October 2010 Print

Two Responses to Suffering in Modern Drama

Andrew J. Clarendon

Literature often has many profound truths to teach us about reality. In the 20th century, two plays stand out as presenting alternate worldviews. One represents the spirit of the age; the other recalls the Catholic way.

One of the ways that I have organized a literature class for high school seniors is to consider modern problems and remedies. The aim is intellectual inoculation: armed with the Faith and some sense of the ideas that modernity uses to try to destroy that faith, the hope is that the graduate is ready to take his place in the great struggle of our time. I like to end the last weeks before Christmas with two important 20th-century dramas that clearly illustrate this debate: Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot and T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, two plays that express the modern and traditional views of suffering and reality.

My students’ response to Godot is nearly always the same. All of them find the tedious monotony of the dialogue to be hardly worth their time. The better students sense the dark humor in the play; every student reacts against the despair and anguish even before they understand why the characters feel the way they do. Yet, Godot is one of the most respected and highly regarded works of the 20th century; it is often assigned in upper level high school and college classes. As recently as last year, the famous actors Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart performed the play to sold-out audiences in London. The action centers on two evenings in the life of two bums–Vladimir and Estragon–who at times are characters of out the Laurel and Hardy vaudeville tradition and at others are poor wretches complaining about what a sick joke the world is. The plot, like the dialogue, is anti-Aristotelian: there is no beginning, middle, or end, but a circular pattern of the same absurd action. While nothing of real consequence happens to Vladimir and Estragon, the only other main characters in the play, a bully named Pozzo and his slave Lucky, go blind and dumb. A tree, presumably a willow, has no leaves in part one, then gains “four or five leaves”¹ the next day; human suffering is in the foreground, while the material world has just enough order to keep the prank going. All is circular deterioration, “signifying nothing.”² The first line of the play encapsulates the message: there is “[n]othing to be done.”³ Vladimir and Estragon take their shoes off, stand up, sit down, think about killing themselves, talk incessantly; but, finally, all they really can do is to continue to wait for Godot, who, of course, never does arrive. They wait without hope and experience a suffering without meaning.

The first thing to understand about Godot is the philosophy behind it; the play’s style and structure cannot be understood, nor can its tremendous influence be accounted for without a grasp of Beckett’s outlook on reality. Godot was first written in French in the late 1940’s; it was later translated into English by Beckett himself, a native Irishman. The philosophical foundation of the play is existentialism: a set of ideas and attitudes that were formulated by philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus during and after World War II. In brief, existentialism is ultimate subjectivity: since “existence precedes essence” (that is, “to be” comes before the “whatness” of a thing), we and other things exist, but these things have no meaning for us except as we create meaning through acting on them. As in the case of poor Hamlet, having to provide an absurd and meaningless universe with one’s own meaning causes anxiety, loneliness, and despair. While the chief figures of existentialism—Sartre and Camus—produced plays and novels describing these ideas, others wrote dramas more loosely based on this outlook. A form of this is a style called “Theatre of the Absurd”: plays in which the “philosophical base is a form of existentialism that views human beings as moving from the nothingness from which they came to the nothingness in which they will end through an existence marked by anguish and absurdity.”⁴ The most widely acclaimed example of “Theatre of the Absurd” is Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Produced at the mid-point of the last century, this atheistic nihilism is one product of Western civilization after the devastation of two world wars, a result of what historian Warren Carroll calls “the age of apostasy in the twentieth Christian century.”⁵ Godot is a serious play that discusses serious ideas and presents what have become influential challenges. There is no sentimentality in it; other than some moments of low humor—Vladimir and Estragon are, remember, bums—all is the anguish of absurdity. Any talk about how Vladimir and Estragon are heroic because they continue to endure and that at least they have their friendship is at best a sidestep; as Pozzo memorably puts it: our mothers “give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”⁶ This nihilism is born out of a century that will certainly be remembered for two things: tremendous technological advances and heaps of corpses. One reaction to this is the great temptation of our time, a corrosive cynicism and debilitating doubt that reduces all to the dusty shadows and idiotic absurdity and grinning skull⁷ of Godot.

It would be a grave fault for a teacher to give students a play like Waiting for Godot and not provide answers to the arguments it presents. In today’s schools, the best that can usually be expected is for the teacher to provide a variety of works that give various points of view and then leave the high school or college students to figure out for themselves what is the truth; it is a relativity of texts in which any sort of idea is just as good as any other. In places where objective truth and reality are still affirmed, a happy example of a direct rebuttal to Godot—and one that also dovetails nicely with Advent and Christmastide—is T. S. Eliot’s dramatization of the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, Murder in the Cathedral.

Murder is a traditional play in a number of senses. The subject matter immediately evokes the rich tradition of medieval plays about saints, while the inclusion of a chorus that comments upon the action recalls ancient Greek drama. These two streams—the medieval and classical—reflect the entire Western dramatic tradition; in essence, Murder is a play about the past designed to show that the lessons of tradition are still valid in modern times. Composed in 1935 for a festival at Canterbury Cathedral, Murder was the first play written in verse for many years. In an effort to get closer to modern speech, Eliot avoids a set metrical pattern, favoring lines with four stressed beats and any number of unstressed syllables. By 1935, dramatic poetry had moved beyond the blank verse of earlier eras; already a giant in 20th-century lyric poetry, Eliot’s dramatic verse reflects the horrors, temptations, and glories of his subject in modern language. The ideas are ancient and eternal; the language both elevates the subject and speaks to our time.

This subject is one with which Waiting for Godot is also concerned: how to make sense of the reality of a life that is often filled with suffering. Like Beckett’s play, Murder is about waiting, waiting for something to happen, waiting for meaning, and, above all, waiting for death. The play opens on December 2, 1170, the day St. Thomas returned to Canterbury after his exile, with a speech given by the Chorus. This Chorus is made up of women of Canterbury, the non-sacerdotal, non-knightly part of the population, “the scrubbers and sweepers”⁸ who immediately announce this theme: “Here let us stand, close by the cathedral. Here let us wait.”⁹ These women, the practical, down-to-earth caretakers of the home, know that they are being “compelled to witness”¹⁰ something and can only wait for it. It soon becomes clear that they are waiting for the Archbishop’s martyrdom. Their response is typical, human, and in the spirit of Godot:

O Thomas, return, Archbishop; return, return, return to France. Return. Quickly. Quietly. Leave us to perish in quiet.

We do not wish anything to happen. Seven years we have lived quietly, Succeeded in avoiding notice, Living and partly living.¹¹

As the martyrdom approaches, the choral speeches are filled with increasing anguish and horror, until, like Lady Macbeth, the Chorus stands before Thomas’s butchered body and cries: “It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is defiled, / But the world that is wholly foul. /... Wash the stone, wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul, wash them wash them!”¹² Opposed to the absurd anguish of Godot, here is horror and humility; a debasement that leads not to nihilism or despair, but, at the end of the play, to the Chorus reciting an act of faith while a choir sings the Te Deum in the distance.

However, it is Thomas’s speeches that contain the essence of Eliot’s answers to Beckett’s challenges–problems that Eliot himself formulated in one of the most influential poems of the modern age, The Waste Land. After the exposition given by the Chorus and priests, Thomas announces his arrival on stage with the words of Christ: “Peace,”¹³ a word that both belies and points to his approaching martyrdom. The fruit of his exile is given in the speech that follows, verses that provide the answer to the modern problem:

action is suffering And suffering is action. Neither does the agent suffer Nor the patient act. But both are fixed In an eternal action, an eternal patience To which all must consent that it may be willed And which all must suffer that they may will it.¹⁴

The choice is starkly clear: one can say that life is too filled with suffering, that it is random and meaningless and ends in nothingness; or one can assert that there is an eternal design, an Agent Who orders things toward the ultimate good. That there is suffering in this life is undeniable; it is the meaning and even utility of the suffering that Eliot, like Shakespeare and Solzhenitsyn and so many others, affirms. Especially for us comfortable moderns, this can be hard to believe and accept. It is significant that immediately after this assertion, this alter Christus, now in the desert of Canterbury, is tempted by “the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life”¹⁵ in the form of three figures: the desire to regain the earlier life of pleasure he enjoyed with the king, the desire to unite with the king and do what he wants to gain political power, and the desire to overthrow the king and assume power himself. After the temptations accuse him of avoiding their blandishments out of pride, a fourth temptation diabolically uses religion to tempt him: to allow his martyrdom out of the pride of being a martyr and to glory in the damnation of his murderers. This episode ends with a moment that could be taken out of Godot. The temptations counsel despair since it seems impossible for Thomas not to act out of pride, and besides:

Man’s life is a cheat and a disappointment; All things are unreal. Unreal or disappointing:

All things become less real, man passes From unreality to unreality.¹⁶

The paradoxical truth is that earthly things, in relation to spiritual ones, are less real and have little meaning. It is not accidental that more than once Eliot quotes and echoes the book of Ecclesiastes, with its famous second verse: “vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.” But if there is no soul, no grace, no redemption, if human life is really nothing more than to be a fool and madman in a hovel, stinking of mortality,¹⁷ then life is certainly a cruel joke–the skull of Godot grins again as “Sweet and cloying through the dark air / Falls the stifling scent of despair.”¹⁸

Thomas defeats the temptation the way all men must: resignation to the providential will of God, to assert meaning, even if the specifics are unknowable, to “no longer act or suffer, to the sword’s end.”¹⁹ For him, like Hamlet, “the readiness is all”²⁰; as he shows in the Christmas sermon that makes up the interlude between parts one and two, Thomas understands true martyrdom since he “has become the instrument of God...lost his will in the will of God, and...no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.”²¹ Our acts, the Archbishop teaches us, have meaning precisely as they are born out of the love of God, and it is through this that everything, from martyrdom to sweeping the floor, has the highest meaning. In the end, as the drunk knights violate the sanctuary of the Church to commit the murder, Thomas has already triumphed:

We have fought the beast And have conquered. We have only to conquer Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory. Now is the triumph of the Cross

all things Proceed to a joyful consummation.²²

In these paradoxes are a joy and glory not against, but beyond, reason. It is a consummation that the Samuel Becketts of the world will not believe in, but the St. Thomas Beckets have achieved.

At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century these questions of meaning and purpose continue to haunt the mass of mankind. The traditional view of reality and suffering must be proclaimed and applied to the specifics of our age. It has always been true that these lessons must be continually passed on, since “[w]e do not know very much of the future / Except that from generation to generation / The same things happen again and again.”²³ In other words, it should not be surprising that there are all manner of troubles in Church and State in our day; the real tragedy would be if mankind accepted the temptation of Godot and forgot the piercing reality of Murder. To this end, while performing our own duties, waiting for the consummation, we could do worse than to meditate upon these words from the final speech of Eliot’s play:

We thank Thee for Thy mercies of blood, for Thy redemption by blood. For the blood of Thy martyrs and saints Shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places. For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ, There is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it

From such ground springs that which forever renews the earth Though it is forever denied.

Lord, have mercy upon us. Blessed Thomas, pray for us.²⁴

Andrew J. Clarendon currently teaches Literature and History at St. Mary’s Academy and College while helping his wife keep track of their six young children. Previously, he taught at the United States Naval Academy and was one of the original faculty members at La Salette Boys Academy in Olivet, Illinois.

¹ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 62.

² Macbeth 5.5.28. All Shakespeare quotations are from David Bevington, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 1992).

³ Beckett, Godot, 2.

⁴ William Harman and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2000), 2.

⁵ Warren Carroll, The Glory of Christendom (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 1993), 684.

⁶ Beckett, Godot, 103.

⁷ Cf. Beckett, Godot, 47.

⁸ T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963), 86.

⁹ Ibid., 11.

¹⁰ Ibid., 11.

¹¹ Ibid., 19.

¹² Ibid., 77-78.

¹³ Ibid., 21.

¹⁴ Ibid., 21-22.

¹⁵ I Jn. 2:16.

¹⁶ Eliot, Murder, 41.

¹⁷ Cf. King Lear 3.2, 3.4, 4.6.133.

¹⁸ Eliot, Murder, 44.

¹⁹ Ibid., 46.

²⁰ Hamlet 5.2.220

²¹ Eliot, Murder, 49.

²² Ibid., 74, 70.

²³ Ibid., 25.

²⁴ Ibid., 87, 88.