LITERARIA An International Journal of New Literature Across the World ISSN: 2229-4600 VOL. 5, No. 1-2, JAN-DEC 2015 In Search of Enlightenment by Reading Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot SYED ISMYL MAHMOOD RIZVI Patna University, Patna ABSTRACT Beckett's philosophical indebtedness has long been recognised – especially in conjunction with Dante, Descartes and Geulincx. In this article, I examine Beckettian universal values of Enlightenment, which will be exposed as self-serving mystifications that rationalize and instrumentalize the meaning of life. In this context, the awareness of the Enlightenment nature of Beckett's writing in Waiting for Godot will be analysed along with the freedom appeal of his reader as he strives to attain the enlightenment. 'For enlightenment, all that is needed is freedom.' (Kant 1991 [1784]) Suppose an individual in the world which is a hard shell that he attempts to toss it away, but for what; to think beyond it, and to relocate him beyond it in order to attain enlightenment. Whenever he looks above into the sky, the high sky, the clouds, the flying birds, the stars, the moon, the sun and the cosmos, those make him to forget the hard shell for a while until his eyes fell upon it and he is recaptured. Still into the pupil of his eyes he is reflecting the cosmos. This energy within him, within anyone has vitality and potentiality to reflect the cosmos, and to look beyond the hard shell. Let's say that he has had an enlightenment experience. Enlightenment is a fact. It is the Truth itself. It is not a result of group agreement or of someone telling everyone: 'Yes, he has got the enlightenment, finally.' For this, it depends solely on the individual being in an actual state of conscious, direct knowledge of his 'Self'. Arguably, then, 'Enlightenment' is paradoxical for very reason that it is a form of 'symbolic action' shaping our understanding of the world. Specifically, the individual does a mental time travel into the Beckettian universe, and therefore, he becomes his proponent reader. Like the astronomical universe, let's suppose that the space of the Beckettian universe are text, the galaxies are governing philosophies over the text, the stars are effective characters, the planets are moving situations and circumstances in the lives of the characters, the moons revolving around the planets are posthumans, the asteroids are clichés and the unexplored space is silence. Within this hypothetical premise the reader feels his existence is gradually shrinking, devouring and disintegrating in such expansive universe. Further, in such body of the universe the reader persists in exploring new dimensions of the space. Therefore, he persists in inhabiting the Beckettian universe "for reasons frustratingly unknown to" him "and as a result anxiety, subversive sexuality, paranoia, violent thoughts and sublimated desire pervade" his "macabre imagination" (Beville 2009: 80). Thereafter, the enlightenment is a revolution in human thought. It declared theory must be wedded to practice, and thoughts must be tested in experience and experiments. In short: what was wanted in all fields of human activity was a principled empiricism (Gay 1996: 73). As David Hume put it in a famous passage in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (2014 [1748]): 'When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion' (Hume 1748: 165). Hume framed the stress between the unity of human nature and the diversity of human experience. In contrast to Hume's assertion Manguel writes that 'it is the reader who grants or recognizes in an object, place or event a certain possible readability; it is the reader who must attribute meaning to a system of signs, and then decipher (Manguel 1996: 77).' Thus reading remains a generative activity, an act of challenging to the thought, reflecting to the idea, positioning the inner-being into the text, analysing meanings through mainstream of various spectrums, watching self in the mirror of symmetrical and mythical symbols, discovering a new face, searching for and sharing meanings, and knowledge. It can also be said that the act of reading must take account of multiple 'reflection of consciousnesses' which the words may employ unto our receptors. Many people read not for curricular purposes, but for their own enlightenment. Here, following the reader's initial act of 'reflection of consciousnesses' unto Waiting for Godot progressively splits between the 'real self' (which tramples down into the unconscious mind) and the 'imaginary self' (which sits with the characters in the text). As a consequence, the reader may become confined within the Beckettian universe and he may also lose contact with his self. Therefore, the reader is given an inside view of the text to which he relates to his outside view of his experiences. This intrinsic relation between them engineers the reader's meta-reflection of the textual interpretation beyond self awareness, beyond consciousness, beyond traditional reading, beyond aestheticism, beyond asceticism, and eminently reaching toward undesirable consequences of 'meta-moments'. The symptomatic assumption of meta-moment is strenuously transposing many symbolic figures in the text to engage the reader further with varied attempts of 'reasonableness'. Naturally, it contradicts the inconsequential readership. Consistently, for this, the reader has to become fully immersed in the internal logic of the text. Yet a conscious reader will observe and self-reflect the unspeakable topos of the text that may construct a new meaning, a new language, a new form of life, and a complete new world. Whereas with these typical meta-moments what he will find that not only literalities of language unearth 'reasonableness', but they make him wrongly presume that the characters in Waiting for Godot reflect them onto him. On the contrary, Beckett's intertextuality emphasizes the reader's immediate reflection onto the characters. The ways, in which these meta-moments are invoked, however, they distance the characters' experiences from the reader, here, however, the experiences of the reader might differ from the characters as well, and points of conflict among them succinctly arrive. Moreover, into this process of conflict the meta-moments draw and connect the reader to a larger body of external texts which is self-contained experiences of them. Rather these metamoments have different mode of representations in everyday experiences of the reader even if such a mode is illusory or non-existent the reader still can relate them to the social body of the textual reading. Then a question arises straightforwardly: How is it possible to attain enlightenment while reading 'Waiting for Godot'? First of all, we must consider generally that there is no institution to attain enlightenment. A man creates an institution. A man can be the institution himself. However, the subject of the Enlightenment has always been a sublime involvement – an approach that will not be regretted by anyone who has read the philosophers who they influenced Beckett – Dante, Descartes, Geulincx, Levinas, Bergson, Heidegger, Nietzsche and the eighteenth century thinkers, the enlightenment thinkers, and Greek mythology. Yet Beckett's relation to philosophy is difficult and complex. He was not a philosopher; if he had been, he would not have needed to engage with art. Beckett compounded this refusal to interpret his own work philosophically by claiming not to understand philosophers (Moran 2006: 94): 'I never understand anything they write (Beckett 2008: 81).' And again he wrote: 'I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that is simply a mess' (Beckett 2008: 81). According to Dermot Moran in Samuel Beckett 100 years (2006), despite his rejection Beckett would be to underplay his deeply serious aesthetic commitment, his lifelong interest in Dante ('Dante's damned'), his admiration for poets such as Rimbaud and Apollinaire, whom he translated, his deep admiration for surrealism, for André Breton and Celine, and, of course, the nouveaux roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet where objects can be described in a flat neutral tone for pages on end (Moran 2006: 95). Beckett did philosophy quite intently, especially in the nineteen twenties and thirties – notably René Descartes, the father of French philosophy. Descartes was a deeply logical and mathematical thinker who speculated on the possibility that all of experience might be systematically false, misleading as a dream, a delusion brought about by an evil demon who delights in tricking us. Beckett's characters often make reference to Cartesian positions and his characters frequently detach from their pains and emotions in order to comment on them in a dry, analytic manner which makes their calm rationality all the more absurd and disconnected. His characters actually live through the Cartesian divorce of body from mind. The body doesn't do what the mind wants (Moran 2006: 95-97). Besides Descartes, Beckett also read Malebranche and was particularly fascinated by the minor Flemish Cartesian follower and occasionalist Arnold Geulincx. Geulincx is the originator of the idea that the relation between the mind and the body is like the relation between two synchronised clocks that exactly agree without influencing each other causally. Geulincx advocated a freedom of the mind that abandons all attempts to influence the course of the mechanistic material world, a condition which aptly describes Molloy, Malone and the other anti-heroes of Beckett's novels (Moran 2006: 98). Beckett's aesthetics, as he explained in his conversation with Georges Duthuit, is based on the artist renouncing his/her traditional mastery over creation. Instead, art should now draw attention to its own failure to express and to the fact there is nothing to express. Beckett's poetic and dramatic exploration of the essential failure of art and of language brings him closest to contemporary philosophy, whether to Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus's (2001 [1921]) proclamation 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' (TLP 2001 [1921]: 7), or Heidegger's reflections on the failures of inauthentic idle talk in Being and Time, or in the post-modern meditations on language's lack of origin and failure to refer (Moran 2006: 109). Besides philosophers influencing Beckett, Beckett has also interested – even mesmerised – contemporary philosophers and critics, from Sartre, Lukacs, and Theodor Adorno, to Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, George Steiner, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Wolfgang Iser, Slavoj Zizek, and many others. They have all been attracted to Beckett's relentless vision of the world which he portrayed through his 'mythical symbols' and our human place in these symbols. These symbols have sought to reflect on Beckett's meaning from quite divergent points of view: from modernism to postmodernism, from structuralism to deconstruction (Moran 2006: 100). For example, a tree in Waiting for Godot (1954) is a marvellous example of how Beckett refuses to allow concrete images to become (mere) symbols (Pilling 1994: 76). Consider the talk in Act II of Waiting for Godot (WFG): VLADIMIR: We have our reasons. ESTRAGON: All the dead voices. VLADIMIR: They make a noise like wings. ESTRAGON: Like leaves. VLADIMIR: Like sand. ESTRAGON: Like leaves. [Silence.] VLADIMIR: They all speak together. ESTRAGON: Each one to itself. [Silence.] VLADIMIR: Rather they whisper. ESTRAGON: They rustle. VLADIMIR: They rustle. [Silence.] VLADIMIR: What do they say? ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives. VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it. VLADIMIR: To be dead is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: It is not sufficient. [Silence.] VLADIMIR: They make a noise like feathers. ESTRAGON: Like leaves. VLADIMIR: Like ashes. ESTRAGON: Like leaves. [Long silence.] (Beckett 1954: 62-3) Even if leaves here and the tree throughout the play are privileged, they must be perceived less as objects with an allegorical meaning than as signifiers in a complex web of textual play (Pilling 1994: 78). For this, Raymond T. Riva in his essay Beckett and Freud (1970) states 'Beckett seems to be communicating in an essentially symbolic language, one which is quite capable of communication while seeming to say nothing and of going nowhere' (Riva 1970: 160). This is what the Beckettian language is: telling some-thing in no-thing-ness. Its symbolism is obscure or non-existent; its 'message' is individual to each audience member, and the 'nothing happens' becomes our daily existence.i As the philosopher critic Günther Anders puts it in his essay Being without Time: On Beckett's Play Waiting for Godot (1963): it is with this kind of life, with man who continues existing because he happens to exist, that Beckett's play deals. But it deals with it in a manner basically different from all previous literary treatments of despair. The proposition which one might attribute to all classical desperado figures (including Faustii) might have been expressed as: 'We have no more to expect, therefore we shall not remain.' Estragon and Vladimir, on the other hand, use 'inversions' of this formula: 'We remain,' they seem to be saying, 'therefore we must be waiting for something.' And: 'We are waiting, therefore there must be something we are waiting for' (Anders 1963: 143). When speaking of Godot, S. E. Gontarski offers the following: 'Beckett's thematic commitment is to the fundamental questions of reality, being, and knowing, to universal images of man's predicament, and not overtly with their social manifestations or their rational explanations' (1985: 244-5). For the 1961 Paris Odeon revival of the play, the sculptor Giacometti designed a tree that was so crucially emblematic that each evening he and later Beckett would come to the theatre before the performance to tweak a twigiii (Pilling 1994: 76). 'It's indescribable. It's like nothing. There's nothing. There's a tree' (Beckett 1954: 148). As the play Waiting for Godot continues, the references to the tree multiply: it is successively a potential gallows-tree (WFG, 17, 53, 93); a paradoxical symbol of change and stability (WFG, 60); an inadequate hiding-place (WFG, 74); the name of a yoga balancing-exercise (WFG, 76); a symbol of sorrow (WFG, 93). The value of the image and the symbol is that they are invested with so much non-literal meaning that they can never be fully understood; they turn to be 'mythical symbols'. According to Voegelin's discussion of the mythical symbols expressed by Plato in the Laws (2006 [348 BC]), 'the truth of the symbols is not informative; it is evocative' (Voegelin 1981: 344). What does this straightforward, declarative, sentence mean? Prima facieiv it means that symbolic truth cannot be reduced to an informational statement about objective thing-reality but must instead exercise such an existential impact upon the reader of the symbolic work that the consciousness of the reader is reformed and enlightened. In his elaboration of this statement, Voegelin writes that the symbols do not refer to structures in the external world but to the existential movement in the metaxy from which they mysteriously emerge as the exegesis of the movement in intelligibly expressive language. Their meaning can be said to be understood only if they have evoked in the listener or reader the corresponding movement of participatory consciousness. Their meaning, thus, is not simply a matter of semantic understanding; one should rather speak of their meaning as optimally fulfilled when the movement they evoke in the recipient consciousness is intense and articulate enough to form the existence of its human bearer and to draw him, in his turn, into the loving quest of truth (Embry 2008: 50). For a more of that symbolic, literary, semantics and visionary invasion at the Enlightenment, the reader views the subject obstinately as social decoders whereas the writer Beckett plunges into the physical image to find the truth. If the reader abandons the written literary and symbolic dialectics, what is left of the literature of ideas? The Enlightenment is left alone, and its relation to the society without any reader (to read and understand) and without the literature (to spread literacy and culture) turns out to be problematic. It is like to reconstruct the imagined past, peopled with renovated human beings, retaining their enlightened souls, and it was like to rewrite the history without Reformation, neoclassicism, and the Enlightenment (Brett 1996: 18). History tells us that it was "the mind of Europe before the mind of Beckett that turned literature toward a more and more intricate self-consciousness" (Kenner 1961: 67), identical and symbolic. In addition, Robert Langbaum in The Mysteries of Identity (1977) believes that "if Eliot was alarmed with the fall of civilization; Beckett is concerned with life after the fall" (Langbaum 1977: 4-5). Beckett's characters, according to Langbaum, are symbolic only negatively, so they symbolize the lack of life. If identity in Beckett approaches zero, while the difference between life and death is almost unnoticeable (1977: 234) – then the question is first: What is Self? The Self is our own consciousness. And Art elevates this consciousness. Likewise Gotshalk's writes in Art and the Social Order (1962) that an impulse for transcendence or escape in which aesthetic experience is raised to equality, even to superiority to other modes of experience, and where the person who has the experience is also elevated. Undoubtedly, the nature of art itself has something to do with these changes, but more notable is the process: why, we ask, all the elevation? Let it then be art that does this – and let everyone have access to art through the feelings they claim individually as persons. Let everyone, in effect, be an artist; let everyone go his own way with aesthetic experience; let everyone, in the end, be his own art work. How such a work makes one perfect! One becomes a masterpiece oneself (Noudelmann 2012: 81). Beckett encourages the readers to see this physical image at cognitive depths. As this is to rectify the imaginative capacity of the readers and this isn't surely reading of genres like science fiction or mystery thriller which mostly engage with adventure. This is also not rendering of religio-ethics about life and death. It is for sure ridiculing the human folly for believing in his self ego even there is no such thing 'Self' to accomplish any belief at all. Ironically, with such phenomenon of ridiculing habit of the Beckettian 'unreal' and expressionistic texts further engage the reader with its 'unthinkable' melodramatic silences; with the absurdity of life; questioning to self existence; the grim and reflexive images of mankind within the contours of pain and sufferings – exhaustion from them, wish for immediate freedom from them and questioning from them altogether undoubtedly mock him. Heretofore, ridiculing an object provides a different eye to view it. If the Self is an object then ridiculing it gives a different view of it rather than appraising it; this appraisal may enamel the object from its defects and fractures. We must note that even with this heritage of 'fractured identity', this search for the Self continues with mankind's oldest question: Who am I? Not what am I? And what is my place in the multiverse? As a matter of fact up to now we have not succeeded to find their answers. Finding the answer will be the Enlightenment. Now looking closely, and proceeding towards the central argument: How is it possible to attain enlightenment while reading 'Waiting for Godot'? The answer is hidden within the reader itself. The reader is somewhat lost into the hullaballoo of the world devoid of peace. He is also somewhat lost into the haunted miseries of the world particularly into the psychological playgrounds of his mind over such things. To obstinate the terrors, oppressions, exclusion and wretchedness he takes shelter in Waiting for Godot by reading it. He is experimenting as well as waiting for some literary enlightenment, while the text acts as a world to him to pass through, to observe and to rediscover his Self. Sooner, he realizes that he is in this world which is not much different from that world which the philosophers belonged, that world which Beckett belonged, and that world which everyone belonged. Other worlds, some bright, some mystical, some silent, some benighted, some unexplored and some exist only into the texts. All his attempts to find out the self begin to whisper and glint with possibility and impossibility of his existence alike the non-existence of Godot in the text. However, the reader may be caught within such 'textual illusion' where he is alienated from his self-ego at the moment, and therefore he may query: Where have I reached with this quest for the Self? In this quest, and thereafter, he strives to attain this 'Enlightenment' which reflects the never-ending search for self-discovery. Therefore, the reader seeking a true knowledge about the 'Self' which isn't much different to get answer for the myth behind human existence passes through various channels of intriguing selves. The distribution of these selves may vary according to their roles and attributes, for example, Siddhartha before becoming Lord Buddha was like a sensible boy, then as a young man, and thereafter, he became a sage seeking the true meaning of life and the lost peace. These multiplying selves resonating false selves finally resolved to be stagnant where at this stage Siddhartha became Lord Buddha. He attained enlightenment. The conflict between the multiple selves can also evoke the formlessness of 'the Self,' as there is no biological structure and physical formation of the self. Further the conflict may split it up into non-self or let it stay stagnant. Here, the reader may again ask a question to himself – Do I really exist? He may be desperate to solve the problem of his identity and selfhood but he fails because he is so much lost into the jungle of multiple identities that he hardly can sustain a concrete identity. He still seems waiting for the enlightenment with his reading of Waiting for Godot. He finds Vladamir and Estragon, the two are also waiting. Vladamir and Estragon depend on Godot's arrival for meaning. Their days are spent awaiting Godot's arrival. The waiting is the hardest part and the men constantly ask 'What'll we do?' (Beckett 1954: 44). Angela Hotaling points out, "The waiting is the hardest part", for the tramps "Not only is the waiting difficult, but figuring out what to do while waiting is difficult" (Hotaling 2013: 3-4). As Albert Camus' argues in The Myth of Sisyphus (1988 [1942]) that human life is absurd, meaningless and purposeless. After finding life meaningless, one attempts to escape it, however, Camus claims that to escape the absurdity of existence is philosophical suicide. Humans grapple with becoming conscious of the absurdity of existence, and this realization causes one to suffer. When it is impossible to explain the world without 'reducing it to poetry,' (Camus 1942: 454) life is either meaningless, or meaningful, but if this meaning is beyond one's understanding, does that make it meaningless? What is ambiguous in the text, however, becomes multivalent when it is meaningless. It allows the reader to think differently, to think beyond this meaningless life, beyond sufferings, beyond pain, and beyond existence, and meanwhile, he stops waiting amidst nothing but he does something in search of the true knowledge and this realization causes him to attain the enlightenment. Here, however, the knowledge is in the control of the mind, and the suffering reader becomes inspired by the information he found and uses it to enhance his life. Without this knowledge incessantly the reader feels mocked by the meaninglessness of the world. Later, he also finds that Beckett belonged to that world which brought him to his submission to find out the supreme truth, and the meaning of existence. Being ridiculed by the wretchedness of the world Beckett started searching for the meaning with his textual performances semblance to sufferings, and meanwhile, he also searched for freedom. With the concept of his writing not clear to many as it brings the logical substitute of a mind to understand it but the reader while reading Beckett's text now feels that he is exploring in the direction to be ridiculed by it. His mind is ridiculed in order to derive the contextual meaning not embedded in the text. His mind is pondering several times to find out the meaning: Who am I? Where do I belong? Are Vladimir and Estragon talking to me through the text? He is uselessly waiting and devoting his time to the text without an answer. It is meaningless. It has nothingness. But Vladimir and Estragon still wait desperately and absurdly for Godot. Godot (or God) does not appear because he no longer exists, one of Beckett's purposes being to dramatize the Nietzschean (Murray 1969: 166) "death of God" (Nietzsche 1974 [1882]: 125). The setting that Beckett creates for the characters is simple and desolate, and could be seen as man's struggle to find a distinct place or existence full of meaning and sense. The characters are far from this discovery of meaning and sense, therefore, they are stuck waiting amidst nothing (Hotaling 2013: 13). In particular, the reader dwells less contextually into the text and he dwells more with its intertextuality. Now the curious-minded reader permits Beckett's 'language culture' of 'metaphysical destruction' of his self. Here, the 'metaphysical destruction' of the self suggests that the tender self can be mutated repeatedly into being (the existent), into nonbeing (the void) and new-being (the unimaginable); where each element has elegance of psychophysical existence. More clearly, self-identity is constituted through repetition. Identity has been repeated even in non-identity, wherein the deconstruction of identity is in every sense a repetition of it. Furthermore, the mutability of the self with preoccupation of absent presence may seem obscure to the reader. But the proliferation of the self does not exactly express its physical impossibility; in fact, it bears Beckett's solution to the quasitranscendental self and transcendental self conundrum, which empirically regulates over pataphysics of beingness. Whereabouts, as the reader attempts to identify the crumbling self, it reminds him that the emendation attaches to the concept of the self, which is to say the alterity of the self into a 'new-being'. Therefore, the reader develops a minimal notion of self-consciousness as perceptual awareness. Here, however, the conflict also continues between the reader's self-evident experience and phenomenal experience of the Beckettian intersubjectivity. More clearly, Godwin Okebaram Uwah states that with this conflict, "consequently, all assumptions crumble, and disintegration can show itself in the multiple personality of the individual, in the degeneration of the person, in depersonalization and dehumanization, or in a shifting identity" (1989: 85). Ironically, Beckett defies the laws of psychophysics, as he makes the self impossible as the ontic causation of the real, and as of the non-objectivity of the objects. For him the essence of 'being' or 'aletheia', is fundamentally situated and thrown in the world but yet awaiting to be found, identified and recognised. Henceforth, Beckett applies pataphysics to make the reader beware with the mystification of his 'being' in the world, which eventually may lead to his exhaustion. 'Exhaustion', as Gilles Deleuze explains in The Exhausted (1992: 3-28), is not a negative condition. It does not refer to an unavailable past or decaying present. What it does address, however, is Beckett's transformation of reality into an infinite number of inclusive disjunctions according to a criterion of exhaustivity. And with each transformation, Beckett opens up different emotional and intellectual parameters of the encounter with the great unknown of self (Oppenheim 2004: 24). Therefore, the reader learns from the suffering that to seek an identity is a painful process, and the lack of self is an adversity to be endured only as a means to an end. The reader is seized into self-inflicted, but mostly in the flux of being – in order both to prove his identity and to intensify his sense of existing (Beville 2009: 13). Now the reader still reading Waiting for Godot starts rethinking about the text is no more a text if it has no meaning to offer. He continues analysing it differently and finds a new concept. Seeing the world with a new eye but for what? It is for knowledge, peace and freedom. Furthermore, the exploration into the unexplored territory of untrammelled human freedom to rediscover the 'self' may lead to man's freedom of action, freedom from delimiting systems and structures, freedom from pain, freedom from misfortune, freedom from sufferings, freedom from the ravages of the will, and freedom from the distorted self and above all freedom of desire for this 'freedom' add to the profundity and the difficulty of the world we live in. 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NOTES i (1990), Waiting for Godot: A Play in Which Nothing Happens Twice, Insights: Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. http://www.bard.org/study-guides/a-play-in-which-nothing-happens-twice ii Faust: An alchemist of German legend who sold his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for knowledge iii Brian Coffey (1963), Memory Murphy's maker: some notes on Samuel Beckett, Threshold, 17, pp. 33-4 iv Prima facie: based on the first impression SYED ISMYL MAHMOOD RIZVI DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, PATNA SCIENCE COLLEGE, PATNA UNIVERSITY, PATNA. E-MAIL: <ISMYL.RIZVI@GMAIL.COM>