Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.
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0:11 Wes Alwan: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Waiting for Godot. Erin, you wanted to say something about the typical characterization of them as tramps.
0:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Do you think they're as characters gaining a little bit from the association with, you know, as I've already talked about Laurel and Hardy, but also maybe Chaplin.
0:34 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I think that's meant to be an association. Yeah. Beckett actually talked about them. Right. As tramps, even though it's not referenced in the play itself. But he was involved in the production where he. I think. I think he gave some guidance on this, on their appearance and what they were supposed to be. But.
0:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I see. Yeah. I mean, again, I want to just argue that the comedy read is really the best way I've found to understand this is the trajectory of the Tramp. Often is this sort of dilation of time and funny business. I mean, you have in the figure of the Tramp the idea of someone who is always going, always moving and yet going nowhere. The ending, such as it is, you know, the famous idea that Godot never comes or that nothing, nothing amounts to anything in the end, is actually predicted in the Tramp trope, in which Tramp trope.
1:35 Wes Alwan: I was going to get a tramp stamp, but I decided on getting a tramp stamp.
1:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: I decided on the Tramp trope. But at the end of these little escapades, you know, these little serial adventures in the life of the Tramp, what happens? Nothing. Right. He might have a delusion of grandeur. Something might happen to him. You know, there'll be a little bit of a plot for the 20 minute silent film or whatever that he's engaged in. And then usually at the end, disappointment, back on the road, back where he began. No salvation, no social climb, no actual progress, but just movement. So movement without progress is kind of the life of the Tramp.
2:16 Wes Alwan: So at this point, right, they've just talked about, had an absurd conversation about whether to commit suicide and who should go first, you know, depending on so that the branch doesn't break for the second one and then leave them alone. And Estragon says, don't let's do anything. It's safer. And then Vladimir says, let's wait and see what he says. As if Godot is going to tell them whether they should commit suicide, or in what order they should commit suicide. Or maybe whether that there's some reason not to commit suicide. Estragon. Says who? Giddo. Estragon. Good idea. Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand, says Vladimir. Do you want to go back and forth for a second here?
3:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: Sure. On the other hand, it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes.
3:05 Wes Alwan: I'm curious to hear what he has to offer. Then we'll take it or leave it.
3:09 Erin O'Luanaigh: What exactly did we ask him for?
3:11 Wes Alwan: Were you not there?
3:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: I can't have been listening.
3:14 Wes Alwan: Oh, nothing very definite.
3:16 Erin O'Luanaigh: A kind of prayer.
3:19 Wes Alwan: Precisely.
3:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: A vague supplication.
3:23 Wes Alwan: Exactly.
3:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: This is funny. And what did he reply? That he'd see that he couldn't promise anything.
3:32 Wes Alwan: That he'd have to think it over
3:34 Erin O'Luanaigh: in the quiet of his home, consult
3:36 Wes Alwan: his family, his friends, his agents, his
3:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: correspondence, his books, his bank account, before taking a decision. It's the normal thing, is it not? I think it is.
3:52 Wes Alwan: I think so too. All right, so that's fun.
3:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: These are really, really fun to read out loud.
4:01 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So strike. Yeah. So you can see all the comedy in here. Strike the iron before freezes instead of while it's hot.
4:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: The anticipation of the end.
4:15 Wes Alwan: Yeah. What did we ask him for? Nothing very definite. A kind of prayer. Precisely.
4:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right.
4:22 Wes Alwan: So it's not definite, but it's precise. It's vague, but exactly.
4:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: Will he come tomorrow, Surely.
4:31 Wes Alwan: Yeah. That he couldn't promise anything. But anyway, so we. We get the idea that they don't know what exactly they're waiting on. What's. It's. It's very vague. And they. They even use the word vague. And the word prayer is used. And other times the word save is used. And savior. So there's some religious association here as well.
4:51 Erin O'Luanaigh: What's funny too, is in the middle of all this, it strikes me, on page 11, Vladimir says, your worship wishes to assert his prerogatives. And prior to this, I think on the very first page.
5:02 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Where did your worship sleep tonight? Or something like that.
5:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, your highness? Yeah. And because of what happens with the stickiness of language with Vladimir, he starts calling even before they decide to play at Pato and Lucky on day two, or in the second act, he has already started calling estragon pig, a use of the term that Pozzo uses for lucky. So one wonders if, you know, the day before this they were. Vladimir was contaged by someone who was calling someone else your highness and your worship in a. In a sort of sarcastic way or something like that.
5:41 Wes Alwan: Interesting. Yeah.
5:42 Erin O'Luanaigh: We intuit in Act 2 that he picks up on some turns of phrase from Pazzo, but. Yeah, but it's funny that it comes up in the midst of this theological conversation which doesn't occur in Act 2. So those words, I think, aren't used at all in Act 2. But maybe from the beginning, Vladimir has come into this conversation already ruminating on this idea of the thieves being saved. And that's what suggests the sarcastic your worship phrase to his mind, rather than some other characters that we haven't seen in act minus one.
6:16 Wes Alwan: It seems to me to sort of reverse their roles a bit, because Vladimir is actually the one more in charge. And he has a name which is more. There's more half to it. Right. There's actually been princes, Russian princes named Vladimir and Estragon. Again, it's a name of an herb. Yeah. You get a sense Vladimir is more in charge. So it's a weird inversion to. Suggests that Estragon is in charge. But of course, you know, there is a sense in which the person who doesn't seem to be in charge is in charge. And in fact. Right. The diminutives that they have for each other. Gogo and Dee Dee. Right. Estragon, Gogo. And of course he wants to go all the time, but he can't, because they're waiting for gado, which is almost like a combination of their names. Go and D. Go DD sounds like D almost sounds like this. It's like this, this, or here. Here versus Go. Go. Stasis versus motion and what Freud would call secondary process, and the kind of fixing something in one's attention and rational thought and planning, which certainly Vladimir has, versus just impulse, which is what Estragon seems to have. So to sort of say your highness or your worship is to raise the question of who's in charge. Is it executive function that's in charge, or is it impulse and instinct that's in charge?
7:42 Erin O'Luanaigh: To give maybe credence to your idea that Estragon is maybe secretly the one in control or in charge. Pozzo's name is confused with Godot. And Gogo certainly sounds more like Godot than Didi does. Though I like your idea that the name kind of combines the two in a way so that we could say that, you know, Pazo is the more obviously dominant one of that pair. Godot, say in the pair that he's A part of. With the boy is certainly the dominant. And then Gogo, Estragon would be along that axis. Though, of course, these dynamics shift in Act 2. I mean. Yeah. From the beginning, Vladimir is saving Estragon, or trying to save Estragon from these people that apparently beat him up all night.
8:25 Wes Alwan: Right.
8:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: Which is, like, really sad, but also
8:28 Wes Alwan: really funny because he transgresses in some way. Vladimir suggests he's doing something to.
8:33 Erin O'Luanaigh: To antagonize them.
8:34 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So the idea that there's something impulsive about Estragon that gets a natural response. So what happens when Pazzo and Lucky arrive? Well, it's kind of a relief. Okay. You know, it's like, okay, something interesting is going to happen in this play. And it's kind of a traveling vaudeville act. It's more pronounced than the vaudeville act that we've already been witnessing and more extreme. And in a way, Pazzo and Lucky seem to be exaggerated versions of Vladimir and Estragon. So, Right. There's a kind of a bit of a master slave dynamic, maybe with Vladimir and Estragon, but it's very pronounced with Pazo and Lucky. Lucky is literally his slave. And you can think of Pazzo as a harsh superego or as a. If you're thinking about it intrapsychically or on a social level as, you know, feudal lord or master. There's been lots of readings of this in terms of Hegel's master slave dialectic and all that stuff. So it's really quite. Quite a striking scene when they show up, right, with. So, you know, enter, Pazzo and Lucky. Pazzo drives Lucky by means of a rope passed around his neck so that Lucky is the first to enter, followed by the rope, which is long enough to let him reach the middle of the stage before Pazzo appears. Lucky carries a heavy bag, a folding stool, a picnic basket, and a greatcoat. Pozzo, a whip. And then, of course, the way he treats Lucky is quite, you know, quite extreme. Calling him pig and all that and having him give him the whip that he's gonna use to whip him. But from reading, I understand that the very first performance of this, people walked out. And I wonder where it is that they walked out, where it is that this became too objectional. Well, and I suppose maybe it's with Pozzo and Lucky, but you would think that would be the thing. Like, okay, actually, this is getting really interesting now, but I don't know.
10:31 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, they've been predicted. I mean, very often, Estragon is the one who's introducing New elements to the dialogue, surprising twists in the dialogue. And one of them that he introduces, the question we're not tied, which he then raises again right before Pozzo and Lucky. Come on. Estragon also has the idea of the necessity for testing the branch to determine their weight before they kill themselves on it, because he doesn't want the branch to not be able to hold whichever of them is heavier and have the heavier person go second so that they don't successfully kill themselves. Something which it takes Vladimir a second to catch up on. Which is a surprising moment because Estragon makes sense and thinks logically about something before Vladimir can intuit it. But both of those instances are about being tied to each other or to Gadot in terms of their fates and then being sort of weighed in the balance, maybe like scales connected, like the two thieves, maybe on the. On the. The crosses on either side of Christ. And then we get Lucky and Pazo coming on to tied together by this rope. Yeah, I like this idea that they're an exaggeration of Estragon and Vladimir. And there are some of the same elements that recur in the pazzo Lucky dynamic, though twisted. So we get the turnip that Vladimir gives Estragon and then Pozzo with the chicken bone. I don't know. I guess maybe it doesn't really work. Erin, it's a carrot. Sorry.
12:07 Wes Alwan: Right. Accidentally gives him a Tyranid, but he doesn't. Estragon doesn'. I bring that up because Vladimir really does care about Estragon and is feeding him.
12:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes.
12:19 Wes Alwan: Whereas Pozzo's abusing Lucky and Lucky gets the bones. Right. So the.
12:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right.
12:25 Wes Alwan: Right. Pozzo takes out the chicken and eats it himself instead of, you know, whereas Vladimir was offering Estragon food. And then Estragon gets the bones that usually Lucky gets. Usually gets the scraps, gets the leftovers.
12:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right.
12:39 Wes Alwan: Pazo is much more imperious and pompous and condescending than Vladimir, and he's a rich man and they're on his land, except the road is free to all, which is a disgrace and blah, blah, blah. So I think that Vladimir thinks he's Godot at first, Right?
12:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. Well, they're not sure, or they hear the sound first and they think that sound is potentially Godot coming. Right?
13:03 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Vladimir Godot. Estragon says yes. And then Pozzo presents himself as Pozzo and Estragon says he said Godot. So I guess Vladimir realizes quickly that he's not Godot.
13:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. And it's in the second act. That I think they say that they're saved. And when they first hear Pazzo and Lucky coming, I think actually the two of them cower at the sound. Yeah. So you're right. He actually does think he might be Godot.
13:31 Wes Alwan: So Pozzo accuses him of Pazzo, says, you took me for Godot. And Vladimir says, no. Oh, no, sir. Not for an instant, sir. So, Lyon, who is he? Oh, he's kind of an acquaintance. Estragon? Nothing of the kind. We hardly know him is Vladimir. True, we don't know him very well. But at the same time, Estragon, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him. Pazzo, you took me for him. So. Yeah. What's this insistence on the idea that they took him for Godot? You know, it may have something to do with what I was talking about early in the first part, which is just this. Godot could be representative of dramatic resolution or suspense or a plot point. It could be representative of some aspect within a play. So it's almost like saying to the audience, you took me for some item of significance in the play or some plot development. Well, when this play doesn't actually have a plot, or you might say, on my reading, having to do with the foolishness of being so invested in the future, or perhaps even invested in one's ambitions, which are very future oriented. You took me, the rich man, as the thing that you wanted to be or the thing that you're waiting for, expecting. But of course, Estragon and Vladimir, too, I don't think they're not organized enough to give content to Godot in that way. If they're mistaking Pazo for Godot, it's simply right. It's more a function of this idea that they really. Godot doesn't have any content for them, except that he might save them from something which doesn't have a lot of content either.
15:10 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. Yeah, that's sort of suggested by the. To take something for something else. There's a sort of interchangeability or like a displacement, I suppose. But then also there's inherent in that maybe, you know, the colloquialism. What do you take me for? Yeah, I love Vladimir saying, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him.
15:31 Wes Alwan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: Pazo seems incredulous at the thought that he could be taken for someone else because of his singularity or something. You know, he says disparagingly, of the same species as Pazo, made in God's image. Yeah. The idea that other people would be the same Species as him seems like something distasteful. And so he repeatedly refers to Lucky as a pig and a hog, but says he cannot go for long without the society of my likes. Even when the likeness is an imperfect one.
16:02 Wes Alwan: He's gonna deign to, right, to hang out with these guys and, you know, have this feast in front of them, chicken and wine, without offering it to them. So at least they're, you know, they're lesser than him. He's a rich man who owns all the land. But they're. No, they're not. Lucky levels the road is free to all. Yeah. Which he then says is a disgrace. Right. So again, if we were to read this intrapsychically, we might think of it in terms of this relationship between some grandiose aspect of ourselves and then something that's been disavowed. Lucky is the disavowed shadow self that we want to cast off. Or maybe it's the part of us that's being beaten up and abused for being less than. But I think the dynamic of that is to put Pozzo in a position. Why isn't he in his manor, right, with the Stein. He mentions the Steinway. That's where he left his watch. Why isn't he in the manor with the piano entertaining him? Well, he's off to sell Lucky at the fair, right? But he could have someone do that for him. But anyway, he gets put into the position of being a wanderer through a desolate wasteland, which is not quite what we would expect a nobleman to be doing. You get the sense that he's right. He says it himself. What he's really looking for is company. But it's hard to have company if you are that pompous and high up and unaware of the well being of others. Right. Have company in the truest sense.
17:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: The other element or the other dynamic in his relationship with Lucky is one of the parasitism, I suppose, or as if the rope is an umbilical cord that has allowed Pozzo to leech off of Lucky. Right. Is that the implication that Lucky has previously been able to think and speak and that Pozo has learned things from him or acquired things from him until Lucky becomes hollowed out and unable to make any sort of coherent statement.
18:12 Wes Alwan: Yeah, it's quite Lucky, actually. He starts weeping because of what. What Pazzo says here, right. Which is that he's learned so much from. From Lucky. They're inquiring why he doesn't put his baggage down, right. And Pazzo ends up saying he wants to Impress him and mollify him. And then Vladimir is surprised by the idea that Pazzo would want to get rid of them. You know he's going to bring him to the fair. Then there's the whole scene where Estragon gets kicked and Pazzo gives that great speech about the tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else, another stops, right? Bucky's tears go to go to Estragon.
18:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Underneath, Pazzo says, guess who taught me all these beautiful things? My Lucky. But for him, all my thoughts, all my feelings would have been of common things. Professional worries, beauty, grace, truth of the first water. I knew they were all beyond me. So I took a nook and Vladimir says, a nook? And I looked that up. I couldn't find anything about it, except for stuff about Waiting for Godot and where the origin of that word might be from.
19:16 Wes Alwan: Maybe it's like a niche profession.
19:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: But yeah, that was nearly 60 years ago. Yes, nearly 60. You wouldn't think it to look at me, would you? Compared to him, I look like a young man. No? So, also implying that he's physically sustained himself on the deterioration of Lucky. And then Vladimir says, after having sucked all the good out of him, you chuck him away like a. Like a banana skin.
19:40 Wes Alwan: Vladimir abuses him for the way he treats Lucky and all that stuff. And Pozzo ends up collapsing, right? Well, Vladimir even uses the word crucify. He's crucifying Lucky. But. But Pozzo's claim is that Lucky is killing him. He used to be so kind, so entertaining, so helpful and entertaining, my good angel. And now he is killing me. But anyway, I guess I wanted to kind of lead into that twilight speech that he gives. So it's another great speech. And then we'll probably have to talk about Lucky's speech as well. Let's read the whole thing. Just kidding. So everything seems black to him today. Except the firmament, says Pozzo. But I see what it is. You are not from these parts. You don't know what our twilights can do. Shall I tell you? And then he makes sure that everyone's looking at the sky, including Lucky. Will you look at the sky, pig? Yikes. What is there so extraordinary about it? Qua sky. It is pale and luminous like any sky at any at this hour of the day in these latitudes when the weather is fine. An hour ago, roughly after having poured forth even since say 10 o' clock in the morning, tirelessly torrents of red and white light, it begins to lose its effulgence to grow pale, pale, ever a little paler, a little paler, until poof, finished, it comes to rest. But behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging and will burst upon us. Pop. Like that. Just when we least expect it. That is how it is on this bitch of an earth. Yeah. So what is that doing? What's the function of that speech, if there is any? You get the sense that it's another bit of parody of something that we might expect to see in a. In a play, right? Some sort of crescendo, emotional crescendo, along with a great speech. So maybe it's a parody of a great speech, but it also points to the concept of death, right? And the coming of night, which seems to be the alternative to the coming of Godot. Or somehow coupled to it, maybe.
22:04 Erin O'Luanaigh: I take it also to be this expression of balance that. That I've already talked about, the pairs expressing half of a dynamic. So in Night and Day, you have the two sides of the coin. Maybe one thing that I didn't mention, or maybe that we just alluded to, is Vladimir's obsession with his hat versus Estragon's, as we talked about with his boots. Right? And then not too long after this Night and day speech, Estragon will tell Pazo, he, meaning Vladimir, has stinking breath and I have stinking feet. So there's a sort of heads and tails, night and day. Night and day thing is kind of like a one damn thing after the other. But it's also yin and yang balance, the cyclicality of that or whatever.
22:53 Wes Alwan: So what do we make of Lucky's monologue? So they. Yeah, they have Lucky think, right. Given the existence is uttered forth in the public words of. Is it punche and watman of a personal God? Kwa kwa kwa kwa with the white beard. Kwa kwa kwa kawa outside time and extension, who from the heights of divine apathia Divine and thambia Divine aphasia loves us dearly, with some exceptions, for reasons unknown. But time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda, blah, blah, blah, for a long time. And apparently Beckett and the production he was involved in, he wanted this to be read very, very quick, as quickly as possible.
23:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, this is the most Joycean part of the play to me. Yeah, I do. I really enjoyed, actually, the Lucky speech part of the 2001. That was the only one that I saw performed. I liked the fire and brimstone kind of element of it because I think of this, or I thought of it on the page and perhaps still do as being a parody of an academic kind of treatise. So I wasn't expecting the lucky performance in the 2001 adaptation to be so preachery from the pulpit. Kind of heir to it.
24:06 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So again, another evocation of religious questions and perhaps academic thinking about the existence of God or something like that. But it's all become fragmented, much like the play as a whole. Right. Maybe it's like someone took a play and took a bunch of phrases and Scrabble tiles and shook the bag and then put them back out on the board. And this is the play. This is the play you get with
24:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: the repetition of, for instance, the names or the different turns of phrase left unfinished. It is established, you know, the KWA KWA quas and all that. It somehow performs in this really absurd way, these themes of. It's like an expression of ellipses or something. Like the ellipses are somehow being contained within the words or the expressions with which he's sort of extending the time. Again, it's like this dilation. Some of the things that I just teased out that I was writing in the margins,
25:15 Wes Alwan: I have.
25:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: Waiting, uncertainty, time filling, suffering, irrationality, inability of speech. But, yeah, I don't know. Something like what you get from a lecture if you're kind of falling asleep, or maybe what you remember from something several days later. Something that was long and boring and you only caught snatches of it because you were only half paying attention. Something like the. The result of having heard a highfalutin and incomprehensible and maybe kind of boring lecture. You know, since we were on the pazzo portion. Pazzo pulls out his pipe and smokes one. And then. And then he decides to have another. And he says, the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. It occurred to me that this was a revision of the carrot idea that Vladimir and Estragon talk about. On page 13 in my edition, Estragon is eating the carrot and says, funny, the more you eat it, the worse it gets. Vladimir says, with me, it's just the opposite. Again, it. It two different. It's there. In other words, Estragon says, Vladimir, I get used to the muck as I go along. And then Estragon says, is that the opposite? Vladimir says, question of temperament. Estragon of character. Vladimir, nothing you can do about it. Estragon, no use struggling. I don't know. I really love this. The change in the carrot versus the change in you as you eat the carrot?
26:47 Wes Alwan: Yeah. The more he eats, the worse it gets. And Vladimir gets used to it. Estragon's question is getting used to it. The opposite of things getting the more you eat it. Right. Because you might think the more you eat, the better it gets. Right. That's the joke. The opposite would be the more you eat, the better it gets. Not getting used to it. And then. So why is the response there? Question of temperament and character.
27:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: Because it's still possible to get used to something. You get used to the muck as you go along. So you're just getting used to it, getting worse. So the question isn't whether or not the carrot has changed. I suppose the carrot is going to get worse. That seems to be the assumption. But it's just a matter of whether or not you can get used to that quality of it.
27:33 Wes Alwan: Yeah. I mean, the suggestion is that depending on one's character, one might get used to things or get more sick of them with time. And then there's the, you know. Right. If it's character, it's fate. If it's character, it's essence. The essential doesn't change and there's no use in struggling to change. There's no use in trying to be different. At Estreon, there's nothing to be done, so you can't change yourself. So this is, you know, this is the opposite. This is sort of the foil to existentialism. Right. Existentialism is predicated on the idea that existence precedes essence. So existence, as in the foundation to our free will, that we can freely choose something and aren't just reducible to some essence, to some deterministic essence that forces us to be one way or another. I did it because that's my character and there's nothing I can do about it. This is kind of an explicitly anti existential statement.
28:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, I just took it as our way of a roundabout way of talking about Act 2 without actually having to go there. Second is never as good as the first.
28:41 Wes Alwan: Related to the pipe again.
28:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, he says the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. So he has a slightly more tinged by privilege, a more positive view of the repeated activity. Still having some savor.
29:01 Wes Alwan: You know, you can be eating raw carrots and have them go from bad to okay or bad to worse. Right. Bad to worse. Is Estragon bad to okay? Is Vladimir? Or you could be eating really good chicken and wine and having a pipe. All these things that are much better to begin with than A raw carrot. And the pleasure degrades a little bit as you go along, but it's still much better than a raw carrot.
29:31 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right.
29:32 Wes Alwan: It helps to start our heart. Start from a good height so that when you come down, you're not hitting the ground.
29:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's true. That's true. But I like the idea of the. The entropy inherent in repetition, which seems to be like a. Like a meta joke about the play.
29:49 Wes Alwan: So, speaking of repetition. Yeah. Things repeat in the second act and we get Pazzo and Lucky arriving again, but this time Pazzo is blind and the rope is shorter. Yeah. What's the point of repetition here?
30:03 Erin O'Luanaigh: I love when Vladimir says reinforcements at last when they come on stage Again, very much to your point, that we're. We're sort of relieved to see them.
30:12 Wes Alwan: Exactly. Yeah. He's speaking for the audience at that point.
30:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Yeah. This time, again, I'm really intrigued by the. Either side of the scale. So. So there's a.
30:21 Wes Alwan: By the way, there's a lot of tedium. To my mind, before they arrive, they do a question and answer routines.
30:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: They insult each other for.
30:30 Wes Alwan: Insult each other. Yeah. They try all these different things to be interesting, but it's really just boring. They exchange insults, do their exercises.
30:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: They do the hat business because there's the third hat.
30:43 Wes Alwan: Yep. Speaking of logical routine. Yep.
30:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: And the idea of the boots, whether or not the boots have been replaced, which also kind of is a recapitulation of the worst carrot, in a way. There's sort of shades of the worst carrot in that.
30:58 Wes Alwan: Right. And then there's a suggestion that someone for whom you know, has come along, whose boots are too small for their feet, and then taken Lucky's boots, which means that, you know, Estragon's boots must be. Sorry, Estragon's boots. Which means they must be bigger than that person's boots.
31:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: And yet somehow that they might fit Estragon. Right. So. But they will have simply gotten smaller. So there's.
31:23 Wes Alwan: They must be smaller and yet they fit Astragon. Yeah. So.
31:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. So again, there's a. There's an entropic quality. Yeah.
31:31 Wes Alwan: It's a failure of what kind of. Maybe in math is transitivity or something like that. If A is smaller than B and B is smaller than C, then A
31:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: should be smaller than C. Exactly. And one of the things also that I just wanted to point out about the ways in which maybe the play behaving in absurd ways even extends to the scaffolding in the text of the play, the stage directions. Reading it, I Think is a really important experience in addition to seeing it. Seeing it bring something, obviously, to the text. It's meant to be seen. But also, if you were only to see it, then you would not have the experience of discovering that the characters sometimes contradict the stage directions or don't seem to acknowledge the stage directions. So if we were just to see this play, we would. Or we wouldn't know, or maybe we would question the fact that these are, in fact, just Estragon's boots from the day before. We're told in the stage direction that they are Estragon's boots, but the characters argue over whether or not they are.
32:34 Wes Alwan: And they're said to be a different color. Yeah.
32:36 Erin O'Luanaigh: Estragon and Vladimir argue over whether or not the tree, you know, the instructions that were given them, I suppose, is that Godot was gonna meet them by the tree. Then they argue over whether or not it's actually a tree. But of course, it's called a tree in the stage directions. There's another example of this, or even just the way that the tree kind of acts in a strange way that it's supposed to be the next day, but it has all these at least a handful of leaves on it now overnight. Or that Pozzo is blind overnight and Lucky is mute overnight. That's another undermining element or an unruly element of the way that the play is working, which makes it doubly absurd or even more questionable, ultimately. Whether or not we could read this allegorically, for instance, is that even the stage direction sort of seek to undermine any kind of stability in the text. Back to Lucky and Pazo. Now we have Pazo being blind. And so the interesting dynamic, which is granted, made more obvious or more. More definitive in Act 1 by the fact that, of course, Lucky is loaded down with all these bags and Pazzo has a whip, is complicated. Or maybe the. The complication that was already there in this image of the two of them yoked together by the rope is just more apparent in Act 2, where Lucky is actually preceding Pazzo, right. Going before him. And so now we can say that Lucky is leading him around in Act 2 because of Pazo's blindness. So again, there was already kind of an uncertain. I mean, it's on the one hand, very clear power dynamic between them, of course, but on the other hand, something interesting is happening visually on stage, even in Act 1, where, again, this idea of balance, or either side of the scale where they're tied together, the power dynamic, obviously, then shifts really definitively in the second act, where Pozzo is being just led around by Lucky.
34:34 Wes Alwan: Basically, we get. In the end, when Pozzo arrives, he asks what time it is. And then there's some question of whether it's, I think, evening or dawn, right? Estragon and Vladimir argue. You know, Vladimir says it's evening. But, well, Vladimir actually says something very, very interesting. It's evening, sir. It's evening. Night is drawing nigh. My friend here would have me doubt it, and I must confess, he shook me for a moment. But it is not for nothing I have lived through this long day. And I can assure you it is very near the end of its repertory. How do you feel now? So, right, we're coming to the end of the play seems to be the suggestion, and he knows it. And then we get the stuff with Pazzo claiming that the blind. Oddly. So here's how he puts it. Don't question me. The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them, too. Vladimir says, well, just fancy that. I could have sworn it was just the opposite, right? So that he should be a Tiresias if he's blind, right? He should be a character who is prophetic, who can tell us what's in the future. But Pazzo doesn't even want to be, you know, he gets very irritable later on. And Vladimir says, dumb. Since when? Right? They keep asking them these time questions. Pazo says, have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? It's abominable. When? When? One day. Is that not enough for you? One day he went dumb. One day I went blind. One day we'll go deaf. One day we were born, One day we shall die. The same day the second. Is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave. The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. And then on jerks the rope and says on to Lucky. It's reminiscent of the Twilight speech, right? Which also ends with night. But it's much more staccato. It's briefer. It's got the staccato quality. It's more impassioned and maybe authentic, less pompous. It doesn't come across as the same sort of parody. It's heartfelt and it's almost like a reduction, like in cooking, right? It's reduced more to its essence. But once again, night, Right? Yeah. Night person. And then distance between morning and night has been collapsed in Pazo's original speech, I think, right? There's. He sort of hesitates and fumbles around the idea that the light has been going all day long. And you get some sense of some expanse of time. And here all of time is collapsed, right? You give birth astride of a grave, as if nothing happens in between. Or there's not time enough for anything to happen between. Everything is the same moment.
37:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. And then Vladimir will take that and expand on it in what I think is maybe the most Shakespearean speech. Yeah, he does dilate that a bit. So he says. So here's. Here's the full little paragraph. Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do? What shall I say of today? That with Estragon, my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot. That Pazo passed with his carrier and that he spoke to us. Probably. But in all that, what truth will there be? He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth down in the hole, lingeringly the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old, the air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too, someone is looking. Of me too, someone is saying. He is sleeping, he knows nothing. Let him sleep on. I can't go on.
38:28 Wes Alwan: What have I said with Pazo? It's as if birth and death are happening in the same moment. But as you. As you point out, Vladimir dilates this, so to speak, with the forceps. Right, so. But. But it's the gravedigger is there lingering, you know, doing things lingeringly. Right, so. So it actually takes a lot. The birth takes a long time. And the whole process of birth is the duration of our lives. And we have time to waste them, to be bored, to not do anything, to kind of live a death in life, which is much worse than the thing that Pozzo was talking about.
39:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: And habit is that death. This is the second, I think, use of the term. In the play a few pages earlier, Vladimir says. All I know is that the hours are long under these conditions and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which. How shall I say? Which may at first sight seem reasonable until they become a habit beguiling the time tomorrow, sleep. All this stuff is, you know, very Macbeth also, of course, very Hamlet. But.
39:35 Wes Alwan: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I noticed this too. Yeah, the tone of the speech. Yeah, it's very high.
39:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, right. Yeah. So he becomes Vladimir, becomes Really quite profound over the course of Act 2. So maybe that's one thing that sort of pushes against the entropy reading. This idea of habit, I think, is introduced rather late. It's an interesting characterization of what's gone on. Is it habit that they've been waiting for, Godot?
40:02 Wes Alwan: Well, there's something passive about habit, right. Because we're not deliberating and we're not taking conscious action. We're just, you know, we're doing what we do out of. Out of habit. I mean, it sort of. It speaks to that whole thing with the carrot. Right. And getting used to something. Right. As a matter of habit. If you eat enough, you get used to it. And it'd be inert to whether, you know, it might be the habit of eating the carrot sort of blinds you to something that's better, something that's more tasty. And the same thing in life. You sort of get into death drive mode. And the parts of life that you know would involve more vitality, you are habituated out of. Out of seeking that, out of inhabiting that. Because you're in sort of inertia mode, I suppose.
40:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: But they don't eat the carrot out of habit, right? I mean, everything they're doing, they're doing out of a kind of desperation. And they're eating the carrot because they don't have anything better. And when they have something better, even if it's just scraps, they'll take that. Or Estragon will.
41:05 Wes Alwan: Well, they're waiting, you know, they're desperate because their attention is on. They're in expectancy. Right. To use that word that Seneca uses, a state of expectancy. And the expectancy impoverishes the present and it leaves us with carrots and turnips and raw.
41:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, I like that.
41:26 Wes Alwan: Carrots and turnips. Yeah. And as opposed to something richer, you know, all the richness is put into the future. And people really do this with their lives. Obviously, they. They're holding out right for. For the big right for the prize that will only come if they. You know, it might be the asceticism of just working hard, but it. But. But sometimes it's just neglect, self neglect. Because, you know, one is focused on one's ambitions or some other form of salvation. It doesn't have to be ambition.
41:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Drink the wine today, people. Eat the chicken today.
42:01 Wes Alwan: Carpe diem. Yeah. You know, I gave some classical quotes from Seneca about expectancy.
42:09 Erin O'Luanaigh: Is it Horus? It's not Horus, because that's. No, I think this seems too late. To be.
42:15 Wes Alwan: No, I think you're right. But my notes seized up. Yeah, it's Horus seized up.
42:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Good one.
42:23 Wes Alwan: All right, so. Yeah. You want to give any final words, or is there nothing left to be done?
42:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: I was going to say, shall we go?
42:34 Wes Alwan: Yeah.
42:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: No. Used to say, yes, let's go. But then we're not gonna. But then there's gonna be five minutes. Five full minutes of just dead air, and then eventually it will end.
42:44 Wes Alwan: What are we waiting for if we can't go? We must be waiting for something.
42:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Wake me up before you go. Go.
42:55 Wes Alwan: Yeah. All right. Thank you.
42:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Thank you.
