Writing and
Education
Autobiography
Challenge
Considering
Conclusions
Considering
Introductions
Four
Meanings of Life
Godot
and the Great Pumpkin
A
Major is More Minor Than
You Think
The
Poetry
Process (A look at 4 versions of a poem.)
Thoughts
About
Picking
a Major
Quick
Points About Education
Quick
Points
About
Writing
Reading
Poetry
and Cloud Watching
Revising
Revision
Reviving
Experience
Reviving
Symbolism
Using
an Audience
Videos
What
Makes a Story True?
What's the Subject of This Class? (Being revised.)
Why
Write?
Writing
and
Einstein (The Difference Between Information and Meaning)
Writing
and
the
Goldilocks Dilemma
Links
to
Other
Sites |
Godot and the
Great
Pumpkin by Forrest
D. Poston
(originally presented at the University of Louisville
20th Century
Literature Conference, Feb. 2002)
Near the end of "It's the
Great Pumpkin,
Charlie Brown," Sally's
patience ends with, "I spent the whole night waiting
for the Great
Pumpkin, and all that came was a stupid beagle." My
initial reaction to
Waiting for Godot was much the same as Sally's
unsatisfactory
Halloween, but when dealing with trick or treat, you
sometimes get the
trick. As a result, I spent several years feeling
grumpy at the mention
of Samuel Beckett, but I was never quite convinced
that the darkness
was quite so absolute or necessary. The more someone
quotes "there's
nothing to be done," though more I look for something
to be done.
When
I realized that the Great Pumpkin equals Godot in
absurdity, but we
respond to the two stories differently, I knew that
I'd found some
wiggle room to alter the perspective, interpretation,
and application.
I've come to suspect that
we're at least as
fond of absurdity as
we are of order, and of course, the two are not
mutually exclusive. Nor
is it fair to assume that absurdity is intrinsically
bad or that order
is intrinsically good. We want order, and meaning to
offer direction,
but we also want freedom and creativity to offer
possibilities. We may
not expect the Great Pumpkin, but neither despair nor
stoicism off a
satisfactory substitute for some form of hope. Somehow
we have to
balance those desires, and so we get two stories about
absurdity, but
our differing reactions to the stories suggest
variables in our
relationship with absurdity. We have some choice. Life
may or may not
have meaning, but it most assuredly has absurdity. In
that we have no
choice, but we can choose or manipulate our attitude.
That idea itself isn't
overwhelmingly new.
There are two choices
running through reactions to Beckett's work, two
extremes. The primary
camp goes with a "nasty, brutish," and not short
enough pose best
summarized with the now politically incorrect, "Life's
a bitch, and
then you die." Oh, yes, and "There's nothing to be
done." In
juxtaposition is the human spirit camp. By not giving
in to the utter
meaninglessness, waiting each day in spite of the
pointlessness of it,
our down-trodden non-heroes somehow glorify the human
spirit. This
would be, "You're born, you live, you die" attitude,
and "there's
nothing to be done." I'm not after a cotton candy,
Pollyanna world,
either/or absolutes tend to conceal "Choice C."
Since it was watching Charlie
Brown that
helped me see another
option, I'll start there. The first question is simply
what is it
that's absurd in The Great Pumpkin. There's the Great
Pumpkin
himself/itself, and his Santa Claus competitor.
There's Charlie Brown
trying to kick the football no matter how well he
knows Lucy, and
there's Charlie Brown always getting a rock in place
of a treat. Of
course there's Snoopy, the WWI flying ace. But what of
that would we
ever want to change? Of course, we play the game
differently with an
animated children's story. We don't read this story
with quite the high
seriousness of a critic. It's okay to enjoy the story,
and so waiting
for the Great Pumpkin becomes cute, not tragic. After
all, children
grow up and put such silliness behind them all in due
time, but we
don't want them to trade innocence and wonder for
stoicism in the face
of the void. Even if we believe in darkness, we
somehow want children
to hold onto something for us, some hope that we might
become like
children. We want Charlie Brown to keep trying to kick
the football
because maybe once he'll put one over on Lucy, and
we'll have a reason
to get up in the morning with a possibility, not
merely a full bladder.
The real absurdity in the
Great Pumpkin is the
absolute quality in
Linus's philosophy. First, he has to find the "most
sincere" pumpkin
patch. Very sincere isn't sincere enough, and when he
lets a single
"if" slip out, he's "doomed." In that black and white
perspective,
there's no room for human error, no room for the oops
that's
alwayscoming sooner or later. Nothing is quite so
absurd as perfection,
whether that's perfect goodness or perfect darkness.
Absolutes become
utterly static, and it is at such extremes that there
is "nothing to be
done."
Turning back to Godot, what
then is absurd in
that story? Two men
wait for a man who may or may not come, and they don't
know what he'll
do if he does come. This cycle goes on indefinitely,
and it appears to
be the central absurdity, especially since it's the
action (or
non-action) named in the title. However, this may be
the most
reasonable action in the play because it creates
possibility. It's not
much of a possibility, but it's a sliver anyway, and
it's certainly
more than anything else we're shown. Other than that,
we have quite a
bit of violence. Estragon and Vladimir are beaten and
do their share of
beating.
Naturally, they talk quite a
bit, but there is
little
conversation. Rather than talking to one another, they
talk at one
another. Two, perhaps even three lines will connect to
one another,
then it's non-sequitur time again. Characters
act upon each
other, not
with each other, increasing the sense of isolation and
chaos. While
conversation may often seem disjointed, it has a
tendency toward
pattern, a building of ideas. Break the conversation,
and you emphasize
the Cartesian world in which everything is separate
and incapable of
interaction. After all, Descartes was never able to
come up with a
satisfactory explanation for how we see any object
when there is a
separation to cross. He came up with some fascinating
attempts, but
nothing to satisfactorily overcome the mechanistic
view. For the west,
that had to wait for Heisenberg and the quantum
approach to a fully
interconnected system, for Chaos Theory that says
apparent chaos is
really just a pattern too complex to see.
So life is absurd, but
Waiting for Godot
doesn't show that life is
absurd nearly as much as it shows that we live
absurdly. Whether live
has meaning or not, is it better to act in ways that
increase our sense
of isolation or take pleasure in the delight of
creating conversation?
Now there is a special absurdity or paradox. Even if
there is no
meaning, we can create patterns, and patterns are at
least the
ingredients of meaning. A Deconstructionist may point
out, quite
correctly, that words have no intrinsic meaning, but
we cannot talk
about the meaninglessness shown by Waiting for Godot
unless Beckett
creates a shape we can interpret as meaning
meaninglessness.
Beckett said, "I take no
sides. I am
interested in the shape of
ideas." Unless we want to argue with Beckett, there
must then be sides
to be taken, and there must be ideas and forms. Be
there meaning, be
there no meaning, we are still seekers of meaning,
creators of meaning,
interpreters of forms, so the shapes Beckett creates
become Rorschach
tests. If we're feeling more playful, they become
cloud-watching games.
In that case, the question becomes why we interpret
the shapes the way
we do. I don't really want to use "should" or "right"
along with
interpretation, but are there better or worse ways to
approach
interpretation?
Critical approaches are more
numerous than
fleas of late, and
there even remain strong traces of the New Critical
approach looking
for a correct interpretation with authorial intent and
all the problems
that entails. My first critical approach to reading is
to switch the
critic off as completely as possible because I'm a
firm believer in
reading for simple pleasure first and for the
intellectual gymnastics
afterward. That second stage revolves around a single
question: how can
I use these ideas to alter or refine my perception of
and relationship
to myself and the world? That creates a trinity that
isn't all that
new, consisting of myself, the very real text
(including authorial
intent and accident), and the social or even broader
context we share.
Who am I, and how do I relate to the universe? Nothing
big.
If I wanted to name my
approach, I guess I'd
call it Utilitarian
Creative Interpretation, and it's roots go back to my
high school days,
that time when many students start thinking that the
word symbolism is
pretty harsh profanity. For me, it peaked when we read
To Kill a
Mockingbird and got to the scene when the sheriff
suggested Atticus,
the father and lawyer, should be the one to shoot the
mad dog. Not
surprisingly, Atticus's young children were quite
surprised to find out
that their father had been champion shot of the county
in his youth. My
well-intentioned teacher explained to us that this was
the symbol of
justice shooting down the mad dog of prejudice. In
those younger days,
I didn't use profanity, and I simply sat there
thinking how silly that
was, though I had no other interpretation to offer at
the time.
Only after years of teaching
and individual
conferences did I
realize how common this scene really was. We all have
to go through
various stages of realizing that these giants we call
Mom and Dad are
really just people. They were just as small as us and
even have pasts
that go beyond us. It's when we begin to realize a
simple truth that we
can believe in our own future and accept our parents
mistakes. People
are allowed to make mistakes, but gods are not.
When we read as critics, we
have a tendency to
go for something
big. Whether we're trying to impress ourselves,
our colleagues or
the
tenure committee, we tend to jump from ground zero to
Platonic ideals
all in one superhuman bound, but bypassing everything
in between is
another way we strengthen the appearance of
separation,
disconnectedness. My teacher took people and turned
them into non-human
symbols grounded only in ethereal concepts. That's the
kind of jump
that makes authors either groan or laugh (and
sometimes look for other
ways to make critics jump). It certainly isn't fair to
readers trying
to understand (even if not consciously) their own
experience. It takes
meaning and turns it into meaninglessness. I'd go so
far as to call it
absurd. Rather than turning a human into a symbol, the
most effective
and powerful symbols will most often humanize an idea,
not "idealize" a
human.
Idealists are accused of
having their heads in
the clouds, but
that's just so they can watch the critics who are
floating in the
stratosphere, too. Of course, both earth and clouds
are important to
continuing life, whether it's absurd or not, but our
ability to
understand experience or philosophy in useful ways
comes when the two
are grounded. When the symbol is grounded in
experience, lightning
strikes. In literary terms, that's a good thing even
if we get quite a
shock.
So far, I've given my reading
style a name and
made fun of
literary critics, but where is the so what behind it
all? For me, that
comes as a teacher. If I want to re-interpret myself
through a Dick
Francis mystery in my own living room, that's my
business, but if I
have the nerve to stand in front of other people and
try to influence
their lives, I'd better consider what influence I'm
going to have. At
least as far back as high school, my teachers were
trying to get me to
read as a critic. Certainly every graduate school I've
had contact with
has created the same atmosphere. The more I talk to my
colleagues, the
more I wonder when some of them last read as readers,
read for the
simple pleasure of words, ideas, and action, without
wondering if they
could get an article out of this to improve job
security.
I know it's not just me. Too
many of my
students come in with a
hatred of symbolism. Far too many have told me that
they are avoiding
majoring in art, music, or English because that's the
field they love,
and they're afraid that studying it will destroy the
love. The fear
isn't unjustified, especially if they have teachers
who have divorced
literature and married criticism.
I really don't want to tell
my students that
"there's nothing to
be done." I don't want to tell them that the glory is
in not committing
suicide when the situation seems to call for it, that
the only reason
not to commit suicide is because suicide and living
are equally
pointless. There's no point to life, but read this
assignment anyway.
It seems that some critics and philosophers want to
tell us that it
isn't cool to hope; it isn't "in" to laugh, except
with cynicism. These
stories are our contemporary mythology, part of how we
form opinions
about the working of the universe, how to live and how
to die. As we
read and interpret them, we read and create ourselves.
So how can I read Waiting for
Godot to alter
or refine my
perception of and relationship to myself and the
world? Grounding the
ideas in experience, is life absurd in terms of
paradox and
unpredictability? Whether love is chemical,
psychological or spiritual,
it surely proves absurdity. Do the characters in the
play behave
absurdly? Certainly. Do people frequently act in such
absurd ways? Any
daily newspaper provides ample evidence. Do I want to
live in imitation
of these characters if I have a choice? Not hardly. If
life is absurd,
and the characters and real people live absurdly, does
the play tell me
that I must live in such an absurd manner? Ah, the
crux. There is the
possibility of a negative example. Even a mirror held
to nature would
reverse the image. So there is the possibility, but is
there anything
in the play itself that can justify a reversal of
attitude? After all,
even if we're cloud-watching, we don't want to claim
that a round cloud
looks like a square.
Vladimir raises a question
for us, and
questions introduce
possibilities because we don't have to give the pat
answer. In one
gospel, one thief is saved, and it's that story that's
remembered. "Why
believe him rather than the others?" According to
Estragon, it's
because "People are bloody ignorant apes" and we're
all too ready to
settle for that answer because it has just enough
truth to satisfy our
grumpier nature. Still, the question sits there for
the reader. Why
believe that story rather than another or none?
If all are saved, what's the
point? Whatever
we do, the end is the
same. If none are saved, what's the point? At either
extreme, there are
no choices, no possibilities. It's not only a
religious question but
also a matter of meaning or meaningless, a matter of
the difference
between absurdity and real chaos. If one was saved,
then we can affect
our lives and move out of the realm of mere chance.
Why believe that
story? Because it's neither all cotton candy nor
cyanide. It offers no
promises but possibilities, yes.
It's also Vladimir who says,
"There's man all
over for you,
blaming on his boots the faults of his feet." Perhaps
when we find only
darkness in absurdity, it isn't Beckett or reality but
ourselves who
are responsible. Of course, that's the temptation to
believe that all
were saved or none were saved. If there's nothing to
be done, then we
can deny responsibility entirely.
Beckett shows us the
absurdity around us, and
he shows us people
living absurdly, but the simple fact that life is
absurd doesn't mean
that we have to live absurdly in all its worst
incarnations. Just
because life can be that way, doesn't mean the play
insists life MUST
be that way, or that we have to accept such lives.
After all, if words
had inherent meaning, we couldn't treat them like the
glorious Silly
Putty they are. If life weren't absurd, we wouldn't
have puns. Perhaps
we need to watch and read more like we do when we
watch The Great
Pumpkin. Numerous philosophers have told us to become
more like
children, but that doesn't mean we become lemmings
blindly following
one idea or one authority. It means that somehow we
have to blend
wisdom painfully gained with simplicity; match the
cynicism that gives
us caution with the innocence that gives us abandon;
pair our doubt
with wonder; balance our pre-revelation Scrooge with
our Tiny Tim.
I've been accused of being an
idealist and
unrealistic. Fine. I
confess. And I don't want to stop you from
reading as you wish,
but we
also need to maintain some humor and humanity.
Mostly, we need to
remember that realistic and pessimistic aren't really
synonymous.
The
third approach in place of life's a bitch or stoicism
is one I
encountered long before I heard of Samuel Beckett, the
Theater of the
Absurd, or existentialism, and I've long forgotten
where I first saw,
"Why take life so seriously? You'll never get out of
it alive anyway
get out of it alive anyway?"
Back to the Home
Page
E-mail
|
Back to the Home Page
Other Essays and Poetry
Something
Somewhat
Vaguely
Like a Resume
Being
Like
Children
The
Blessing and the Blues
The
Cat With a Bucket List
David
and the Revelation
The
Dawn, the Dark, and the Horse I Didn't Ride In On (an
odd, meandering, semi-romantic story)
Ghost
Dancer
in the Twilight Zone
The
Hair Connection and the Nature of Choices
The Mug,
the Magic, and the Mistake
Trumpet
Player,
USDA Approved
Videos
Poetry
Selected
Poems
The
Poetry
Process
Writing by Current or Former Students
Ms.
Write Meets Her Match in Jr. Ms. Write Now
by Heide Perry
I'll
Just
Have Cats
by Cara Hummel
Toys
to
Toys
by Allyson Bowlds
Scribbles
and Bits
Links
to
Other
Sites |
