Beckett and the Quest for Meaning

Abstract

The twentieth century has been a turbulent and unhappy age, dominated by fanaticisms, ideologies that proclaimed themselves as infallibly based on would-be scientific truths about race or class, and in consequence a period of unprecedented violence and cruelty. In those distant days, in nineteen-thirties Vienna, when as a school boy I joined an underground Communist cell and was, in hidden clear ings in the woods on summer Sundays, indoctrinated in the principles of Marxism, I learned that this system of thought had now become a scien tific truth beyond doubt, and that therefore anyone who wanted to pursue policies that contradicted it had to be liquidated for the general good. (It was the period of the great Moscow trials.) At the same time, some of my friends at school who belonged to the equally illegal and underground Hitler youth assured me that inferior races like the Jews had been scien tifically established as being so noxious to the future health of humanity that it was an urgent necessity to kill them all, not realizing that I, their friend, was included in this verdict. Those totalitarian creeds are now in disrepute, but the world is still threatened by violent fanaticisms and fundamentalisms of numerous varieties: the vacuum created by the decline of traditional religious be liefs in the nineteenth century, still far from having been filled, has grown ever wider as it has become less and less possible to accept the literal truth of events like the Resurrection. Those who still cling to them revert to the primitivism of fundamentalist cults; most others are left with an equally primitive, stultifying and barren materialism. I think that an important aspect of Samuel Beckett's significance for the new century is precisely that he shows us characters confronting a world in which all fundamentalisms, infallible orthodoxies, pseudo scientific totalitarian solutions, all saviors and salvations have become dead myths. Admittedly, in Waiting for Godot Lucky still speaks of a God with a white beard, yet that deity looks down from his height in di vine apathia, athambia and aphasia, while humanity shrinks and dwin dles. Christian images still pervade that play, from the thieves on the cross to the map of the Holy Land, from Cain and Abel to the sheep and the goats, but they are treated with irony, or even derision, as metaphors