Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (82 page)

Jean Genet – Saint Genet in Sartre’s biography – introduced himself one day in 1944 to the philosopher and his consort as they sat at the Café Flore. He had a shaven head and a broken nose, ‘but his eyes knew how to smile, and his mouth could express the astonishment of childhood.’
⁴⁴
His appearance owed not a little to his upbringing in reformatories, prisons, and brothels, where he had been a male prostitute. Genet’s future reputation would lie in his brilliance with words and his provocative plots, but he was of interest to the existentialists because as an aggressive homosexual and a criminal he occupied two prisons (psychological as well as physical), and in living on the edge, in boundary situations, he at least stood the chance of being more alive, more authentic, than others. He was also of interest to de Beauvoir because, being homosexual and having been forced to play ‘female’ roles in prison (on one occasion he was a ‘bride’ in a prison ménage), Genet’s views about sex and gender were quite unlike anyone else’s. Genet certainly lived life to the full in his way, even going so far as to desecrate a church to see what God would do about it. ‘And the miracle happened. There was no miracle. God had been debunked. God was hollow.’
⁴⁵

In a series of novels and plays Genet regaled his public with life as it really was among the ‘queers’ and criminals he knew, the vicious sexual hierarchies within prisons, the baroque sexual practices and inverted codes of behaviour (calling someone ‘a cocksucker’ was enough to get one murdered).
⁴⁶
But Genet instinctively grasped that low life, on the edge of violence, the boundary situation par excellence, evoked not only a prurient interest on the part of the bourgeois but deeper feelings too. It opened a longing for something, whether
it was latent masochism or latent homosexuality or a sneaking lust for violence – whatever it was, the very popularity of Genet’s work showed up the inadequacies of bourgeois life much more than any analysis by Sartre or the others.
Our Lady of the Flowers
(1946) was written while Genet was in Mettray prison and details the petty but all-important victories and defeats in a closed world of natural and unnatural homosexuals.
The Maids
(1948) is ostensibly about two maids who conspire to murder their mistress; however, Genet’s insistence that all the roles are played by young men underlines the play’s real agenda, the nature of sexuality and its relation to our bodies. By the same token, in
The Blacks
(1958) his requirement that some of the white roles be played by blacks, and that one white person must always be in the audience for any performance, further underlined Genet’s point that life is about feeling (even if that feeling is shame or embarrassment) rather than ‘just’ about thought.
⁴⁷
As an erstwhile criminal, he knew what Sartre didn’t appear to grasp: that a rebel is not necessarily a revolutionary, and that the difference between them is, at times, critical.

Samuel Beckett’s most important creative period overlapped with those of Camus and Genet, and in this time he completed
Waiting for Godot, Endgame,
and
Krapp’s Last Tape.
It should be noted, however, that both
Endgame
and
Krapp’s Last Tape
received their world premieres in London. By then, Paris was slipping. Born in 1906, Beckett was the son of well-to-do Protestants who lived at Foxrock, near Dublin. As Isaiah Berlin watched the October Revolution in Petrograd, so Beckett watched the Easter Rebellion from the hills outside the Irish capital.
⁴⁸
He attended Trinity College, Dublin, like James Joyce, and after a spell at teaching he travelled all over Europe.
⁴⁹
He met the author of
Ulysses
in Paris, becoming a friend and helping defend the older man’s later work (Joyce was writing
Finnegans Wake).
⁵⁰
Beckett settled first in London, however, after his father died and left him an annuity. In 1934 he began analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, with Wilfred Bion, by which time he was writing short stories, poems, and criticism.
⁵¹
In 1937 he moved back to Paris, where he eventually had his novel
Murphy
published, by Routledge, after it had been rejected by forty-two houses. During the war he distinguished himself in the resistance, winning two medals. But he also spent a long time in hiding (with the novelist Nathalie Sarraute) in Vichy France, which, as several critics have remarked, gave him an extended experience in waiting. (When he came back, Nancy Cunard thought he had the look of ‘an Aztec eagle about him.’)
⁵²
Beckett was by now thoroughly immersed in French culture – he was an expert on Proust, mixed in the circle around
Transition
magazine, imbibed the work of the symbolist poets, and could not help but be affected by Sartre’s existentialism. All of Beckett’s major plays were written in French and then translated back into English, mostly by him but occasionally with help.
⁵³
As the critic Andrew Kennedy has said, this experience with ‘language pains’ surely helped his writing.

Beckett wrote his most famous work,
Waiting for Godot,
in less than four months, starting in early October 1948 and finishing the following January. It was, however, another four years before it was performed, at the Théâtre
de Babylone in Paris. Despite mixed reviews, and his friends having to ‘corral’ people into attending, it was worth the wait, for
Godot
has become one of the most discussed plays of the century, loved and loathed in equal measure, at least to begin with, though as time has gone by its stature has, if anything, grown.
⁵⁴
It is a spare, sparse play; its two main characters (there are five in all) occupy a stage that is bare save for a solitary tree.
⁵⁵
The two central figures are usually referred to as literary tramps, and they are often cast wearing bowler hats, though the stage directions do not call for this. The play is notable for its long periods of silence, its repetitions of dialogue (when dialogue occurs), its lurches between metaphysical speculation and banal cliché, the near-repetitions of the action, such as it is, in the two halves of the play, and the final nonappearance of the eponymous Godot. In its unique form, its references to itself, and the demands it makes on the audience, it is one of the last throws of modernism. It was cleverly summed up by one critic, who wrote, ‘Nothing happens, twice!’
⁵⁶
This is true enough on the surface, but a travesty nonetheless. As with all the masterpieces of modernism,
Godot’s
form is integral to the play, and to the experience of the work; no summary can hope to do it justice. It is a post-waste
Land
play, a post-O’Neill play, post-Joyce, post-Sartre, post-Proust, post-Freud, post-Heisenberg, and post-Rutherford. You can find as many twentieth-century influences as you care to look for – which is where its richness lies. Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps, are waiting for Godot. We don’t know why they are waiting, where they are waiting, how long they have been waiting, or how long they expect to wait. The act of waiting, the silences and the repetitions, conspire to bring the question of time to the fore – and of course in bewildering and intriguing the audience, who must also wait through these silences and repetitions,
Godot
provides an experience to be had nowhere else, causing the audience to think. (The play’s French title is
En attendant Godot
; ‘attending,’ as in paying attention to, amplifies waiting.) In some respects,
Godot
is the reverse of Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu.
Proust made something out of nothing; Beckett is making nothing out of something, but the result is the same, to force the audience to consider what nothing and something are, and how they differ (and recalls Wolfgang Pauli’s question from the 1920s – why is there something rather than nothing?).
⁵⁷

Both acts are interrupted by the arrival, first, of Lucky and Pozzo, and of the Boy. The first two are a sort of vaudeville act, the former deaf and the latter dumb.
⁵⁸
The Boy is a messenger from Mr Godot, but he has no message, recalling Kafka’s
Castle.
There is much else, of course – a lot of cursing, a hat-passing routine, comic miming, problems with boots and bodily functions. But the play is essentially about emptiness, silence, and meaning. One is reminded of the physicists’ analogous scale when illustrating the atom – that the nucleus (which nonetheless has most of the mass), is no more than a grain of sand at the centre of an electron shell-structure the size of an opera house. This is not only bleak, Beckett is saying; communication is not only fatuous, futile, and absurd, but it is also comic. All we are left with
is either cliché or speculation so removed from any reality that we can never know if it has any meaning – shades of Wittgenstein. Though Beckett loved Chaplin, his message is the very opposite; there is nothing heroic about Vladimir or Estragon, their comedy evokes no identification on our part. It is, it is intended to be, terrifying. Beckett is breaking down all categories. Vladimir and Estragon occupy space-time; in the early French editions Pozzo and Lucky are described as ‘les comiques staliniens’; the play is about humanity – the universe – running down, losing energy, cooling; the characters have, as the existentialists said, been thrown into the world without purpose or essence, only feeling.
⁵⁹
They must wait, with patience, because they have no idea what will come, or even
if
it will come, save death of course. Vladimir and Estragon do stay together, the play’s one positive, optimistic note, till they reach the superb culmination – as an example of the playwright’s art, it can hardly be bettered. Vladimir cries, ‘We have kept our appointment, and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?’

The important point with Beckett, as with O’Neill and Eliot, is to experience the work. For he was no cynic, and the only satisfactory way to conclude writing about him is to quote him. His endings are better than anyone else’s. The end of
Godot
reads as follows:

Or we can end by quoting Beckett’s letter to fellow playwright Harold Pinter: ‘If you insist on finding form [for my plays] I’ll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That’s the kind of form my work has.’

For Beckett at midcentury, the speculations of Sartre were pointless; they were simply statements of the obvious. Science had produced a cold, empty, dark world in which, as more details were grasped, the bigger picture drained away, if only because words were no longer enough to account for what we know, or think we know. Dignity has almost disappeared in
Godot,
and humour survives ironically only by grim effort, and uncertainly at best. Comforting though it is, Beckett can see no point to dignity. As for humour … well, the best that can be said is – it helps the waiting.

Beckett and Genet both came from outside the French mainland, but it was Paris that provided the stage for their triumphs. The position of the third great playwright of those years, Eugène Ionesco, was slightly different. Ionesco was of Romanian background, grew up in France, spent several years in Romania, during the Soviet occupation, and then returned to Paris, where his first play,
The Bald Prima Donna,
was produced in 1950. Others followed in rapid succession, including
The Chairs
(1955),
The Stroller in the Air
(1956),
How to
Get Rid of It
(1958),
The Killer
(1959) and
Rhinoceros
(1959). One of the biographies of Beckett was given the subtitle ‘The Last Modernist,’ but the title could have applied equally to Ionesco, for he was in some ways the perfect amalgam of Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Freud, Alfred Jarry, Kafka, Heidegger, and the Dada/surrealists. Ionesco admitted that many of his ideas for plays came from his dreams.
⁶⁰
His main aim, he said, certainly in his earlier plays, was to convey the astonishment he felt simply at existing, at why there is something rather than nothing. Not far behind came his concern with language, his dissatisfaction at our reliance on cliché and, more profoundly, the sheer inadequacy of language when portraying reality. Not far behind this came his obsession with psychology, in particular the new group psychology of the modern world of mass civilisation in great cities, how that affected our ideas of solitude and what separated humanity from animality.

In
The Bald Prima Donna
it is as if the figures in a de Chirico landscape are speaking, virtual automatons who show no emotion, whose words come out in a monotone.
⁶¹
Ionesco’s purpose here is to show the magic of genuine language, to draw our attention to what it is and how it is produced. In
The Stroller in the Air,
one of his plays based on a dream (of flying), the main character can see, from his vantage point, into the lives of others. This oneway sharing, however, which offers great comic possibilities, is in the end tragic, for as a result of his unique vantage point the stroller experiences a greater solitude than anyone else. In
The Chairs,
chairs are brought on to the stage at a rapid pace, to create a situation that words simply fad to describe, and the audience therefore has to work out the situation for itself, find its own words. Finally, in
Rhinoceros,
the characters gradually metamorphose into animals, exchanging an individual human psychology for something more ‘primitive,’ more group-centred, all the time provoking us to ask how great this divide really is.
⁶²