Theo (Year 12 student)
Editor’s note: Theo researched, wrote and submitted this exceptional academic essay to the Gould Prize for Essays in English Literature, organised by Trinity College, Cambridge, during his time in Year 12 at GSAL. This essay was awarded Highly Commended and Theo was invited to visit Trinity College in person. Theo is now studying for a degree in Classics and English at Queen’s College, Oxford. CPD
VLADIMIR: And it’s not over.
ESTRAGON: Apparently not.
VLADIMIR: It’s only the beginning.
ESTRAGON: It’s awful.
VLADIMIR: It’s worse than being at the theatre.
Waiting for Godot, Act 1
In Aristotle’s Poetics, one of the earliest extant philosophical treatises on poetry, he defines a ‘whole’ as ‘that which has a beginning, middle, and end’, referring specifically to the plot structure of tragedy. The Poetics outlines a set of aesthetic principles for the writing of, among other forms, Greek tragic theatre. Focussing, in particular, on the structure of the play as a ‘whole’, it is important to note that Aristotle’s belief that ‘beauty is bound up with size and order’, showing his fascination with mapping scientific and organic order onto art, here acknowledges a linear temporal structure of a dramatic work. To respond to the question of whether ‘all dramatic works’ are ‘whole’, this essay will explore how mid-twentieth-century dramatists offer some of the most striking challenges to Aristotelian thought, specifically by highlighting how non-linear temporal structures play an important role in their theatrical works. There will be a particular focus on the Absurdist drama of Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent figures in the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ movement. Beckett particularly explores the ‘absurd’ and illogical nature of human perception of time in his drama through his characters, for example those in the plays Happy Days and Waiting for Godot, on which this essay will focus. The quotation which opens this essay, from Waiting for Godot, comically maps Beckett’s exploration of the illogical perception of time onto the very structure of a dramatic work. Beckett’s plays challenge Aristotle’s concept of a ‘whole’ dramatic work as they ‘lack a plot’ based on the consequential evolution of ‘beginning, middle, and end’. However, Beckett uses these distinctive temporal references as integral pieces of imagery throughout his work, consistently referring to the temporal landmarks of ‘beginning’ and ‘end’.
For Aristotle, the parts of the ‘whole’ – the ‘beginning, middle, and end’ – were required to follow an organic, logical and consequential pattern, each part existing both as its own distinguishable section and as a natural consequence of the other parts. As a logician and scientist, Aristotle’s notion of analysing dramatic structure reflected his scientific belief in consequential logic. The philosopher’s definition of the ‘middle’ part of the ‘whole’ – ‘that which follows something else, and is itself followed by something’ exemplifies this form of logic and could be reminiscent of a three-part Aristotelian syllogism, showing how the Greeks’ understanding and analysis of art was sometimes embedded in the logic of their scientific study.
A prominent example of a twentieth-century dramatic work which challenges this logical structure comes from the German Modernist dramatist Bertolt Brecht, whose concept of ‘Non-Aristotelian’ and ‘epic’ drama directly rejects Aristotle’s formula. Brecht termed the consequential relationship between ‘beginning, middle, and end’, proposed by Aristotle, an ‘evolutionary inevitability’ (‘evolutionäre Zwangsläufigkeit’), rejecting this in favour of making each scene ‘an entity in itself’. His preference for ‘epic’ drama to consist of ‘self-contained units’, with the ‘whole’ ‘cut into slices which will continue to make sense…read by themselves’ lends itself to a more episodic theatrical form, evident in Brecht’s use of ‘montage’ techniques. Whilst Brecht’s concepts of ‘Non-Aristotelian drama’ oppose Aristotle’s definition of the ‘whole’ on the technical level of theatre production, the dramatic works encompassed by the movement ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ pose challenges based on broader philosophical ideas about the place of order and logic in art and society in the twentieth century. According to modern Romanian dramatist Eugène Ionesco, ‘Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose’, and Martin Esslin, who coined of the term ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, considers the movement among a broader ‘anti-literary movement of our time’. If Aristotle’s notion of a ‘whole’ dramatic work is cemented in logic and reason, then the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ is the twentieth-century antithesis, as the movement holds dear ideas of the ‘illogical’ and the ‘unreasonable’ at its conceptual centre.
Whilst not a dramatic work, the illuminating opening lines of Beckett’s lesser-known 1946 novella The Expelled exemplify the author’s fascination with beginning and ending points. The narrator describes his personal ritual of counting steps as he walks up and down a flight of stairs:
‘There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the figure has gone from my mind. I have never known whether you should say one with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step, and so on, or whether the sidewalk shouldn’t count. At the top of the steps I fell foul of the same dilemma. In the other direction, I mean from top to bottom, it was the same, the word is not too strong. I did not know where to begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the matter.’
This seemingly-trivial analogy offers Beckett the opportunity to explore the illogicalities that have to be faced when attempting to superimpose reason and logic onto a quotidian situation. This rumination on steps perfectly mirrors how the beginnings and endings of Beckett’s own dramatic works seem so blurred and ambiguous.
The ambiguous opening is an effect Beckett frequently creates by beginning his plays in medias res. For example, Happy Days opens with Winnie’s speech, starting with ‘another heavenly day…’, where the determiner immediately alerts the audience to the fact that the ‘heavenly day’ has happened before, and that, to Winnie, this kind of day is not a novel phenomenon. This technique creates an illusion for the audience as jarringly ‘absurd’ as the play’s subject matter, as if they have stumbled into viewing the monotonous life of a married couple half way through its completion. Waiting For Godot similarly begins at an unusual midpoint in the characters’ lives, suggested by Vladimir’s comment ‘All my life I’ve tried to put it from me…’ In both of these plays, Beckett creates an atmosphere in which the characters seem to live in stasis, throwing his audience into this world in medias res without explanation as to how the characters find themselves in such predicaments, creating a tragicomic dramatic effect. With the absence of a plot structure, the audience is given nothing to interpret as temporal landmarks except the beginning and end of the acts of the play itself.
Alongside Beckett’s experimentation with the structural and temporal quality of the ‘beginning’ of his plays, beginnings are also treated as abstract concepts in Absurdist theatre. At the start of Act Two of Happy Days, Winnie’s speech ambiguously references life’s beginnings – ‘A long life. Beginning in the womb, where life used to begin.’ The ambiguity of this phrase hinges on the verb ‘used’, suggesting that Winnie was not conceived in the womb, or that Winnie’s recollection of her own birth is but a distant and hazy memory. The former suggests that the character is aware that her existence only lies within the confines of the play, her life beginning and ending with the curtain’s rise and fall. Birth, in other words, is not the beginning of a person, for Beckett’s characters often begin and end their theatrical lives whilst in the middle-age of a human life.
The exploration of the ambiguity of life’s beginnings is expanded from that of human life in Beckett’s Happy Days to that of the origins of life in Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party by the character McCann – ‘He doesn’t know which came first!…Chicken? Egg? Which came first?’ This philosophical interrogation highlights the absurdity of attempting to understand the beginnings of life with scientific logic and order, thematically connecting with Beckett’s step-counting passage in The Expelled. Beckett’s exposition of the confusion created when counting the first step of a flight of stairs mirrors Pinter’s exploration of the absurdity of the chicken and egg paradox. Across these examples, ‘where to begin’ poses a significant challenge to the Aristotelian concept of the ‘whole’, and the very impossibilities which the structure creates are highlighted by Beckett and Pinter as absurd inevitabilities of life.
Endings are emphasised over and also as beginnings. The ‘end’, as a temporal landmark, is an integral piece of dramatic and structural imagery in Beckett’s work. The beginning of his Endgame, whilst still in effect opening in medias res, jarringly refers to an ‘end’, as Clov begins ‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.’ This juxtaposition of ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ further complicates Beckett’s relationship with the concept of the dramatic ‘whole’, bypassing completely the ‘middle’ in favour of a duality between ‘beginning’ and ‘end’. In both Happy Days and Waiting for Godot, the characters wait for an ambiguous and metaphorical ‘end’. In Happy Days, this is represented by a bell that chimes to mark a new day and a new Act. This bell is eagerly awaited by the character Winnie, whose repeated phrase ‘can’t be long now – until the bell’ comes to symbolise a seemingly-endless cycle of anticipation of an ‘end’ to the day. Winnie’s eager anticipation for the end of each day is contrasted with her greatest fear – that ‘the bell goes by, and little or nothing said, little or nothing done’, while being ‘far, far from ready’ for sleep. This notion of an ‘end’ is more in-keeping with Aristotle’s structure of a ‘whole’, as the Greek word for ‘end’ he uses is ‘τελευτήν’, which can also be translated as an ‘accomplishment’, suggesting some form of successful completion of a task.
This endless cycle of anticipation of a conclusion is similarly presented by Beckett in Waiting for Godot. Vladimir and Estragon continuously wait for Godot and, by extension, they are waiting for an ‘end’, since (as Coe suggests) ‘Godot will never be found until Time itself has stopped’. The tragedy in Waiting for Godot comes from the fact that this ‘end’ which the characters so consistently anticipate is only experienced by the audience at the close of the curtain. Beckett suggests that Vladimir and Estragon will continue to wait for Godot ad infinitum through the stasis created by the closing stage direction ‘they do not move’, however, their existence can only ever be understood as characters on stage, and therefore the audience can only assume that these characters, just like those in Happy Days, only exist in the two Acts they appear in. It could therefore be understood that the end of the play represents that very end which the characters were awaiting. In this respect, Beckett’s use of the ‘end’ as a symbol and a temporal landmark also reminds the audience that the dramatic work is itself an event which consists of a ‘beginning, middle, and end’, with the curtain’s rise and fall constituting the beginning and end of the play.
Whereas for Aristotle, ‘beginning, middle, and end’ was an organic order, representing the consequential pattern of human events just as they were imitated (mimesis) in a tragic plot, Beckett explores the artificiality of the three-part structure, deconstructing the ‘whole’ by taking its constituent parts out of the context of a plot structure and turning them into symbols for human life. The trauma of two World Wars still haunted Europe when Beckett was writing Waiting for Godot, and the lessons of human brutality permeated a rising existentialist climate amongst writers of the time. For Beckett, in particular, the premature ending of human life was a potent subject for reflection in his plays, explored through his use of symbolic beginnings and endings in counterpoint with both the theatrical lives of his characters and the life of the play itself. Beckett’s positioning of the dualities ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ sets up artificial lives for his characters, contained within and dictated by the confines of the play itself. Pozzo’s final speech in Waiting for Godot demonstrates, due to the character’s somewhat metatheatrical awareness, Beckett’s creation of artificially short lives for his characters: ‘one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second…They give birth astride of a grave.’
However, both Aristotle and Beckett explore the relationship that this end to the play holds with the audience. For Aristotle, one key purpose of tragedy was to leave the audience feeling cleansed (catharsis) after witnessing an often complete display of death and destruction at the end of the play, we might see this in the simultaneous killing of brothers Polyneices and Eteocles by their own hands at the end of Euripides’ Phoenician Women, offering them an emotional consolation through the annihilation at the play’s ending. In Beckett’s dramatic works, the characters at the play’s end are often in stasis, with the only ‘τελευτήν’ (‘accomplishment’) experienced by the audience with the curtain’s close, acting as that very ‘end’ which the characters anticipated yet failed to experience.
Beckett’s approach to drama ultimately challenges Aristotle’s theory that a dramatic work should form a ‘whole’, consisting of a ‘beginning, middle, and end’ due to his rejection of plots based on ‘linear development’. Beckett deconstructs Aristotle’s notion of a ‘whole’ dramatic structure, embedded in the plot or narrative of the play. In doing so however, he reimagines the notion of ‘beginning, middle, and end’, by drawing attention to the temporal structure of the dramatic event itself. Beckett uses ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ in particular as metaphorical symbols for the boundaries of human life, setting them in dialogue with the boundaries and life of the plays themselves. In contrast with Aristotle’s organic dramatic structure, Beckett experiments with the symbolic and structural positioning of beginnings and endings to create an artificial sense of the ‘whole’. In this way, Beckett consistently refers to these temporal landmarks to give both his own characters and the audience an awareness of the play’s structure, or lack of structure. Mapping the audience’s perception of real time onto the characters’ perception of fictional time, he leaves both parties awaiting the end of the play.
References
The GSAL Journal 