Embodying Lost Masculinity in Waiting for Godot and Endgame

Abstract

In the midst of the writing of the Trilogy of novels, Beckett began to write a play that was “a relaxation from the awful prose I was writing at that time.”1 Waiting for Godot was written in French from October 1948 to January 1949, and it was first produced in Paris in January 1952. The simultaneous composition of prose and drama accounts for some of the repetition between the novels and the play. In the last chapter I said that The Unnamable was like an all-male revue—Waiting for Godot is even more so: women are only mentioned in the context of a sexist joke, and a woman is not even mentioned in the famous “giving birth astride the grave” passage. It is easy to see that Beckett desired a physicality of body in actual space after driving the novel into a representational void. Beckett enacts Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that the body “does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life.” (italics in original).2 Moving from page to stage exorcises in physical space with corporeal figures the traumatic experiences that Beckett was enfolding in his prose. The postwar revelation to embrace dislocation and loss leads to a revolution in Western drama.