The Knowledge of Unknowing in Beckett's
Waiting for Godot
William S. Haney II
Eastern Mediterranean University
The Theatre of the Absurd has been said by Martin Esslin (399-405), Peter Brook (65) and
others to be a quest for a way to live in a modem world deprived of generally accepted
ultimate values. Faced with the loss of confidence in the traditional narratives that explain the
mysteries of the human condition, the Theatre of the Absurd presents its audiences with what
Esslin calls a double absurdity: that of "the deadness and mechanical senselessness of half-
unconscious lives" (400), and that "of the human condition itself in a world where the decline
of religious belief has deprived man of certainties" (401). Playwrights such as Samuel Beckett,
Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter write in a context where traditional narratives, or what
Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition calls the grand or meta-narrative (31-35),
can no longer inspire confidence. Yet nevertheless society is still confronted with a cosmic
anguish and wonder for the ultimate realities of its condition. Regardless of whether or not the
ultimate mysteries of reality are exp lamed by grand narratives or recuperative metaphysical
Systems such as Platonism, religion, the Hegelian dialectic of Spirit, Marxism, or a
hermeneutics of meaning, the grand mysteries themselves stubbornly persist. They don't
disappear when people choose to ignore or repress them; if anything, they manifest as the
repressed returned in disguised forms.
In the Theatre of the Absurd this return appears as the concern with immediate experience -
the element of "pure, abstract theatre" involved in the physical embodiment of the characters
on stage in spite of the absence of discursive meaning (Esslin 328). As critics have pointed
out, the concern with immediate experience, with turning away from the medium of language
and from a reliance on meaning or conceptuality in communication is not unique to the
Theatre of the Absurd but belongs to a long tradition in the history of Western literature
involving pantomime and the carnivalesque (Esslin 328-29, Bloom 493-514). It focuses on the
individual's basic circumstances rather than the ideological make-up of his social identity. As
portrayed in drama by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg and in fiction by James Joyce, it
explores the reality of the mind and its direct contact with phenomenal experience prior to the
interpretive strategies of any particular narrative. In other words, the fundamental experience
of what it is like to be conscious of our existence. Each play of the Theatre of the Absurd
addresses this basic phenomenon. As Esslin puts it, it answers the questions, "How does this
individual feel when confronted with the human condition? What is the basic mood in which he
faces the world? What does it feel like to be he?" (405) These questions deal with the basic
experience of being conscious, which is perhaps the ultimate mystery of human existence
above and beyond any possible meaning of that existence. But what does it mean to be
conscious? As David Chalmers says in The Conscious Mind:
We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a
phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel. Similarly, a mental state is conscious if there is
something it is like to be in that mental state. To put it another way, we can say that a mental
state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel - an associated quality of experience. These
qualitative feels are also known as phenomenal qualities, or qualia for short. The problem of
explaining these phenomenal qualities is just the problem of explaining consciousness. This is
the really hard part of the mind-body problem.
It is through its representation of qualia, of the something it is like to be someone, that the
Theatre of the Absurd approaches the most fundamental mystery of human reality, the
experience of consciousness itself. To understand the way the Theatre of the Absurd conveys
this experience to the audience, I will first define consciousness as consisting of two aspects,
bound or temporal and unbounded or trans-temporal, and then analyse Beckett's Waiting for
Godot as a temporal vehicle for transporting the consciousness of the audience beyond the
temporal, beyond the level of discursive logic, toward a direct experience of pure
consciousness.
The devices used by Beckett to break through temporal, discursive barriers toward the trans-
temporal experience of pure being are well-known to theatre goers, even though they may find
the effects of these absurdist devices difficult to explain after the fact. Beckett dispenses with
narrative sequence, character development and psychology in the conventional sense in order
to convey the qualia of an experience within a specific historical context that nevertheless
takes the conscious mind beyond the limits of space and time. These devices are intended to
convey an intuitive experience of what it is like to be in a single moment, as opposed to what it
is like merely to follow the discursive patterns of thought that substitute for being. The primary
device used by Beckett to express this intuitive moment is the poetic image. In Waiting for
Godot, the juxtaposition of a series of poetic images, which substitutes for a conventional plot,
results for the audience in a series of epiphanies related to the nature of experience itself.
These poetic images and the flashes of consciousness they induce resemble the "total
experience" or "feeling of wholeness" that results from the "polyphonic montage" in the film
theory of Sergei Eisenstein (Andrew 61-63). In Kantian terms, the poetic image, as distinct
from the linear rationality and coherence of a narrative sequence, takes the conscious mind of
the spectator from the experience of the phenomenal world to a suggestion of the noumenal
or intuitive realm beyond. Through an intersection of these poles of experience, Beckett's
drama results in a re-discovery of ultimate realities, whether or not these realities can be
logically interpreted. Indeed Beckett is less concerned with meaning than with the structure of
experience. Even in the absence of ultimate meaning, the Theatre of the Absurd can confront
the spectator with the presence of ultimate realities by taking the conscious mind beyond the
limits of space, time and causality. This alienation effect - the ideal of Brecht, the Russian
formalists, the Natya Shastra in Indian aesthetics, and Keats's negative capability - does not
simply replace one set of mental contents for another, but rather empties the awareness of all
contents to elicit an experience of what is known as pure consciousness.
Before analysing the plays in detail for their production of this direct experience, I shall briefly
elaborate on the witnessing quality of consciousness. In his essay "'I' = Awareness," the
psychiatrist Arthur Deikman makes the distinction between the "I" as observer or witnessing
faculty of the conscious mind, and the conscious contents of the mind which the "I" precedes
(350-56). The "I" of awareness is the ground of all experience and thus distinct from the
contents of awareness, all sensations, thoughts, memories, images and emotions that the
conscious mind may entertain. Awareness itself differs from the sensations, emotions, ideas
and memories that comprise our social identity. The contents of awareness are temporal,
while the "I" of awareness is beyond space, time and causality, even though connected to the
physical body functioning within time and space. This distinction helps to explain why the
Theatre of the Absurd abandons ordinary characterisation based on conventional motives;
Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot are nearly without attributes, ageing tramps locked
in a love-hate relationship and full of uncertainty about the time, place and purpose of their
existence. Those who directly experience the "I" of awareness transcend from their personal
and social identities into a state that in Eastern cultures is known by various terms, such as
formless selt purusha, turiya (or the fourth state of consciousness beyond ordinary waking,
deep sleep and dream), and pure consciousness. As stated in the Mandulya Upanishad,
"(Turiya (pure consciousness] is) not ... cognition, not non-cognition ... [It is] the essence of
the knowledge of the one self ... the non-dual" (Radhakrishnan, 7, 698). Because it is
experienced as a state of being as opposed to an observation or thought, the experience of
pure consciousness cannot lead to the infinite regress of the self observing itself, and then
another more comprehensive internal self observing that self, etc., ad infinitum. One
experiences pure consciousness by being it, not by observing it. This experience of being is
also recorded in the West by figures such as St. John of the Cross, St. Simeon (Malekin and
Yarrow 25) and many others of all walks of life, and has become the subject of increasing
research in the humanities and sciences, as evidence by periodicals like the Journal of
Consciousness Studies (see Güzeldere).
In his book Mysticism and Philosophy, W.T. Stace gives an apt description of pure
consciousness as experienced in what he calls "introverted mysticism":
Suppose that, after having got rid of all sensations, one should go on to exclude from
consciousness all sensuous images, and then all abstract thoughts, reasoning processes,
volitions, and other particular mental contents; what would there then be left of
consciousness? There would be no mental content whatever but rather a complete
emptiness, vacuum, void. One would suppose a priori that consciousness would then entirely
lapse and one would fall asleep or become unconscious. But the introverted mystics -
thousands of them all over the world - unanimously assert that they have attained to this
complete vacuum of particular mental contents, but that what then happens is quite different
from a lapse into unconsciousness. On the contrary, what emerges is a state of pure
consciousness - "pure" in the sense that it is not the consciousness of any empirical content. It
has no content except itself (85-6).
The conscious mind goes from the duality of subject-object relationships characterised by
observation and thought, to an experience beyond subject-object, space-time duality where
the mind becomes completely still. As Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow explain in their
remarkable book, Consciousness, Literature and Theater, this state "is approached by the
process of unknowing; that is to say, the mind becomes less, not more active, eventually
leaving the subject-object relationship behind. It exchanges knowing about things, in a
theoretical and abstract way, for knowledge through uniting with the object of knowledge" (28).
Waiting for Godot can be seen as a play that involves the process of unknowing. The
characters cannot fathom their situations and the spectators cannot grasp the plays through
any of the traditional narratives provided by society, but must rely rather on their intuition and
emotions as a means of direct experience. The actors and spectators (subject and object)
thus unite on the level of consciousness. The fact that in
1957 the prisoners in San Quentin, California, were enthralled by a performance of Waiting for
Godot reveals the inadequacy of a strictly intellectual approach for appreciating the play.
From a thematic perspective, the metaphysical and practical uncertainties of Beckett's play,
with its pseudo-climaxes and non arrivals of Godot, do not necessarily render it nihilistic or
totally pessimistic. As Peter Brook says, "Beckett's dark plays are plays full of light" (65). In
fact the uncertainties of the play provide a vehicle for going beyond the conceptual boundaries
that characterise the contents of awareness and glimpsing the freedom associated with the
"I" as awareness. In the play-within-the-play, the speculation on Godot's identity when Pozzo
says, "Godin … Godet … Godot … anyhow you see who I mean" (24), suggests that one's
true identity does not reside on the level of thought or language, which are effective only for
identifying and reporting the qualia of human experience. In the Shankara's non-dual Vedanta,
as Eliot Deutsch notes, "A person's essence is unapproachable through his name; and in the
Spirit, in the Absolute where pure silence reigns, all names are rejected" (47). Rather, human
identity has its real basis in the witnessing observer, the "I" of awareness, which can be
glimpsed instantaneously only as a "total experience" or a "feeling of the whole." Godot will
never be apprehended through cognition or fully expressed through discursive language,
which unfolds in time. As Beckett was well aware, the notion of any ultimate, non-changing
reality can only be rendered at best through the suggestion of a poetic image and
apprehended intuitively in an instant of time. Hence, the play can only allude to the possibility
of being saved by Godot, since no explicit rendering of what it means to be saved is possible.
As Beckett shows, the ultimate reality of the subjective mind is beyond logical meaning and
cannot be known by objective means alone.
Beckett's mastery of the poetic image and other devices that stop the flow of thought and
objective observation moves the spectator beyond spatio-temporal limits toward a direct
experience of pure consciousness. The features of the anti-play such as the lack of logical
movement; the digressions and nonsense; the fact that, as stated by one critic, "nothing
happens, twice"; the repetition of endless cycles of action-in-non-action; and Vladimir s
circular song at the opening of Act II ("And dug the dog a tomb") have the effect, as Andrew
Kennedy observers, of conveying a sense of "eternal return" (20, 24). This cyclical self-referral
of the text can also be seen in the ironic reference to what is happening in the theatre,
especially in Act II. The self-referral portrayed when Estragon says, "That wasn't such a bad
little canter" (42), or when Vladimir looks out into the audience and says, "There! Not a soul in
sight" (47), or later when he asks, "What are we doing here, that is the question" (51), creates
a series of conceptual gaps through which the conscious mind can witness its cognitive
activity. With a gap between word and referent, the seif-referentiality of the text also induces a
corresponding self-referral in the mind of the audience. As Harold Bloom says, "Self-
consciousness is one element in Beckett's vision of our vertigo," and "excessive
consciousness negates action," as with Hamlet (498). While Bloom is referring more to a daily
consciousness on the level of discursive thought rather than to a witnessing of thought from
pure awareness, any subjective reflexivity highlights the "I" of awareness over the contents of
awareness and thereby conjures up in the audience a taste of "extra-daily" consciousness
(Haney, "Deconstruction't 134-6). This noumenal being, though typically rendered absent by
the failure of language, is suggested on the stage and even rendered present through the self-
referral embodiment of Beckett's characters.
In "Ways of Waiting in Waiting for Godot", James Calderwood notes that waiting is a kind of
non-activity which is self-erasing (33). This non-activity again empties out the contents of
awareness to promote the experience of an extra-daily state of mind. In this way non-activity
parallels the experience of pure being. The act of waiting, although indiscernible to an outside
observer, disrupts the illusion of time by erasing the past, diminishing the present and
aggrandising the future when that which is waited for is expected to appear (Calderwood 33).
The movement toward the appointment with Godot constitutes a movement from the activity
of "becoming" toward an experience of "being," a non-movement in which nothing happens
yet from which all activity emerges. Estragon: "Let's go." Vladimir: "We can't." "Why not?"
"We're waiting for Godot." In the emptiness of meaning, as Malekin and Yarrow note, waiting
is "the ever-repeated moment which precedes beginning. The moment in which beginning is
possible; the moment, as at the beginning of the play, when performers and spectators are
most awake to the newness of it all. Godot hauls its participants back again and again to this
launching-place, from which, as in life, everything always has to be improvised anew" (139).
From the perspective of Eastern cultures (Deutsch, 2745), activity is an illusion, and the one
reality is the stasis of pure being, which is omnipresent, as suggested in part when Vladimir
says, "We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as
much?" And Estragon replies, "Billions" (51). Everyone has the potential for this experience,
which is latent everywhere. If Vladimir and Estragon are unique, it is only because for them, as
tramps, travel is an end in itself (Calderwood 35), and the destination (being) is immanent in
the process of becoming. Calderwood refers to the paradox of their appointment as similar to
the sound of one hand clapping (34). As a Zen koan, this statement has no rational meaning
and serves as a vehicle for taking the awareness beyond the limits of thought and meaning -
and in so doing is a synecdoche for Beckett's play.
It has often been noted that the word Godot is a Joycean word with hidden shapes. Reversed
it spells Tod-dog, or death-dog. Dog in reverse spells god. As such, Vladimir's song at the
beginning of Act II, "And dug the dog a tomb," alludes to the death of god. The word Godot
embodies a coexistence of opposites: mortality and immortality, becoming and being, thought
and pure consciousness. While God may seem to exist only as a possibility just beyond the
tramps' reach (Calderwood 38), the mystery if not the real nature of Godot is always at hand.
As a coexistence of opposites it is immanent in the conscious mind, since all language and
thought emerges from the ground of pure consciousness. The fact that the spectator is
suspended between the opposite poles of death and god is significant in preventing the mind
from dwelling on any particular meaning, from stagnating in its flow toward its own essential
nature as an all-encompassing witness beyond the subject-object, space-time duality of
thought. When Beckett says, "I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in
them …It is the shape that matters" (qtd in Calderwood 38), he intimates that the "I" of
awareness impartially subsumes all phenomena. The fuller the consciousness, the more
dispersed the phenomena unified by its wholeness.
The extent to which the play arrives to the waiting spectator, and in turn the spectator to the
waiting play, depends finally on the degree to which the actors and audience have access to
the ground of consciousness. This relation between the spectator and actor is the subject of
the Natya Shastra, the Indian treatise on dramaturgy, which holds that there are several levels
of the mind involved in the transformation of the audience. The word mind here is used in two
senses: the diverse levels of consciousness on the one hand, and the thinking mind within
that structure on the other (Alexander 290). The overall levels of the mind comprise the
senses, the thinking mind, the discriminating intellect, feeling and intuition, the individual ego,
and pure consciousness. For the Natya Shastra, aesthetic rapture (rasa, defined as a taste or
flavour of pure consciousness) affects the audience primarily through the emotions, and the
actors whose performance can evoke the strongest emotional response are the most effective
(Bharatamuni 375-86) Since, however, the emotions are closely linked with pure
consciousness, the more the actors can tap into this silent witnessing faculty underlying all
mental activity, the more transformative the effect of their performance Godot surely does not
arrive for the waiting audience if interpreted as a transcendental signified experienced merely
as a thought by the thinking mind. He may possibly arrive, however, if interpreted aesthetically
as an emotional flavour (rasa) of the observer knowing herself that is, of the awareness
moving from the boundaries of sensations and thoughts through the aesthetically evoked
emotions toward the experience of the extra-daily. If Godot arrives, therefore, it will most likely
be trough the spectators' experience of aesthetic rapture as induced through the medium of
Beckett's art, wit its self-referral gaps, pauses and ever-repeated moments that precede
activity. What happens in the play, then, depends ultimately on the quality of the interaction
between the actors and the spectators in each performance.
For a post-modernist critic, Waiting for Godot has modernist overtones, and Godot himself
represents a meta-narrative that prevents the tramps from ever achieving the freedom they so
desperately seek. Jeffrey Nealon argues that Estragon and Vladimir are tricksters engaged in
the play of language games, that all their games point to one meta-game, the grand narrative
centred on Godot, and that they are content to play their comfortable modernist games within
this grand narrative, rather than attempt to break out through a post-modernist misuse of
language for the sake of progress and discovery (46-7). The best example of a post-
modernist language game, he claims, is Lucky's think, which transgresses and disrupts the
limits of the ultimate meta-game, namely Western metaphysics. Lucky is right, of course, to
deconstruet and expose the limits of objective thought:
Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a
personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension
who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with
some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda. .
(28).
If the non-sense of Lucky's think takes him and perhaps the audience to the other side of the
limits of language, then he has basically come to the experience of "I" as awareness. Lucky's
think is not merely unreasonable or the opposite of reason, which would keep it within the
dialectic of language as an aspect of thought experienced through the mind and intellect.
Rather, his think is trans-reasonable (Nealon 48), moving the awareness aesthetically through
the emotions beyond the intellect toward an experience of freedom, showing that language
games cannot be totalised by a meta-discourse. But Western metaphysics and the supposed
meta-game of Godot only become a meta-discourse when approached, as is usually the case,
theoretically through the mind and intellect. Metaphysics is therefore not so much a grand
narrative in the West as a grand misunderstanding. The post-modernist critique of objective
metaphysical systems is really a critique of the theory of metaphysics rather than its
application through direct experience, and as such it misses the point.
This critical misunderstanding occurs because the actual practice of metaphysics, the
movement beyond thought as observation toward the direct experience of pure
consciousness, is rare in the West outside of aesthetic experience (and inadvertently certain
kinds of theory) (Haney, Literary Theory 1-65).
For Godot to be a metagame, as Nealon claims he is, he would have to be a known or finite
quantity, yet in the play he remains unknown and infinite. Even Beckett, when asked about the
meaning of Godot, replied that had he known he would have told us in the play. Moreover,
Nealon notes that as a truly post-modernist play Waiting for Godot involves not the lack of
meaning but an excess of meaning produced by the liberating play of language (51). Yet the
deconstructive free play of language is liberating only in a finite sense, since the movement of
differance remains within the boundaries of thought without intentionally giving access to the
unboundedness of pure consciousness, which it indeed rejects as an illusion. To say that
Beckett's play presents a totalising modernist view in an infinite post-modernist world,
therefore, is to (mis)identity what it is like to be conscious - with its unboundedness and infinite
possibilities - with the boundaries of the thinking mind, and to belie the true impact of Waiting
for Godot as a complex aesthetic vehicle for expanding consciousness. Beckett's work
brilliantly illuminates the dual nature of the self, a co-existence of the everyday thinking mind
and the underlying witnessing pure awareness, the source of all play, all beginnings and
repetitions.
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