Explaining the Twilight

(Picture: Photo after the 1961 Beckett portrait by Reginald Grey)

(22.10.2022) One does know that Samuel Beckett had a certain longing for the romantic, also for romantic music, but that also he tended to suppress that longing, striving for intellectual clarity, economy of form and a general scepticism instead. While he »shared the modernist suspicion of Romantic excess«, says the Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (p. 757), he »throttled the lyric impulse, and trampled the blue flower of beauty, he retained an attraction to the mystical, a recognition of the need to express, the voice within too strong ultimately to be denied.«

The two acts of Waiting for Godot do show one and the same thing, or better: they are set in one and the same framework: which is dusk.
Nightfall, dusk, twilight, whatever it may be called (Beckett does tend to speak of ›twilight‹) – the protagonists gathered in the evening, one evening, and in one next evening, seem to wait for someone named Godot, a someone that never shows up, and the moment this is made clear (with a boy appearing as a sort of messenger), night falls upon the protagonists. Waiting has come to an end, as has act one.
The next day, the next act does show exactly the same thing, and this one repetition is enough to allude, very economically in terms of form, to something repeating. To something repeating ever and ever again, with every day, humans have been living on earth. Humans do hope for something. They do hope in vain – night does fall –, but they do not seem to give up hope. A new day may dawn, but there is no dawning in Waiting for Godot. This analysis of humans hoping focusses on the end of hope. Beckett focusses on dusk, and he ends his analysis with night falling and Godot not having come.
The actual play Waiting for Godot does show the human comedy of men waiting, hoping, and of what they do while waiting and hoping (which is also: to discuss dusk). So the above is not an interpretation of the play – Beckett wanted individuals to have their own personal associations with what they saw on stage. What I am interested here is rather the general cultural atmosphere of the Post-World-War-II-Era: Waiting for Godot had been completed shortly before the death of Stalin in 1953, and certainly Beckett’s analytical comedy was in no way representative for the cultural mood of that time. People had hopes, and one Post-War chanson is perhaps much more representative for the atmosphere of the day, and this is Yves Montand’s chanson C’est à l’aube of 1949. A chanson that could be sung in Paris, but also in Moscow (which is what Yves Montand did in the end of 1956), and a chanson that reflects the horrible things that during times of war do occur while dawning, but turns this reflection into a an optimistic march: a celebration of dawning, the dawning of a new tomorrow.
There is nothing of that in Waiting for Godot, but of course the framework of that play is wide enough to include also the optimistic dimension of human thinking, but the intellectual scepticism of Samual Beckett does not spare anything, and it does not even spare the mere framework of humans hoping: which is the rhythm of day and night, because, in Waiting for Godot, Beckett has one protagonist perform a bizarre explanation of what twilight is, and his alter ego, Belaqua, protagonist of many texts, even seems to think that dusk and dawn could be mere illusions.
The Post-War-Era, seen from today, for many, many intellectuals was a kind of Waiting for Godot (and for Yves Montand it was a painful turning from fellow-traveller of the French communist party to critic of communism). Stalin, indeed, had been a bearer of hope for many; later, and especially after 1956, it had been Khrushchev; still later it was the revolution as such, while today it might be identity politics, sustainable development and other things. The drama of hoping goes on. And the analysis of waiting/hoping in Waiting for Godot does not seem to be outdated in any way. Only that, from time to time, we have to recall, that also an individual as sceptical as Samuel Beckett did feel the longing for the romantic, which, however, he tended to suppress.

(Picture: RMN; Yves Montand in 1948)

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