. Fuck this shit.
Cam: It’s almost like, man, if someone found out you was doing that every fucking week, I would fucking kill myself the next week anyway.
Rich: Well, it shouldn’t, sort of abstractly, be that shameful. It’s just you don’t want to broadcast it to the whole world, right? I mean, it’s just jerking off with extra steps, basically.
Cam: It’s just a couple weeks. Yeah, sure. As I said in Seinfeld, there’s anything wrong with it.
Rich: Yeah.
Cam: I just — rather than they know I was morbidly depressed for years and finally took myself — but not that there’s anything wrong with it.
Benny: And they can talk about how sad it is that this creative genius couldn’t output more because he was so depressed. At least it would give me an excuse for not having written more essays. Like, sorry, I was dealing with stuff.
Rich: It draws attention to you, right? Like, you become sort of canonized or something. If you’re young and attractive…
Cam: Well, Franzen reckons Wallace did it a little bit because of that. It becomes like the canonized author who killed himself.
Rich: Well, it’s kind of worked, right? I mean, we don’t have to reckon with what his takes might be in modernity, which is nice.
Cam: Yeah, let it work. Let it head out. Okay.
Rich: I’m so curious to hear everyone’s reaction.
Cam: Yeah, okay.
synopsis (nothing happens, twice)
Rich: I haven’t written a synopsis. Actually, I’ll do a synopsis off the dime.
Cam: I can do one if you want, but I’m happy for you to do one as well.
Rich: I’ll do one, you can improve on it.
Benny: Okay. Sentence by sentence.
Cam: Don’t interrupt me.
Rich: Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for a third man, Godot. The next day, they wait for him again. The end.
Benny: Nothing happens. Twice.
Cam: Do you know — yeah, there’s this famous review of like, this is the play that nothing happens twice.
Rich: That’s basically it. All right.
Cam: I’ll unpack it a little bit more. Alright, so we’ve got these two guys, Vladimir and Estragon, and they’re kind of almost like tramps, kind of bums, but not quite, but they kind of have that vibe. And they’re waiting in this kind of — it would be a play stage, but like this barren landscape, and there’s just this leafless tree. And they’re clowning about, asking questions, but they keep saying, we’re waiting for Godot, we’re waiting for Godot. And they don’t seem to know really who that is.
Cam: Then another character comes along called Pozzo, and he’s got a slave, got a rope around his neck. And the slave carries a stool and a suitcase, and the slave doesn’t talk, and Pozzo’s quite cruel to the slave. And they talk to him, and again, it’s all a little bit absurd, all a bit nonsense. Pozzo’s kind of like upper class coded. They get the slave, called Lucky, to sort of dance and then to think, and he says a soliloquy which itself is kind of nonsensical and hard to interpret.
Cam: And then the day ends, and they’re not sure what to do, and then they come back, and that’s the whole “they do nothing twice” thing, and they’re still just waiting for Godot. A boy comes along, but it’s all still absurd and nonsense, and then near the end they consider hanging themselves, and they don’t do that, and they say they’ll leave, and then they don’t leave. And then the play ends. What’s your reaction, Benny? And then Rich?
Initial reactions + arguing about interpretation
Benny: I think it took me a while to get into it, and I think it’s one of those things where as you’re reading it, I didn’t find it very insightful, but then thinking about it a bit after and taking a little bit of time to write out some of the themes, I thought it was more valuable and more interesting. I think maybe it’s a… so when was it written?
Cam: 50s. 1952.
Benny: Yeah, I think it’s a bit of a piece of its time in the sense that I think absurdism and existentialism have just entered the culture more now and are more familiar to people. I have a bit of a similar reaction to this that I had to Razor’s Edge, in that I think if I read it in the 50s it would probably hit me harder than reading it now, because I’ve read Nagel on the absurd and there’s all these philosophy podcasts that discuss it and whatnot all the time. So I think I sort of knew a lot of the themes going into it.
Benny: But I found it surprisingly more thought provoking, especially reflecting on it afterwards, than I thought I would and than I thought I was going to while reading it even. What about you, Rich?
Rich: Yeah, I fucking hated it.
Benny: This is the — we got a wolf situation.
Cam: There’s no wolf, mate.
Benny: It’s just the tables have turned.
Rich: Yeah, but I read the whole thing at least, so I’m entitled to hate it. No, I’m kind of kidding, but after reflecting on it, I don’t hate it. But I definitely — I was bored while reading it, I thought it was stupid, I experienced cringe, which I haven’t experienced before. Yeah, I’m kind of surprised it took this long, but this is the first of the books that we’ve read where I thought, the emperor has no clothes. You know what Cam’s initial reaction to Virginia Woolf was — hey, go back and listen, bitch. It’s like the theatrical equivalent of the banana taped to the gallery wall. That was my first response, and like, this fucking sucks.
Rich: And I think my slightly more charitable interpretation is that it comes across to me as like a cipher. And I really got there only by reading the wiki, which is that everyone is reading their own interpretation onto this. And there’s a million different ways you can take it, from wartime allegory to Jungian archetypes to Freud to absurdism and existentialism and God, atheism, any way you want.
Rich: And I think that is kind of cool and interesting in a sense, but it’s also a condemnation, I think, that he’s written something so intentionally vague that you could map literally anything onto it. And in fact, it seems like he knew that that’s why it was successful, and he took steps to keep it vague and make it even vaguer when he was doing the English translation. He got rid of biographical details and made it even more of an abstract generality.
Cam: Yeah, I don’t think he did that to make it more successful, but I know he did that. Anyway, carry on.
Rich: I don’t know if he did or not, but it’s the fact that he did that, right? He realized that this nebulosity is what made it work so well. So I think that’s interesting, but I also don’t find it particularly more interesting than like tarot readings or casting the I Ching or something, where it might be a tool that sort of helps you generate some thoughts as a sort of directed randomness. But it’s going to necessarily be inferior to any work which is actually about a particular thing in a deliberate or directed way. So my fear with this whole conversation that we’re about to have is that we’re looking like idiots by scrabbling around trying to find a signal in noise when I think it’s probably just noise, to be honest.
Cam: Well, let’s push back at it gently. I mean, I do kind of agree with some of what you’re saying.
Rich: Push back firmly.
Cam: I need to get the belt out then.
Rich: I like it rough.
Cam: Well, my reaction was similar to Benny’s and some of yours, where I was like, man, what the fuck is this about? And I mean, okay, the first thing is it’s so hard with these canonized classics, as we’ve kind of talked about before, where this is this super famous play and you go into it and it’s nonsense, and you have to have a certain type of confidence to be like, well, this is just stupid, when all these smart people like it.
Cam: I mean, the other caveat as well is it’s a play, and Beckett himself thought the medium matters.
Rich: Yeah, no, I did wonder about that.
Cam: And we read it, and maybe as plays go — everyone reads Shakespeare, but as plays go maybe this is more important to see. And we’d probably have — we’d just seen Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart do it.
Rich: I had that exact same thought, but then, like, you know, I’d watch Ian McKellen read the back of a Weet-Bix packet, right? I’m sure he can elevate just about anything into art, but I don’t think that’s necessarily an endorsement of the actual material.
Cam: Well okay, not even necessarily McKellen, right? Would you just go to a performance of it in Australia or something? And the medium itself may be important in general and especially important in this. And I know Beckett, that’s why he wrote plays, is because he sort of had misgivings around prose and doing what he wants to do.
Cam: But anyway, caveat aside, to give some slight pushback: I think it’s not totally expansive of what you can — you can’t just interpret anything from it. It is vague. It’s kind of like McLuhan’s cold media, where he talks about low-fidelity cartoons and stuff can be interpreted lots of ways, but this is just very vague and it can be. But I just think that you show it to certain groups of certain people — like I was reading about, they showed it to prisoners back in the day and all of those people immediately loved it and they got it straight away and they’re like, yeah, we just know what this is about.
Cam: And there’s a famous performance of it in the 90s — Susan Sontag produced it during the Sarajevo Wars and the Yugoslavian Wars, and I think they showed it in like Hurricane Katrina, Bush era, and you know, these people are all sort of getting it and seeing meaning in it. I think there’s not necessarily nothing there. So I’ll just spell out — I mean, you guys probably know it, but this kind of —
Rich: I’m a lot more interested in your reading of it, because it’s a classic, we know people love it, we know it’s resonated with people. So I’m way more interested to know, rather than endless examples of groups of people who like it — like, what is it that you like about it?
Cam: Yeah, let’s go. Benny, you were going to…
Benny: Yeah, I mean, I would push back even harder than Cam on the claim that you can read it any way you want. I think that’s just demonstrably false. It’s abstract in a sense, but there are also extremely clear themes around waiting and repetition and memory, and analogies between the scripting and a thought in your head. I think you couldn’t find any topic and try and map it on. And in fact, when reading the Wikipedia, I was pretty underwhelmed by a lot of the cultural critics around it that tried to map it onto certain world events. There was like — some people were trying to map it onto the plight of the Jews during the war. I think that was one possible reading. I think that’s extremely hard to find in the text. I think that’s a huge reach.
Benny: So yeah, I would just push, like, pick a theme and try and map it on. I don’t think it’s actually going to work really well. The fact that they’re talking over each other, forgetting why they’re there, forgetting what happened the previous day. The characters — you have Vladimir who’s continually musing about more religious and philosophical matters, Estragon who’s continually forgetting things and is more thinking about physical pain and discomfort and stuff like that. I think they’re pretty clear themes throughout the whole thing. Maybe I’ll just let you react to that.
Rich: Well, I’m hearing motifs and character traits for sure, but I’m not necessarily hearing themes or messages. So maybe you can take it to the next level of — I don’t know how you guys want to do this, talk about each character or how you want to format it, but what do their behaviors tell us, as it were? The fact that they keep repeating themselves or that they’re sort of lost in time and…
What are we waiting for?
Cam: Okay. My reaction to it, and I think what people — the groups of people during wartime and disaster time are seeing in it — it captured this thing around waiting and uncertainty. It’s obviously in the title. And I wasn’t sure, Benny, you would know, the French title, En Attendant Godot, does that literally mean waiting for? I read somewhere it could also mean while waiting for Godot.
Benny: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don’t know if it makes a huge difference, but yeah.
Cam: Well, maybe I thought there’s an interesting nuance there of just emphasizing what you do while you’re waiting. But you’re kind of in this apocalyptic scenario, or you interpret it as limbo or hell. Or Beckett himself, when he was writing it, he’s during World War II in France. Or like even COVID recently — there’s this thing that you’re waiting for, and no one knows what to do, and you still have to wait and you still have to do things and you still have to entertain yourself.
Cam: And in some sense, to be existential about it, it’s like, you know, we’re just waiting for death, and we’re all just entertaining ourselves now, and we’re no different than these guys watching Lucky dance, and you’re just reading all these books. It’s a little bit more sensical. But if you take Camus and Thomas Nagel, it’s all kind of nothing at the end of the day. But this is more this confusion of like, what do we do, and people still try to fill the time.
Cam: I think there’s one of the quotes — I can’t remember if it was Vladimir or Estragon talked about — I should have got the exact quote, but it was something around their wait or time pass, and they go, it makes time pass easy. And there’s some comment around like, time passes anyway. And it reminded me of, I think, Wallace’s Forever Overhead, where the boy kind of thinks about it, like the bee kind of flying there. Just the thing like, you know, time passes no matter if you’re in this disaster scenario or just regular life or depressed, and you kind of have to make it pass, and there’s kind of no meaning at the end of it.
Cam: But, you know, all that said, I did find it a bit annoying and boring reading it.
Benny: Definitely a huge theme is that life and time is passing by, often while you’re waiting for something specific to happen. So a lot of your life is spent anticipating the next thing, whatever the next thing is. You’re waiting for something, waiting for some good event, you’re waiting for the end of work, you’re waiting for the weekend, you’re waiting for the next vacation, the next girlfriend, whatever. And a lot of your life is just anticipating that and trying to make the time in between sort of vanish as fast as possible.
Benny: But that’s what your life is — that’s the important parts of every day. A lot of us just spend that time trying to distract yourself until the next thing, getting lost in little melodramas that are sort of pointless from everyone’s perspective but your own. The fact that these same scenes play themselves out over and over and they seem to be in a similar psychological state throughout most of the play regardless of what’s actually going on — I thought it was pretty poignant, I guess, of how most people, me included, live most of our lives.
Rich: But isn’t the tone a bit darker and more existential than that? It’s not exactly that they’re not able to be in the moment and experience the ups and downs of life passing them by because they’re too fixated on some future thing that’s gonna bring them comfort or not gonna make them happy or whatever the usual trap of modernity. I think it’s almost like they’re waiting to die. Like, they just want to die. They know that nothing good is happening, they don’t enjoy the present moment. They want it to be over and done with sooner rather than later.
Benny: I think that’s most people. That’s my claim. What do you think waiting in anticipation for the next thing means? It means you want whatever you’re doing currently to end and you want that next thing, and you know that next thing you assume to be much better than whatever you’re currently doing.
Rich: Yeah, but like the grimmest possible version, where they think that death will be better than whatever they could possibly do in life. Whatever way they could entertain themselves is not going to be as good as non-existence.
Benny: Yeah, I mean — what do you guys think of the death thing? I didn’t see that coming, to be honest. That didn’t seem to be a theme during part one, and I thought it came out of nowhere a bit in part two.
Rich: Didn’t they first talk about hanging themselves in part one?
Cam: Yeah, they do early on with the erection, but it’s kind of flippant and it’s with a bunch of other nonsense. I mean, right from the start I think you can kind of read it as like, are these guys in limbo? Where are they? Are they in hell?
Benny: Yeah, it’s very dreamlike.
Cam: Yeah.
Benny: Or like purgatory-like or something. Yeah.
Rich: It’s all fantasy elements, right? Like, everyone loses their memory day by day.
Cam: And they talk about like, are you from here, to Pozzo and to the boy. Like, you know, you’re human, you’re one, you’re something like me — implying that there could be another option.
Rich: Yeah. And Vladimir’s message that he keeps repeating to the boy is like, just tell him you saw me. Just tell him that I was seen, that I am real, or that I exist or something.
Religious, Freudian, Marxist interpretations
Cam: I mean, we might as well get out there — one obvious, fairly obvious interpretation is Godot is God. It’s in the name. It’s this thing where we just have to have faith. These guys seem to have this sort of faith in Godot, right? Like, they don’t know who he is, they just know he’s there for them. Beckett himself, as you kind of alluded to, is sort of unhelpful, and then says, well, if it was God I would have said God. Like, I don’t know who Godot is.
Rich: Well, he was actually helpful there by straightforwardly dismissing it. And he pointed out that he wrote it in French, and it’s not how you say God in French. So if that was what he was thinking, it was unconscious.
Cam: Yeah, but I think — it’s more a question for Benny. I mean, it’s hard now with anglicized world, but I think Godot, even for a French audience, would have had some cultural sway or some imprint. Just kind of know what it means.
Benny: I don’t know. God in French is — so it’s very different.
Cam: Yeah, but just like the English word God — would they…
Rich: I can see it the other way around, that English people, being francophones, that a French word would be widely known, but I don’t know. You might be right.
Cam: Hmm, yeah, maybe not.
Benny: Did you guys read that one interpretation, that it’s like the Freudian interpretation?
Cam: Nah, I’m interested to hear that. Go on.
Benny: Yeah, I mean — so Freud’s got this thing with the id, the ego, and the superego, right? And Vladimir’s nickname is Didi, which is id backwards twice, and Estragon, Gogo. So I think the claim is that they’re supposed to be id and ego in some sense, and then they’re waiting for superego, which is sort of your —
Cam: What’s funny is Vlad seems more like the ego, right?
Benny: That’s exactly what I was thinking as I read that. Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking as I read the analysis.
Cam: I think Vladimir is meant to be the smarter one slightly, even though they’re both talking shit. But there’s that one point which is kind of funny — actually made me lol, and it was a little bit of metafiction, where Gogo was like, use your intelligence, and then it just says like, Vladimir uses his intelligence.
Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cam: And he’s like, I’m still in the dark.
Benny: Like a video game style. Like, yeah. Use intelligence.
Cam: Yeah, yeah.
Rich: That’s the perks of actually reading the play — there’s something in there for us.
Benny: That’s funny.
Cam: Yeah, but I think he was meant to be the smarter one. But certainly Pozzo, I wondered, kind of represented this maybe like society, and that would be like the superego. Because he comes across as sort of the ruler of society, or just society itself, like impinging on Lucky. There’s certainly a class reading there.
Cam: And he even talks about — at one point he’s talking about Lucky just wants to blame Pozzo for his circumstances, and Pozzo just views it as the natural order of things, and he’s actually helping Lucky. Lucky would choose this life. And it definitely reminded me of discussions around Marxism and free market — the idea of poor people, they get offered a job and it’s better than the alternative, like in the third world, and then people say, well, is the alternative dying in the bush, and therefore should government or society cater towards that?
Benny: Yeah, nice. When I was first reading it, I had a thesis in the back of my mind that was supposed to represent the nature of our thoughts, but I hadn’t seen any sort of other interpretation like that.
Cam: Like stream of consciousness.
Benny: So more so just the scattered nature of your thought. Yeah, a bit of stream of consciousness style. But just especially when, for instance, Lucky goes on his sort of two-page rant that is barely readable — it’s legible for two sentences and then changes the subject very quickly with some weird interspersed words. My sense is, yeah, it’s a bit of stream of consciousness in the sense that if you were to record your thoughts, often you focus on something for small periods of time and then you change. So yeah, I had a thought in the beginning when I started reading it, like, is this all going on just inside someone’s head or something? But I didn’t see much textual evidence later on to bear that out.
Cam: That Lucky soliloquy made me think of, like — because it’s incomprehensible, right, but he’s using a lot of big words and you can tell he’s touching on some of these essential themes maybe. But it just reminded me of when you see not-that-smart people listen to someone like, I don’t know, Russell Brand or something, that uses all these like large vocabulary and they just think he’s this genius.
Cam: And I can even relate to this book as well, like potentially being incomprehensible — are you smart enough to just realize it’s BS? I mean, to defend Richard’s thesis that there’s no clothes there, somewhat — like, part of me wonders, was this popular at the time maybe just because it was funny? It was like absurdism, and these guys are like clowns, like there’s a lot of physical comedy and it’s just absurd.
Benny: Like dark post-war these days, and people are just getting a kick out of it, yeah.
Cam: It’s like when you watch — like the Eric Andre show, which is totally surreal. I’m not sure if you guys have ever seen that, and it’s just — there’s meant to be this talk show and then suddenly there’s this guy hanging from his nipples or something. Like, who’s that’s like my dad — like the Hannibal says he’s black, like this guy hanging his white. So totally absurd and it’s just kind of funny. And I just wondered, was this popular just kind of worked because it was funny, and then you kind of have this deeper existential which is kind of there, and then everyone reads heaps into it — greatest work of all time. But maybe it was just kind of funny and absurd. And yeah, sure, existential.
Benny: It was certainly less deep than I was hoping, I guess, given how popular it is.
tHaT’s sOOO RANdoM!!
Rich: It reminds me of, in high school, did you guys have like that “that’s so random” style of humor, which is popular when you’re like 14 or something, and you sort of respond — someone says something and you respond with like a random word that you say in a funny way, or like a total non sequitur, and it’s like, oh, you’re so random. And that’s what this play reminded me of. Like just a string of non sequiturs and it’s like not really funny, but it’s kind of like in the realm of something that could be funny.
Rich: It reminds me of if you see a bad improv troupe or something, and they’re like, oh, may I have your hat? No, you can’t, you can’t have my hat, you’ve already got a boot, I can’t use my boot as a hat. And it’s like they’re groping towards something that could be funny but it’s not actually funny. And that was my reaction the entire way — I didn’t find any of it actually funny. It just seemed like — some of the physical comedy…
Cam: I think this play got laughs and gets laughs to this day. So I think it is funny, at least descriptively, to people.
Rich: I think could be funny, but possibly — what made you chuckle? I’m curious.
Cam: I mean, some things made me slightly chuckle. Well, that one that “uses intelligence” and…
Rich: Yeah, that was good. That’s good.
Cam: It wasn’t often. But there’s that kind of Tyler Cowen critique of humor — it seems to be very cultural of the time, and then of course, even if it was funny for 10-20 years, of course it’s not funny 70 years later. I find the Eric Andre show quite funny, which is surrealism and absurd.
Rich: I like absurd humor too, but it’s just — not everything is funny if you just say something random, right? It needs to actually subvert your expectations in an interesting way. You can’t just subvert expectations by pressing random number generator or whatever, or like repeating the same thing that you just said two sentences ago. So it’s not that I’m hostile to this kind of humor.
Cam: I did think there were some things that was in the mixture of the nonsense, and you’d probably have to reread this several times to kind of pick them all up. You kind of just take one line out of context, go, okay, that’s actually quite a deep line or a line you can think about. Like my example before was like, at least that helps pass the time. Like, well, time would have passed anyway. It’s quite a deep line that has a lot of meaning to it. And there were just occasional instances of that.
Cam: They even said, are you bored right now, or something, and I kind of thought, talking to the audience there. And of course I don’t have a big collection of them all because I’m not a scholar of Beckett.
Beckett’s fame
Rich: I don’t know if people did love this play when it came out. I think a couple of bold critics gave it applause or something.
Cam: I think immediately they didn’t, and then it took off.
Rich: And also they tried to censor it, which I think made it more interesting to people, because it has the words like erection in it and I can’t remember what else.
Cam: Had the Streisand effect.
Cam: I think it was really split at the time — you were either like, this is nothing, or this is great. And now it’s become this canonized thing. I think Beckett’s attitude, he had a lot of misgivings around him being famous and it being famous, and he didn’t really like it. So I don’t think he was there for the — unless he’s a very good actor.
Rich: Like, is this what made him famous? Like, surely he was just famous and this is unrelated.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. He was in obscurity. He was like James Joyce’s research assistant, weed carrier for — I mean, they didn’t smoke weed, but metaphorically — for a while, and he was trying to be a writer and he wasn’t making it. And then this just blew the fuck up when he was like 50.
Rich: Ah, okay.
Cam: And then after this, he was writing shit that was even more vague. Like, the reason I was reading — the reason he doesn’t like Waiting for Godot is because it’s kind of not vague enough, or it’s too optimistic. I think this play that he said he quote “dislikes least” unquote is Endgame, which is all about like, come on man, you must know this, like, why are you doing —
Rich: So you have to give some credence to my idea that he’s totally cynical about this, right? He wrote some dog shit and then he was like, wow, people love this. I got to make it even more vague and generic.
Benny: Yeah, it definitely is interesting, admittedly, that the wiki has so many interpretations, like from psychological schools to political schools to sociological schools. I admit that that’s to some extent somewhat suspicious, like everyone just mapping on what they want to map onto it. But people tried to cast the play with female characters, apparently, some more modern.
Cam: Yeah, I saw that. And Beckett was like, no.
Rich: Yeah, that was the one thing that he was not on board with. He’s like, take it in any direction you want, as long as it doesn’t involve females.
Benny: Yeah, he’s like, but not.
Cam: And he said something like, because you have the erection jokes and shit like that.
Rich: He tried to fucking sue to prevent them from putting it on. And then even after the judge overturned it after his death, there was some — he had a representative who would go on at the beginning of each performance and be like, I just need you to know that this is against the wishes of Beckett. He would not have wanted women to play these roles. Fucking crazy.
Benny: That’s wild.
Rich: And this is in like the 90s.
Cam: I saw another thing where another one of his plays, they tried to perform it like in a deserted train station or something, and he said no to that. But yeah, I think he was quite willing for other stuff.
Rich: So, did you guys enjoy reading it while you were reading it? Or only once you’d sort of thought about it and tried to salvage something from it?
Benny: The latter, I think, for me.
Rich: Right.
Cam: I think a bit of both. I was sort of reading it, struggling a little bit, then I read a little bit, then I actually watched a little bit of it on YouTube, then I went back to it and enjoyed it more. But I still didn’t like it. I didn’t love it, TBH.
Benny: I mean, it’s one of those — yeah, while reading it you could read it extremely quickly and not pay that much attention to lines, or you could read it excruciatingly closely and pay attention to each and every line and observe all of the repetition, etc. And I think over the course of the book I just drifted more and more to just skimming and trying to somewhat enjoy each scene and then think about it after, which I think made it easier. But also, as you’re reading it, you’re just kind of hoping the next number of pages — bye bye.
Cam: Yeah, same. So we still don’t know who the fuck Godot is.
Cam: Oh yeah. I tweeted out, ain’t no one wishing for that — Waiting for Godot to be longer.
Rich: Or third act murder, possible, but…
Cam: That’s the thing, you could just keep Family Guy-style it and just keep acting more and more acts.
Benny: Yeah.
Rich: Yeah, I kind of feel like it is in that mold, right? It’s sort of — the form mirrors the theme in a way that’s meant to hammer you over the head with it. I think your reading of it, Cam, is the one that I like the best — the sort of existentialist absurdist one. And I think it is sort of true and important.
Cam: That’s the main one.
Beckett vs Camus
Rich: But it’s just that, like, I really like the idea, like, the Camus school of existentialism and the absurd, and then when you compare this to a book by Camus, like, come the fuck on, it’s just so much better. Camus actually gets into the meat of it in such a more interesting way, and with interesting characters, and it just shits all over this.
Cam: It’s bastardized it for you. I definitely enjoy that stuff more, but I don’t know, there may be something to — because the absurdism is so potentially visceral or abstract, you kind of have to represent it as so as well. I don’t know, I suppose I’m trying to defend it a bit.
Benny: Yeah, I don’t love Camus’ brand of absurdism, to be honest. So maybe that’s why I’m more sympathetic to this book.
Cam: Any on our list?
Benny: I don’t like that Camus leaves open this possibility that, you know, there is some objective meaning to life, we just can’t grasp it because of our sort of puny little consciousnesses and our psychology. That’s just a weird feature of his philosophy that I don’t like.
Rich: Okay, yeah, I guess I was more saying I like his core message of, you know, the absurdity of trying to find meaning in a meaningless universe. And I like his style and his aesthetics and his writing and the way that he develops that theme.
Cam: It’s motorcycle driving — I think that’s how he maybe died.
Rich: I heard that he died in a masturbation accident.
Cam: Motorcycle.
Benny: Have you guys read Nagel on the absurd? I think he’s infinitely better than Camus.
Cam: Yeah.
Rich: To be clear, I think the Myth of Sisyphus sucks. But we’re going to read The Fall, I think. Hopefully you’ll like it, even if you don’t like the —
Cam: Yeah, the Myth of Sisyphus has like the most arresting badass line in all of literature to open it. Like, the one question in life is whether you kill yourself, nothing else matters.
Rich: Yeah, yeah. It goes so hard.
Benny: And then the rest of it sucks.
Cam: And then like, and you’re like, wow, yeah, then you read it and you’re like, what the fuck is this about?
Rich: And then it has another cool closing line. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Cam: Yeah.
Benny: Yeah, that’s true.
Rich: Someone should just take that and do like an ellipsis in the middle and just combine the first and last lines.
Cam: Yeah.
Benny: Actually, I mean, this is not a bad comparison. I would way rather read this than The Myth of Sisyphus. I thought it was horrible and largely worthless.
Rich: Yeah, I’m not gonna go into that for it, but we should talk about it when we do The Fall because it is on our list. But just like exploring what it’s like to be a person grappling with the death of God and the absence of meaning and so on is more viscerally interesting, rather than just being delivered the straight philosophy of it. Or not even being delivered it straight, but having to read this twisted, unclear essay.
The One True Interpretation
Cam: To be honest, I think I reject the premise that there’s like heaps of ways to interpret this. Like, I know it’s vague and there are multiple ways, and you know, is it God, is it hell, or is it something else? But I think there’s the main way — and maybe I’m falling victim to thinking your way is the right way too — but like, it’s this kind of existential reading.
Benny: Yeah, I agree with you, I agree with you.
Rich: Yeah, I think everyone else is stretching way more than that central reading.
Cam: Yeah, I was trying to think, what’s the most batshit reading of it that has a slight kernel of truth, and I couldn’t really think of any.
Benny: Most of them, I think — a lot of the weird ones are just wordplay. Like the Freudian one has this too, where I don’t think there’s actually much textual evidence beyond just the fact that their names are Didi and Gogo.
Cam: But you do wonder about the words, though. You wonder about Godot. You kind of wonder about Vladimir. It’s like this Russian name. Like, why is it this Russian name? And then, like, Estragon sounds so much like estrogen. Like, Lucky. Like, you know, it feels like some sort of nominal determinism in there somewhere or something.
Benny: Did they even know what estrogen was in the 50s? Who knows?
Cam: Yeah, that’s right. This is about touching receipts and falling sperm counts and fertility.
Rich: Yeah, if you read through the wiki, so much of, in particular, the snippets from critics, it’s just weird salad. Like, it’s just clearly nonsense. Which is not to say that there’s nothing there, but that, yeah, it doesn’t really fill you with confidence. And then the same from the quotes from Beckett himself, which might be him deliberately being a troll or being, you know, doing Nabokov style obfuscation. But I don’t think he has any particular deep insights either.
Cam: My take on his attitude is like, he thinks it would ruin the art for him to say the final meaning of it and everyone take that line. And he kind of doesn’t know. Yeah, I probably believe — take him at his word when he says that he should put it out there, because, you know, to invoke Map and the Territory or Jed Martin, he just had this impulse to make it, and he doesn’t fully understand it himself.
Rich: Yeah, I think so. And I don’t think he should try and say what it’s about. I just think he didn’t architect some careful vision of what everything stands for and that this is meant to be about a thing. I think he just wrote this thing that kind of gropes at something and is sort of vague. And I don’t think there’s deep meaning in every name that he chose or anything like that. And I highly doubt that it’s actually about Freudianism or actually about Jungian archetypes or anything else.
Benny: Yeah, I agree with that. But then at that point you have to come back to death of the author considerations, right? Like, the value of a work of fiction is not, I claim, what the author intended it to be — it’s what people get out of it. And if you can make a strong case for something interesting in the work, then —
Rich: Yeah, and the Freudians would say that he talked about the ego and the superego because those are in some sense —
Benny: Like universal characteristics. Yeah.
Rich: And that they would bubble through into his writing.
Cam: To be honest, when you go to the Freudian Museum in Vienna, there’s this statue of this man hanging upside down with like a fat-ass erection. Just quietly.
Benny: Just quietly. Just quietly.
Cam: Did I say fat?
Benny: Hanging out.
Cam: Yeah.
Benny: Yeah.
Rich: I’m waiting for this conversation to be over at this point.
Cam: Yeah, let’s call it.
Benny: What’s next, boys? What book?
Cam: Frankenstein, I think. I’m happy for any of them.
Benny: Are we explicitly following what’s on the Google doc right now in terms of order as well?
Cam: No, I think Rich just messaged in the app saying let’s do Waiting for Godot and Frankenstein next.
Rich: Yeah, we don’t need to do them in any order, but we’re going to do all the fives, and then I guess, unless anyone changes their votes, we’ll do all the fours.
Benny: Okay, cool.
Cam: Need that Infinite Jest — just two vote from someone. Come on, boys.
Rich: I’m going to minus one it.
Benny: I’m gonna — yeah, but then I’m gonna give it a negative two if someone gives it a —
Cam: No dog, yeah, that’s how — that’s how we’re gonna make it.
Rich: Bro, you said in your review that you’ve read it 3.5 times. I think you’ve got a problem.
Cam: Alright, well, I think I was lying, probably.
Rich: I wondered about that.
Cam: I think I was adding up all the like — on net, when we were reading it, I reread some sections like lots. But yeah, I probably overstated. I was rounding up. Three and a half.
Benny: It’s rounding up from 1.5 to…
Rich: From one.
Cam: Yeah, rounding up. From 1.9 to three and a half.
Benny: That’s funny.
Cam: Yeah.
