Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

A Map-Like Imagination in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (“The Moose”)

A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map’s privileged, sweeping, bird’s eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let’s say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop’s most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination. Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop. And since maps have been associated with her poetic vision, at once telescoping and binocular, and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also handheld, man made intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative and personal. Over the next few episodes, we'll be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with the moose as expressions of, among other things, her map, like imagination. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild? 1:12 Wes Alwan: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous. 1:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, perfectly harmless. 1:24 Wes Alwan: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you? 1:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: I have not. And I. Actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish. 1:52 Wes Alwan: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see a moose? 1:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: I don't know. 1:57 Wes Alwan: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild, really? 2:03 Erin O'Luanaigh: Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to. But maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see a moose. Like, I just, I. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees 1996 World Series sweatshirt. 2:42 Wes Alwan: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it? 2:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a mousse on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm going to see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I bought a moose sweatshirt in I think Grand Teton. And I was like, I'm going to see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah and things would happen and everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw a baby moose and its mom. And I'd get all excited and I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me. 3:32 Wes Alwan: So you don't want to see like a magic white heart or something like that? 3:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, I just want to see him. But even the garden variety moose. No, no, just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it. 3:49 Wes Alwan: Because they are a goofy. Right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking or are they both? 3:55 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think they're both. And I think that kind of quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand. 4:22 Wes Alwan: Interesting. 4:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. They're not majestic. 4:25 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal. 4:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's. That she's grown up in and that she's a part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on. 5:16 Wes Alwan: Okay, so maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right. 5:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. 5:27 Wes Alwan: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading? 5:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower, middle, upper five islands, five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the Passengers lie back, snores, some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises. An old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned. Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store. And finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half grown, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, Dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly. Sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel this sweet sensation of joy. Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit McAdam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline. 11:05 Wes Alwan: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. Read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background? 11:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about more. But yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hoffman, who wrote quite a bit about her. And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a. In a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sistina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England. But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified. 12:53 Wes Alwan: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it. 12:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. She started this in, I think, 1946. 13:01 Wes Alwan: And then she finished it when this 13:04 Erin O'Luanaigh: was published in Geography 3. So she finished it in the 70s. 13:07 Wes Alwan: Okay. 13:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: Geography 3 came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, geography three is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that. 13:24 Wes Alwan: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there. 13:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem. 14:04 Wes Alwan: Yeah. 14:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: Low rate of productivity is great to. 14:08 Wes Alwan: You know, I can relate to that. 14:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live large and die with a slim collected is kind of a. 14:19 Wes Alwan: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro. 14:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. 14:29 Wes Alwan: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it? This is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony. 14:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me. 14:44 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while. 14:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: Absolutely, absolutely. 14:49 Wes Alwan: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip, and there really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven relatives. Yeah. 15:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage. 15:30 Wes Alwan: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right. 15:36 Erin O'Luanaigh: Her. 15:36 Wes Alwan: Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized. 15:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right, yeah. 15:41 Wes Alwan: At the age when she was 5. 15:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. 15:44 Wes Alwan: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead. 15:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from the bite on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar. 16:22 Wes Alwan: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general? 16:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes a scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefooted on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals. And they took her to. Back with them to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema and really, like, I think Almost died of both at one time or other. Very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved seeing her hand and her little. In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up. 18:14 Wes Alwan: Wow. 18:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Macedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years. She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography three, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian poems. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, the sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed. Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich. 19:43 Wes Alwan: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. Are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you Add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, well, begins with the tides, but. 20:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and just the necessities. And a place we learn that maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it. 21:16 Wes Alwan: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward. It's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and. And brought along with it towards her destination. 22:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there. 22:31 Wes Alwan: Well, I was gonna say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my Finger on it. Exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now, then? What's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image. 23:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or of just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant considering that she's talking about a tide. 23:25 Wes Alwan: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But. 23:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: And boundaries, too. 23:41 Wes Alwan: Right. 23:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that, too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border. 24:18 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But. Yeah, I had the same thought, too. Yeah. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall of brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there. 24:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big suddenly reduced in size to the handheld. But Coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are, in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, sort of springing out of the fishing industry. 25:42 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide. 25:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's great. 25:52 Wes Alwan: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus. 26:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. The bus flashes. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content. 26:56 Wes Alwan: Right. 26:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: Of the road itself. So we get that combination of something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area. 27:07 Wes Alwan: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Greene, who I've been reading on the show soon. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses. So from the red clay. And you can make homes from them as well. And common in Sierra and Leon. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up and went, all right, there must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah. 27:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: So that's the mineral. The. 27:44 Wes Alwan: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay. Type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering. 27:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. 27:57 Wes Alwan: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the. 28:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes, it's coming. 28:13 Wes Alwan: The redness of the soil. 28:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling. 28:40 Wes Alwan: It's such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading, well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more vivid, definitely. 29:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image. 29:52 Wes Alwan: And. 29:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, you talked about momentum too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with. And Akali supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak. Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I E Y e of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the 30:48 Wes Alwan: capital I We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop? 31:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass river. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's. 31:48 Wes Alwan: As far as the content. Content goes. 31:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups. The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peas clinging, one of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from. Certainly from a moving bus. 32:43 Wes Alwan: Yeah. The point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important, which is the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very beautiful. 33:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, they Compound. And then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boots and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on the red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment of tent. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens poem, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so probably no real connection there. 34:07 Wes Alwan: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it means. Or. It means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and evening is approaching in a kind of mini winter. Right. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves as evening commences. It's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening. That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see. Okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the. The light reflecting off the enamel bus or. Right. Not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark. Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah. The shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime. 35:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right? Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To autumn you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence you get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind. 36:07 Wes Alwan: Right. 36:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: Because there's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of the evening. Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is. It's got to be like August. Maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development. 36:40 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter, it's called. It gets colder. And we see the. 36:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: Definitely. 36:47 Wes Alwan: We see the effects of it. But yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season. 36:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, right. Yeah. And that point, or that point in the transition from summer to autumn, where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, you know, the evening temperature. Right. Is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get. 37:09 Wes Alwan: Shall we take a. Shall we? Oh, yes, let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two. 37:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: She'll have to wait. 37:18 Wes Alwan: Let's not let her on the bus yet. 37:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinals rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you. 37:30 Wes Alwan: Thank you.

Curses and Colonizers in “The Mummy” (1999) – Part 2

The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1999 film, “The Mummy.” Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1999 masterpiece, The Mummy, directed by Stephen Sommers, who is obviously, you know, the Orson Welles of the 90s 0:25 Wes Alwan: and also known for such movies as Van Helsing. 0:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's also a movie. 0:30 Wes Alwan: I like the Money Returns and Odd Thomas and GI Joe. 0:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, there it is. 0:39 Wes Alwan: Rise of Cobra. 0:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: There it is. Yeah. That's probably the greatest. That's probably his Magnificent Ambersons. Just to say a little bit more. Also in defense of this film, I think it's just fun. Right. You had fun watching this, I'm assuming. Yeah. There's something about it, to me that. Not just because we're talking about origins and stuff like that, that is a kind of, er, movie or the ultimate movie in terms of the fact that movies are just. There's something about them that is fundamentally silly and they're in a certain respect, like the silliest art form. And of course that makes me want to say something also about mummies as the ultimate representations of film itself, which has, I think, been a point made by people like Andre Bazan and, you know, all sorts of. Vin Sontag in On Photography talks about this. Right. Just the idea of the photographic image as the preservation of dead people is. Is often the case. 1:35 Wes Alwan: And it's. You know, the chemical processing of film is like embalming. 1:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, exactly. 1:41 Wes Alwan: Lots of parallels. 1:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'm just. I'm trying very slowly to construct a justification for why we are covering this on subtext. No, but I. But also. And I should. I should have said this at the beginning of the last one. This is my Gimme. My. My summer fun. In the same spirit of doing Elf at. At Christmas, I think I wanted to do a silly summer blockbuster. And of course they're also doing another. Another Mummy film soon with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Finally. She'll be back. So it's also in honor of the resurrection of the career of Brendan Fraser. 2:16 Wes Alwan: He's going to be £300 in this one. 2:18 Erin O'Luanaigh: That'll be great. 2:19 Wes Alwan: Rachel. Rachel Weiss has to roll him around. I'm sorry. 2:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: So mean. That would. That would still be fine with me. 2:28 Wes Alwan: I just going to be called Beached. 2:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: So mean. 2:36 Wes Alwan: The I love the whale. 2:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. 2:38 Wes Alwan: I cried, like, audibly at a theater. 2:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: He's so great. 2:45 Wes Alwan: Yeah, he's great. 2:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: But anyway, back to the conversation here about what? Did I say something about Picnic and Hanging Rock. Oh, this film is kind of like the inverse of Picnic and Hanging Rock. I thought in that Picnic is about the victory of the colonized over the colonizer that you eventually get destroyed by or defeated by the forces that you try to control. You get defeated in your attempts to fashion a narrative. Yeah. What is unknowable overtakes you and destroys your efforts at a kind of mental containment. 3:19 Wes Alwan: And again, it's contact with, like, a primal origin. 3:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly. 3:24 Wes Alwan: So in a way, it's the origin of your high level of consciousness, in a way. But it's primal. And so it can defeat that. 3:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And this is why the Mummy is. It's almost like a fantasy that you can feel secure as a colonizer, that you will eventually figure it out, that there is something to be figured out, that ultimately all of this has a logic that you can solve the puzzle. In fact, solve it twice over. 3:47 Wes Alwan: Right. 3:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: Because you have the first. The puzzle is about bringing the mummy to life, even though it can sometimes be accidental. There's an effort of piecing something together when the mummy comes to life. And then one has to also finish solving the puzzle or solve a second puzzle in order to then kill the mummy or send it back to the underworld or whatever the. The explanation is. And along the way, one also has to at least avoid, if not defeat, the fallout of the curse. So, yeah, so it's a fantasy about overcoming all of that. And I think the idea that makes this very psychologically suggestive is just that this, the mummy, is the puzzle that comes with its own kind of solution, in the way that Picnic at a Hanging Rock is the opposite of that, in that it's stubborn and it can't be solved. And I think the Evelyn character seems to embody this herself in that she has this maternal figure who's Egyptian, her father is English. So whatever drama is taking place with the mummy is also internalized somehow. Again, this is played with more in the Mummy Returns, which makes it stupid and weird. It turns out that Evelyn is actually the reincarnation of the pharaoh's daughter. So there's this whole Elektra dynamic thing that ends up going on. It's really, really, really ridiculous. But the female figure in the original 1932 Boris Karloff mummy, as I already said, she also has this dual heritage, this dual nature. And so the implication of that seems to me to be the idea that we have the desire to understand our own origins. So she's both puzzle and puzzle solver, and we want to figure ourselves out in order to resolve something that in us is unresolved. I think the curse, too, operates on the same logic in a way. Like I was thinking about how the curse is kind of like a conspiracy theory. You know way more about this than I do. I know this is an interest of yours, but you're applying a kind of faulty abduction to what you think is the fallout of something that has, rather than a sort of conspiratorial, systematic explanation, it has a magical explanation. So this idea of logic and mystery, or logic and magic, or the known and the unknown being sort of right next to each other for the purposes of one solving the other and therefore making you feel at peace and no longer cursed, no longer suffering under some lack of knowledge or understanding. 6:13 Wes Alwan: Right. 6:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: You figured it out. You've defeated these forces in yourself. That seems to be the kind of psychological underpinning in talking about abduction, which 6:21 Wes Alwan: I'm actually reading about right now. We're doing the Philosopher curse on our show. So inference to the best explanation. You're making me think about her first reading of the spell. Is it a spell? That we would call it. Right. She's a curious seeker of knowledge, really. Really. She's not trying to give a theory of anything literally. Right. She's just out of curiosity, reading what's in the book. But if you were to make a comparison to abduction, it's almost like it produces its own theory in reality. And the theory is the. Is the backstory. So what it does is it raises something from the dead. It's almost like breathing life into some theoretical entity that comes back to haunt you or something like that, that attacks me. And in the case of the conspiracy theory, Right, the theorized entity is a intelligent designer of a sort, but a malicious one, a persecutory one. And you get that in this case, right? There's a persecutory entity is aroused by one's curiosity. 7:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Just another complication to this is the fact that the mummy has been cursed to go after whoever awakens it by some sort of overarch. I mean, in this film, it's the idea that Imhotep has violated the pharaoh's mistress and he's sentenced to the hom die and all that stuff. But the mummy itself wants to be found. So that's why this is like a perfect little puzzle box for a colonizer's self Exoneration, because the mummy wants to come back to life. So it's a curse that wants you to trip the tripwire and it wants to play itself out. So it almost has this self fulfilling prophecy or self determinism element to it as well. 8:06 Wes Alwan: Right. 8:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's just another way I think of twisting such a thing. I mean, it's an angle that, that the films get at which the actual Curse of the Pharaohs, as it was publicized in the 20s, that angle wasn't there. But it seems like this is the further twist to get it to make Americans and, and British people and all that like, feel, feel like they're not responsible somehow or that this has some, some will to get a toehold in the human world again, that you're almost being used as a pawn in their scheme. 8:36 Wes Alwan: It's interesting that Imhotep, he's sentenced to the worst possible punishment, but there's a real like escape clause to that, which is if you're resurrected, you get to have. Be all powerful and destroy the world and get your girlfriend back. Is that the deal? 8:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: Because you got your girlfriend? 8:55 Wes Alwan: Maybe it's worth, maybe it's worth a try. Okay, I'll take that bargain. 9:03 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. 9:03 Wes Alwan: It's an odd sort of curse and it's an odd sort of risk to take. And it speaks to the perils of vengeance. Right. If vengeance goes too far, it can, can come back at you with a vengeance. Sorry, that was another aspect of the movie that I thought was really interesting. This, which I thought you were kind of getting a little bit there, which is the oddly risk of risky form of punishment. Right. Absolute pain, but with the risk of absolute destruction of the entire world. And again, I think it's not unrelated to the perils of romantic love where, you know, again, where the world can get blotted out by a fused or codependent, let's say in modern parlance, relationship, the same thing. You know, few parallels of fusion with a maternal object, which we've talked a lot about on this show, in relation to a failure of a paternal authority, which in this case is the pharaoh. So there's something here about not being able to mourn an object or the maternal, the ultimate beloved, and try to maintain that object high at all costs, which can lead to this kind of destruction. The reading itself bothered, you know, when she read from the book so casually and started this whole thing off, that really got to me. And she didn't get really all blamed all that much for it, like. So it's like, oops, just got a Bunch of people killed. 10:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: She doesn't have parents, so. 10:27 Wes Alwan: Did I do that? 10:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. I mean, when we first see her in the. In the Museum of Antiquities, and she knocks down the bookcases, which I would say is a really, like, a missed opportunity, because I had a memory. I've seen this movie so many times, and I had a memory of her doing this at Hamunaptra, that she knocked down all the columns, but that's actually not in the movie, so they never do a callback to the bookcase gag, which I think is. Anyway, would have worked well, but she knocks them all down. And then the curator, who's actually a member of the Medjai, says, give me frogs, flies, locusts, anything but you. Compared to you, the plagues would be a joy. So, yeah, she's the Mummy. She's a tool of the Mummy. She is the mummy. She's an extension of the Mummy. She herself is a plague. She can read and write ancient Egyptian, as she says, and she can decipher hieroglyphics and hieratic. And she knows it all. She knows all about. All she needs is field experience. 11:26 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Underneath all of this is that kind of nerds fantasy that, you know, hey, reading books is going to make me powerful after all, like Prospero and the Tempest, because it's going to be magic. Right. There's a spell in there which I think is kind of partly unconsciously beneath for people who have given up worldly power for the sake of a life of the mind. Let's say there's this, I think, maybe unconscious temptation to an unconscious fantasy that there's some kind of power in this that just transcends the power of knowing. Right. Transcends the power of being a professor. Whatever it is one. Or a writer, or whatever it is one does. One can transform the world, cast a spell. Maybe writing is supposed to be like that. Maybe. I suppose that is the writerly fantasy that you're gonna affect other people in some way, but in this case, it becomes grandiose. Right. It's all powerful, all destructive. But yes. The kind of shy librarian out in 12:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: the field, as you were saying, not too shy. 12:24 Wes Alwan: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Cause she's not really that shy. 12:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: She's sheltered a little. 12:28 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Sheltered, okay. Yeah. But they don't really play up that part of her character as much as they could. Right. She could be more. She's bookish, but she could be more nerdy than she is. She's goofy. They do make her goofy. Yeah. 12:42 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. My favorite moment in the whole Movie is her drunk. I'm proud of what I am. I am a librarian, which is really. 12:52 Wes Alwan: Hear me roar. 12:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. 12:55 Wes Alwan: Yeah. That is great. She says, look, I may not be an explorer or an adventurer or a treasure seeker or a gunfighter, Mr. O', Connell, but I'm proud of what I am. And he says, what is that? I am a librarian, and I'm going to kiss you, Mr. O'. Connell. Call me Rick. Doing his best Harrison forward impression, she, of course, passes out before they can actually kiss. I should have let you read that. 13:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, no. It's way better that you read that. 13:21 Wes Alwan: Yeah. 13:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: She does say at one point explicitly, I think, that no harm ever came from reading a book. 13:30 Wes Alwan: Oh, yeah. 13:31 Erin O'Luanaigh: So this romance between o' Connell and Evie is, I think, part of the lasting appeal of this film, which I literally saw a car a couple years ago that had a bumper sticker on it, and I looked up the bumper stickers. Honk if you'd rather be watching the 1999 cinematic masterpiece, the Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. This is a real bumper sticker that I have seen in the world. 13:56 Wes Alwan: Does it go the whole bumper? It's a long one. 13:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's yellow and kind of fat. I didn't really give much thought to this, but does it have a parallel or a. An origin somewhere that we could think of? He's sort of. What's the term that people use? Like a himbo. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, he's intelligent and resourceful, right? But he's definitely the brawn and she's the brain. I guess it's just like a Beauty and the Beast thing, only he's also beautiful. So. Yeah, but, yeah, bookish girl and big, brawny guy who is sort of antagonizing her, but also who inherently respects her and does whatever she wants. 14:35 Wes Alwan: Sort of like Harrison Ford in Star Wars. I mean, even though this film is often compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the attitude of Rick is more like, I think, Harrison Ford in Star wars, where he's sort of Han Solo is kind of cynical, and I guess the Rick character. Could you call him cynical? 14:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: I mean, he's willing to go back there, and he's. For a guy who almost died by hanging, he bounces back pretty fast. 14:58 Wes Alwan: He's worldly and not idealistic, practical in certain ways and all that stuff. So he is above love in that sense. He's not explicitly that he made out to be a womanizer or something like that, but he's the bachelor par excellence. And he's in a very different position than Imhotep, who is consumed by love to the point of risking everything, not just his life, but being eternally cursed. 15:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: You're making me realize how much of a nerd Princess Leia is. I wouldn't have thought of her in that way, but that's basically what she is. She's kind of nerdy. 15:37 Wes Alwan: Yeah. With those buns, you know, she belongs in. But she's much more feisty than Evelyn, I think. 15:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. She's angry. 15:46 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Her and Han Solo, really. Yeah. Annoy the shit out of each other. 15:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. 15:53 Wes Alwan: In a way that. There's some of that in this, but it's much more benign, I think. 15:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, I mean, we could talk maybe about the three Americans. I don't know if you have anything to say about them. They're kind of just there to be caricatures of Americans and then to get their flesh sucked off their bodies. Yeah. It does give some funny opportunities for a comment by Jonathan, for instance, which Rick seems to sort of escape. 16:19 Wes Alwan: What does he say? 16:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, they're all holding. Holding a gun in each hand and shooting all the magi when they come on the boat. And all Jonathan says when he looks at them, he sort of looks with disgust and says, americans, you know, because they're all, like, hooting and saying, yee haw. I don't know. It just makes us look like badasses. But not for long. They're kind of fun. And I guess it occurred to me, too, in making the connection between the Mummy and the vampire, which I suppose I still haven't talked about, just the fact that you have the. In Dracula, you know, you have the three. They're not all three Americans. Only one is American. But you have the three guys, you know, that each proposed to Minna, or whatever her name is. I haven't read this in a long time, but they're the trio that fight Dracula. So it almost seems like that's something that the movie is explicitly playing with, because these three figures, it doesn't quite line up with the figures in the 1932 mummy, so they seem to be bringing in more Stoker. But my favorite character in the movie is Dr. Bombay. Winston, are you a Bewitched fan? 17:21 Wes Alwan: I did watch Bewitched a bit as a kid, but it's been so long. Yeah. I can't call myself a fan. 17:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. 17:28 Wes Alwan: But I did watch quite a bit of it on reruns as a kid, so. 17:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: Good. I love Dr. Bombay. 17:33 Wes Alwan: Yeah. 17:34 Erin O'Luanaigh: And I love Winston. I love that character. I was initially thinking about him as a kind of. Obviously some sort of ultimate figure of colonialism, but he's actually kind of the opposite of the Mummy. 17:46 Wes Alwan: How do you mean? 17:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: He's not at all about being obsessed with a single woman. He seems both completely uninterested in women and also interested in any woman at any given moment. He's seen with a woman on his arm and he's just getting drunk all the time. So he's this figure of dissipation and doesn't seem particularly attached to anyone. And his lack of attachment makes him just the perfect figure to want to sacrifice himself for some cause. His only attachment seems to be to die some sort of glorious and heroic death because he feels guilty for being a survivor and he just wants to go out with a bang. So no attachments in this world. No desire to get back to some sort of past of his? Well, there is actually. Okay, now that I'm talking through this, it's interesting, right? There is a desire to sort of undo the past, to undo the fact of his survival, but it's about pressing the eject button and just getting out, getting out of this world entirely. His desire for this glorious death is about being useful and then disappearing. As the oldest maybe character in the film, he's an interesting counterpoint to the truly old characters in the film. Like emotep. 19:05 Wes Alwan: Yeah, he says, I just wish I could have chucked it in with the others and gone down in flame and glory instead of sitting around here rotting of boredom and boobs. Yeah, well, they give him his glory in the end. 19:18 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, he's just, yeah. The perfect opposite, I guess, to the Mummy. Where the film, if it does fall apart in any locatable place or if the whole thing is just kind of a silly. A silly mess. Lovable mess. Perhaps it's when the Mummy transports both Benny and Evelyn back to Hamunaptra in some sort of self created sand tornado, he becomes sand at one point to go through her keyhole. That sounded dirty. Just saying that. I regret that. Yeah, I don't know, but best not to look at that too closely. But maybe I should just use that as the way into talking about the vampire thing for a second. The thing about the vampire is that the vampire is rapacious. Much more a figure of, say, sex rather than love. And someone who wants to constantly make new conquests. As opposed to this pharaoh who seems to only be, or not pharaoh. As opposed to this mummy who seems to only be giving his attentions to Evie as a way to secure her as some human sacrifice so he can get his girlfriend back. He still only has one woman in mind. I thought of you the whole time. I guess. Also another difference that occurs to me. So we have him sucking the life out of these American guys. So obviously there's something vampiric about that, but it's in order to reconstitute his 20:43 Wes Alwan: own, just add American flesh. 20:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, it's very, very Silence of the Lambs. But yeah, it's, I suppose, kind of about stealing the life force, but not really. And then I was also thinking about the vampire as being just alive forever and therefore not tied to a particular time, sort of to a place, but not really. You know, he has his castle and he does sleep in a coffin and stuff like that. But he's not really specifically identified with a particular culture. Whereas the mummy is obviously more rooted in a historical context. So it seems as though the mummy is more about both through this constant love object and through the particular culture out of which he comes. Much more about history and the past in a specific sense rather than this sort of sexualized undead threat that can appear anywhere and overtake you. 21:40 Wes Alwan: So what's our taxonomy of the undead? We have mummies, vampires, zombies, Is that it? Are there any other major undead categories in films? 21:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: I don't know if Frankenstein's monster is enough to be a category unto itself. That's a zombie, right? 21:59 Wes Alwan: He's a category unto himself. 22:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, okay. 22:01 Wes Alwan: He's not really a zombie. He's, you know, he reads Milton, right? Come on. 22:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: He's an electrical man. 22:09 Wes Alwan: Also, he's part very, very sensitive guy. Yeah, he's not very good looking. Actually. He's really good looking in the movie. Did you see the. 22:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: I haven't. 22:22 Wes Alwan: The recent movie. Yeah, they make him. No, he's a very good looking actor, which I thought was like, all right, he's still stitched together, but, you know, you got a good face and he's very tall. But any case. Yeah. So I think he's in a category of his own. Zombies. Yeah. I'm just thinking about my different feelings of the effectiveness of these different. I guess none of them really do it for me. 22:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: Vampires do it for me, really. But yeah, I maybe have to have a blood disorder to really. 22:50 Wes Alwan: Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Have you tried that for your blood disorder? Yeah, exactly, you sod. About zombie films. I don't. Philosophically, socially, it interests me because it's about the collective. What is the zombie? I think it's about old people, really, but stumbling around trying to Eat us because they envious or the dead. 23:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, but that's also what vampires are about to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah. Basically this is all. They're all mummies is what you're saying. They're all the past trying to. 23:24 Wes Alwan: Yeah. 23:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: Trying to feast on the living and 23:27 Wes Alwan: the envy of the past for the living. So we, you know, of course, you know, we, we live by their rules. Right. All of our norms, as I was saying. Right. So the civilization is. Right. Has its formative origins and influences in these ancient civilizations. And then our dead ancestors, often the norms, at least their packaging. Right. Was determined by those who live before us. And we just sort of adopt their ways so they continue to live on in us. And sometimes we live on in very zombie like ways. It's like, well, I'm living by this code of ethics or these desires and things that I'm supposed to want and I, I don't know why I want them and I don't know who put this into me, you know, my parents or my culture or whatever. And so we do stump, you know, sometimes stumble around in the zombie like way in the state of pseudo desire. Right. The zombie is enough, I think in that state. Can't really desire. It doesn't. I mean it's animate, but not animate anyway, you get the, you get to get the picture. But you know, we, we can feel norms, the norms given to us by the dead as persecutory. But also I think there's some sort of fear of like the guilt, survivor guilt, you know, that produces a persecutory fantasy like the dead are going to come back for us. 24:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: Hmm. 24:44 Wes Alwan: It's not enough for them to persecute us with our harsh super in the form of a harsh superego. Right. And strict mores or values. They've got to come back in person and take life back from us. So those kinds of thoughts I find very interesting. But a bunch of zombies stumbling around like I think I could get away. It doesn't do it for me. I know. They make them faster now, I guess in some movies. What's it called? The Z. What was it called? 25:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: World War Z and then the Walking Dead. 25:16 Wes Alwan: I just. Yeah, I can't explain why. It just, it has no emotional effect for me. 25:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I feel the same way. The key with the zombie is that it might get you and then you become one of the undead too. And you. And I think this goes to your reading of these. The idea that the zombie is the victim of large cultural forces seems to be reinforced by the fact that the zombie is always part of a larger body of people. Whereas the vampire and the mummy seem more cult of personality, like they seem more. More individualistic and they have their own specific thing that they're after or about self employed. Right, right. Where. Where in the vampire it's maybe more appetitive and in the mummy it's more about. It's more intellectual, you could say, because it's more about memory and the past. 26:02 Wes Alwan: Yeah, there's more association of lust, I guess with vampires and with zombies it's a lack of, you know, again, like a pseudo desire. And desire. Not desire to do anything except to spread the. They reproduce, but they reproduce themselves by biting. Right. 26:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's not. 26:19 Wes Alwan: Not sexual reproduction or reproduction through love. So. And then in the case of the mummy, I think it's more about love. Right. We have lust, we have the aggression, at least in this story. Or maybe it's about knowing, maybe it's about knowledge, you know, the kind of things that you've pointed to. We're curious, but then we're greeted with something incomprehensible. This also makes me think of Peirce because he's kind of pointing to the ways in which knowledge is grounded in the incomprehensible. Right. Because at some point some kind of raw data comes in. It's unconceptualized and unknown. Kant calls this the manifold. And it's. Or it's the thing in itself. The alien unknowable thing in itself. Behind the manifold, perhaps. God, we have this weird situation where you're trying to cross the gap by knowing. But the very concept of knowledge implies something unknowable and alien and perhaps even persecutory. So again, once again, the curiosity, and the kind of benign curiosity of being in a museum looking at ancient artifacts could become fraught in some way. 27:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: I knew we'd get to Kant. I knew we'd be justified. 27:26 Wes Alwan: Sorry. 27:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: In choosing this film. No, I love it. I love it. 27:30 Wes Alwan: Yeah. It turns out Peirce was a big Kantian and Hegelian and it's just shocking to me how little I know about him and how profound he is. But. But anyway, final words. 27:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: I just. I hope I've proved to you how profound this film is. 27:45 Wes Alwan: I will. I will take it under consideration. No, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. 27:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Okay, well, thank you. And careful what you read. 27:57 Wes Alwan: Thank you.

Curses and Colonizers in “The Mummy” (1999)

As a cinematic monster, the mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he’s not just dead, but wounded—ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative. Conveniently for the colonizer’s psyche, the mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him—not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand: the mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archeological, and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin discuss the 1999 film, “The Mummy.” Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: As a cinematic monster, the Mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the Mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he's not just dead, but wounded. Ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative, conveniently for the colonizer's psyche, the Mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him, not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand, the Mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archaeological and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy's tomb, his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the Mummy's DNA, in Shakespearean terms, part Antony, part Cleopatra, reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Today, we're discussing the 1999 film the Mummy. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I have two questions to start us off today. The first is, is this the silliest thing we've covered on the podcast to date, or was elf sillier? 1:41 Wes Alwan: That's a good question. It depends on what you mean by silly. Elf is sillier, but this is the most frivolous choice we've made. 1:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'm trying to figure out if you're mad at me for selecting this or if our listeners are going to be mad at me. 2:00 Wes Alwan: I hadn't seen it, except it might have been on in the background when I met my father when I was around 22, and he had hundreds and hundreds of the HS tapes of various movies that he had pirated. And there was always a movie on in the background when I was hanging out with my siblings. And I vaguely remember scenes from this because they were on in the background, but I had never actually seen the movie, and it didn't. I like mummy film. Horror films in general don't appeal to me, but mummy films especially, for some reason. 2:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, no. 2:30 Wes Alwan: So, yeah, it's not the kind of thing I would end up watching on my own, but it's an interesting. I could see, you know, I started. I saw immediately why it would be up your alley. Because of, like, screwball ish comedy. Right. It operates in two dimensions, so that was interesting. 2:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: This came out when I was 8 years old. We had this local video store that I used to go to to rent movies. When you walked in the door, there was a huge cardboard. I guess the technical term for it is a standee. You know, those big cardboard displays that they'll have in movie theaters or wherever to publicize a film? There was a huge display of the Mummy with different characters and right when you came in. So to me, it's sort of the ultimate summer blockbuster film because that was the thing you saw whenever you came in. And more often than not, you know, I was suggestible enough to think, oh, I could go for watching the Mummy again. Super fun to watch at a sleepover or on a summer night. So I love this film. I mean, I'm gonna try to expand our conversation to talk about the mummy in general, which I do think is kind of an interesting concept. And maybe we could talk about why you find mummies particularly uninteresting. But that leads me to my second question. 3:41 Wes Alwan: You can analyze me a little bit. 3:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: Leads me to my second question, which is, are mummies scary? And maybe this is why you don't like them. Because I think I have an answer to this, and I think yours is going to be the same. I don't know. 3:53 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I don't know. I was thinking about this film in relation to other horror films, including Alien, because we did that one. And. And I think it's a great film. And also the Exorcist, which I think is a great film. I was thinking, well, I'm not entirely opposed to horror. I'm not into horror films, but I'm not entirely opposed to it. And those two films have, like, a solid thematic essence to them involving relationships like, you know, Reagan on the verge of puberty and an absent father and then an alien. The relationships between the ship members kind of alienated. And then this lack of a paternal authority. Just. Just like there is in the Exorcist and the ship computer called Mother. There's always a mother thing going on. It's hard not to think of that with the Mummy as well. But. So I was thinking. I'm not into jump scare films. I don't get. Although, you know, I guess I went to see it. Is that what it's called? The Clown? 4:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. 4:53 Wes Alwan: Terrifying movie. And I actually did enjoy the. You know, because the audience would jump and then we'd all laugh at being kind of taken in. So. So maybe I do. You know, this is not. It's not very. A very fruitful analysis. We're conducting here. I'm too conflicted. But. But mummies in particular. Let's get to the point. Are mummies in particular scary? I don't think so. Horror movies used to scare me as a kid, big time. The Exorcist scared the crap out of me because even though I wasn't religious at that point, part of me believed in the devil just, just in sanctuary and I couldn't deal with it. And then other horror films, it like got into my bones in a way they just can't do as an adult. So in general, I don't think I can be scared in the deeper way that I used to be scared when I was a kid. And then this, you know, because this is also romantic comedy, I find it hard to be. To find any of it scary. Exactly. So, yeah, say more what you mean about scary and whether mummies are scary. 5:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: I just don't think they're scary. And that's one of the reasons why I like this movie. Right. Is because it's not scary. I mean, I don't like horror movies either. Right. But I like that. I like the Mummy as a concept. It's interesting to think of it in the Universal monster movie context and the Mummy as a monster. You could approach that from a lot of different angles. It's, you know, it's a dead body come to life. I mean, I think there's elements of the zombie in the Mummy. There's elements of the vampire and the Mummy in certain ways much, much closer to the vampire. But maybe we could tweeze that out a bit. I think the Mummy as a monster figure is scary, if you really think about it, which is a way of saying that it's not scary. So that's why you need, you know, the accompanying curse. Though maybe you can't really separate the Mummy from the curse, but you know, the Mummy that can unhinge its jaws and become sand and at some point the emoteps little mummy army is climbing on the walls. That becomes a bigger part of the Mummy Returns, which is a truly bad film. I love it, but it's a truly bad film. So I didn't make us do that. Peeling the flesh off of people's bones and then also you have to throw in the scarabs. So you basically need this entire cast of supporting scary things, I think, in order to make the Mummy work as a horror film. I don't quite think of this as a horror film. I mean, part of it is also just the way that the CGI has aged Technically, of course, it has horror tropes, but it's just not that scary to me. Maybe what's kind of scary about it, in a thinky way, is related to the main reading of mummies that I'm interested in exploring, which are. Which is something like the mummy as a colonial fantasy. The colonizer goes into a place that doesn't belong to them, and then they start literally and metaphorically exhuming the culture that they've entered, either to leech off of it or destroy it. And then there's this curse idea. So they awaken this curse, which it seems anti colonial, like it's payback for disturbing the mummy. But in fact, it really kind of serves the colonizer in a way, because the mummy actually wants to come back to life. It actually wants you to disturb it. It wants you to fall into the trap of the curse. So the colonizer is kind of, in that sense, exonerated from the act of meddling in the first place and from colonizing in the first place by the psychology of this curse or the psychology of the mummy wanting to return to life. And then the colonizer has to also kill the mummy and restore order. So they cause the problem, sort of, but it's really more the mummy's fault or the mummy was asking for it. And so they caused the problem, then they themselves are the solution. And I guess that's a scary dynamic in itself for what it reveals about the colonial or the imperial psyche. But I also think that this dynamic can be extended in all sorts of directions. So it might reflect something in each of us about our own relationships to the past. Something silly like maybe we're all colonizers and we all have mummies inside of us that want to come back to life, and our job is to kill that part of ourselves and that desire to reenact the past or something like that. And maybe that. Maybe there's something scary about that, that element, whatever you want to call it, from something as. Maybe as simplistic as the return of the repressed to something like giving up on previous versions of ourselves or whatever the case may be. I mean, in this, in the mummy movies, it's a lost love that has to be ultimately abandoned or. Yeah, I don't know that that's scary, but that's the best I could do. 9:28 Wes Alwan: Well, I think once you start relating it to relationships, whether it's between colonizer and colonized or whether it's a love relationship, then it becomes scary. 9:36 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, exactly. 9:37 Wes Alwan: Relationships are scary. But I think the key word There is preservation because the mummy, obviously, is a preserved. And I guess for the ancient Egyptians, it had something to do with preservation into the afterlife. Right. Why did they do it? Do you have firmer knowledge than me about this? Our research team was on vacation this 10:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: week, if I remember correctly. And see, this is. The other thing is, of course, I'm sure you had. Didn't we talk about this? You had an Egyptology phase, didn't you, as a kid? 10:11 Wes Alwan: Yeah, my grandmother was very into it and there were lots of books around, so I was very fascinated by it. And even today, one of the first thing I do when I go into a museum is go to the Egypt section. And the sense of being in contact with things that are that old and ancient, just crossing that gap is just very powerful for me. And you can look at the signs and it's, you know, this is 2500 BC, and yet these artifacts are so well preserved. And so you can think of. Try to place yourself back then. But the pictogram writing is so weird and alien. It almost is like aliens. And even I think some of the alien aesthetic. Right. Is in films from actual aliens is borrowed from ancient Egypt. So there's something about. Yeah. That combination of preservation and of artifacts and alienness that. That is really powerful. 11:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. When I was a kid, I took a. I don't know if I ever told you this. I took a correspondence course on hieroglyphics from the Oriental Institute. 11:14 Wes Alwan: Oh, wow. 11:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: But, yeah, I was really into it, so another reason why I loved this movie. 11:19 Wes Alwan: Are you still. Are you fluent in hieroglyphics? 11:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, I can. I can recognize some things. 11:25 Wes Alwan: But apparently they did. They did speak actual, you know, reconstructed ancient Egyptian in the film. Yes, that's what I saw. Yeah. 11:33 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, just one of the many great things about this masterpiece. 11:38 Wes Alwan: That kind of attention to detail. 11:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly. 11:41 Wes Alwan: You know, really lends itself to verisimilitude of. 11:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: The thing that always bothers me is 11:47 Wes Alwan: they say waking up and running around. Yeah. 11:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: The. The five canopic jars. And he's like, there are only four. That's such a basic thing to get wrong. But anyway, if I remember correctly, and I did not look this up beforehand, I'm sorry, but I believe that the Egyptians thought that you had three souls and that the preservation of the body involved needing a place for all of these souls to meet for you to become reincarnated. 12:12 Wes Alwan: Oh, right. 12:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: So that's funny. 12:14 Wes Alwan: We actually did a little bit of ancient Egyptian philosophy on the show. I'm part of the partially examined Life recently. 12:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: Was there anything interesting there? 12:24 Wes Alwan: Some stuff about. Yeah, there's these different souls. So we read something called the Instructor and one of the things we read was a dialogue between a man and his soul. One of the souls, the soul that was supposed to carry it off to the afterlife, I think. But it's just stuff taken from fragments of papyrus, basically. And I was surprised that so much writing survived. 12:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: I have some book on the Book of the Dead somewhere packed away in my. I have a lot of my library packed away right now. But, you know, a lot of the stuff like you can. You can read what's in there. And it's a lot of spells and a lot of protection type. It's not quite as interesting as it sounds. And of course, this is one of the controversies about, I think about the curse of the Pharaohs is that a lot of the supposed warnings about disturbing the body or else the curse will come for you were actually invented by newspapers in the 20s as a result of the fervor around King Tut's tomb. And the idea back then. Right. You know, I didn't. I didn't get the chance to actually research this further, but I was also reading that mummies were ground up and they were kept in people's like, medicine cabinets and they were actually. Yeah. And they were actually used. So. No. Another reason why I inherently love mummies. They're actually used as a coagulant. So Which I find so interesting. I don't know what the psychology of that is about or what that's about, except that they think that mummies are dried up bodies. So it'll dry up your cut or. I have no idea. But gross. It's also, you know, further like vampire connection, I guess, sort of. 14:04 Wes Alwan: Yeah, it's a good point. And now that, you know there's a preservation element in vampires too, right. Also to the point of eternal life. I mean, with preservation, I think we're gonna. We'll talk a bit about the love element, right? To this idea of everlasting love. I think that this movie brings in with it Imhotep in Ankhsunamon. How do you pronounce it? 14:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: Anax and Amun. 14:28 Wes Alwan: Anaksunamun. Anaksunamun. 14:31 Erin O'Luanaigh: Or Marta, you can call her either one. 14:34 Wes Alwan: Oh, yeah. I know. It took me a while to figure that out. 14:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: But it's always an arrested development connection for us in every episode. 14:41 Wes Alwan: The thing that the Egyptians did with mummies is weird and gross. Right. We all know that. 14:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: Sort of. I mean, it's also kind of just Kidding. 14:48 Wes Alwan: Yeah. 14:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: Okay. 14:50 Wes Alwan: But it lends itself to the idea, okay, what are they being preserved for? Yeah, okay. The afterlife. Sure. But maybe they were being preserved for us in our museums. But also, I think, like the wrapping up in bandages, like a burn victim type thing, you know, it lends itself to the idea that, okay, well, maybe they could come back to life. And it connects to certain, I guess, folktales about the dangers of preservation. Right. Or fairy tales. I wish I could live forever, but then I live as a rotting corpse. 15:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Or like, death becomes her. Have you seen that? 15:25 Wes Alwan: No, I haven't, actually. I know. 15:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's related to this idea. You live forever, but then you become disgusting and you have all these problems. Yeah, right. 15:34 Wes Alwan: It's like. It's like the. You know, the fairy tales where you have a wish and it's, be careful what you wish for. Because there's always a downside. Right. The wish is misinterpreted in some way or comes with a downside you didn't expect or something like that. But anyway, so, yeah, so there's the wish for eternal life, and then there's also the wish for eternal love, which I think this movie plays on. 15:55 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's interesting how the movie coalesces a lot of different things that are. I mean, it's almost a compendium of different symbols that the Mummy represents. So a really old idea about the Mummy is that they're a figure of pathos and a romantic figure, and they're actually a bunch of Victorian stories about people having romances with mummies or the Mummy being a figure of unrequited love. And I take this to be a really suggestive part of the Mummy's appearance, that the bandages suggest that he's somehow wounded or that he comes out of a wounded or incomplete or somehow interrupted past, or a narrative that he wasn't able to. To carry out and sort of wrenched out of that narrative. Right. So the wrapping seemed to suggest that interrupted life or that unrequited love. That was kind of where people's minds first went with the Mummy, this idea of the romantic lover separated from the beloved by death. And in the 1932 Mummy, that film also has the unrequited love thing with the Anck Su Namun figure and then Boris Karloff. I was really surprised by this when I went back and rewatched it. It's a really boring film. The beginning has a lot of interesting ideas about colonization, that the film then drops. But Karloff just kind of walks around, you know, trying to pretend to Be some normal guy even though he has really bad social skills. And he kind of hypnotizes the female figure in the film, the one who sort of lines up with Evelyn. He's almost like a Mesmer figure or very similar to the vampire where he hypnotizes her and draws her to him. And she is somehow. It's not really explained very well in the film, but she's somehow the reincarnation of Anck Su Namun, much like evelyn in the 1999 film. Something is made of the fact that she might be some sort of distant ancestor because she's also half Egyptian and half English like the Evelyn character. 17:54 Wes Alwan: So I think if some of that had been preserved, it could have made for a more powerful emotional content to the film. Right. Because in this case the threat is all just external to Evelyn. It's not like she is being possessed or seduced or something. 18:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: No. Well, he does kiss her at certain points and he does confuse her with an AK Sudemon. So I think they're trying to make that connection. 18:17 Wes Alwan: She kisses him too, I think. 18:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh yes. To distract him. 18:20 Wes Alwan: The only completed kiss is she kisses him. 18:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. I don't want to know what a completed kiss is. Anyway. 18:30 Wes Alwan: He does get his tongue though back by then, I think. Sorry. 18:34 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, but she's supposed to be the human sacrifice for anoxynamon. Because one of the things that I guess I figured out about the the economy of this film is that Imhotep needs several men to become fully reincarnated. But I guess anoxynamon only needs one. It's just a one to one ratio for. For a woman. I really wonder about a lot of things in this movie and the logic. Like stealing the blind guys eyes and then the fact that the mummy doesn't need glasses. 19:01 Wes Alwan: But anyway, how about all you have to do is carry around the cat and you'd be good. 19:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah. 19:09 Wes Alwan: And they don't. I mean the first thing I do if I found that out is round up a bunch of cats, go to the shelter. 19:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly. 19:19 Wes Alwan: So that bothered me a bit. There's some few plot or in the beginning when like does she have to kill her? I guess she's trapped. So she does have to kill herself. Like that's the. That's the logical plan for him to resurrect her. Why couldn't they just escape together? 19:36 Erin O'Luanaigh: She so believed that he. See, this is like a perfect example of oh what, what do they say now? The opposite of he's just not that into you. Like, if you. If you. Oh, if he. If he wanted to, he would. That's the. The. The current dating advice. Right. So she was so assured of his love for her that she knew that all she had to do was kill her would find a way. 19:57 Wes Alwan: Oh, she's playing hard to get. Okay. 19:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, no. She's not playing hard to get. She's expressing full trust in his ability to overcome death, to rescue her. He's devoted. 20:09 Wes Alwan: You know, it's a love that's supposed to transcend everything. And as we know, that kind of love, there's a danger to it. Right. It can kind of blot out the world. And in this case, it could literally blot out the world once it's resurrected. So I think that's one of the ideas here, whether it's well thought out, is that this level of intensity in love can be destructive. And that's offset, of course, by the relationship, Rick and Evelyn, where they have a healthy level of antagonism. This is going back to Much Ado or screwball comedies. Right? The healthy level of antagonism that prevents you from trying to mummify and resurrect and get into all that creepy stuff. You know, keep it. Keep some boundaries. A little antagonism. 21:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, they're together against the forces of death. Yeah. So in a way, they have a. They have a joint project of trying to. Trying to resurrect each other. 21:15 Wes Alwan: I'd like to see what happens if they. If Imhotep had succeeded and then 20 years into their relationship. I'd like to, like, a window in on that. He's sitting on the couch watching tv, and she's yelling at him about something. No, she's like, bandages on the floor. 21:34 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, it's really good. No, no. She's like, I'm going out. And he's like, where. Where are you going? Just. God, I'm just getting drinks with my friends. 21:42 Wes Alwan: Leave me alone. 21:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'm allowed to spend some time away from you. 21:47 Wes Alwan: There you go. Ultimately, she ends up getting a restraining order on him. I resurrected you. You belong to me. 22:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: She gets half the contents of the tomb. 22:04 Wes Alwan: Yeah, there you go. So, you know. Yeah, it's all good until you succeed. Until then, it's tragic and eternal. 22:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: I like this idea that you're maybe the claustrophobia of this kind of relationship or this idea of preservation because it' related directly to the mummification ritual. You know, the loading up the tomb and trying to create the perfect conditions whereby you can survive. And somehow the effort expended on this is fruitless. One of the ideas behind whether or not there was actually a curse of the pharaohs specifically involved in King Tut's tomb. Whether or not people who entered the tomb were more susceptible to illness had to do with the fact that they would put food in the tomb, assuming that you would have to eat once you were reincarnated or after death or whatever. And so that food eventually, of course, went very, very, very bad. And there was bacteria found in the tomb that could cause a bunch of. A bunch of problems, including pneumonia and some of the people who entered the tomb. Yeah. But I think the idea is that there was this bacteria in the tomb, but that it wasn't enough to infect you or that it couldn't have survived for that long. You know, they found, like, the dead bacteria, something like that. But anyway, it was decomposing over thousands of years, releasing all of these acids and chemicals, and also the bugs that were eating these, you know, all of the. The fish and the. All those things that were in there, then those bugs themselves decomposing and creating really gross things inside this little lockbox. So, yeah, there's something, I don't know, maybe accidentally, metaphorically putrid. Right. About. About that whole concept of trying to preserve something unnaturally beyond its, you know, say it's sell by date. 23:56 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Like in Frankenstein, which we'll do eventually with. Right. He's reassembling, taking pieces of corpses and putting them together. And you almost say. Reminds me of high school when we did dissection, which I hated with a passion, in part because of the formaldehyde smell you get all over you. That you couldn't just do anything about this, you know, beyond the grossness of doing the dissections themselves. But it's, you know, I imagine, like the body of Frankenstein is sort of like a. Yeah. It's preserved, but it's not preserved in life. Right. It's preserved in death somehow. It doesn't decay. And you can do things with it, and maybe if it's your body, you can do things with it, but there's something dead about it at the same time. So the intention of seeing someone off into the afterlife, and I suppose it must have been largely symbolic, or maybe there was a. You know, did they literally believe they needed to eat? Or maybe it was a big controversy. Did they really eat the food or did they just symbolically eat. Right. The transubstantiation. 24:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. Yeah, they really believed that. Yep. 25:01 Wes Alwan: And there were factions and wars and. No. So anyway, yeah, the attempt at preservation, I think that, you know, your point is well taken. Can preserve something at the cost of its putridness. And then going to your colonialism idea. 19th century Egypt is a very different place than ancient Egypt. It's already been colonized, right, by a completely different culture. So the relationship is between the modern Egyptians of the time and that ancient culture, which is alien and also exploiters and, you know, like Napoleon and colonizers and conquerors who have that relationship not just to the local culture, but also to this ancient culture, which I think serves as a object of at least two impulses. One of them is just for the treasure and the other is this curiosity. And maybe there's a morbid curiosity there. What is it about our curiosity when we go into a museum? What's so fascinating about all of this stuff to us? And is there something a bit pernicious about it? Right, so there's something about the incredible preservation of a culture that's so ancient that is exciting and fascinating. But then we have to think about our relationship to that and what that's about, I suppose. Is it entirely well intentioned? 26:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: It seems to me. On the one hand, part of the intention is to feel a lack of difference or to feel some connection with this ancient time, with this culture that's really different from one's own. One wants to feel a connection to this. And that's a big part of the motivation for, say, going to the museum. But then also you want that difference preserved as well. You want to feel that this is thrilling and exotic and different from you. So you want to relate to it on the one hand and also don't want to on the other, or you don't want it to relate to you. You know, that push pull is also in the figure of the mummy. I don't know if I'm characterizing that in a way you would agree with. 27:06 Wes Alwan: We're looking into the past in a way. I think we're looking at our own origins. The origins are supposed to explain something about us, right? In a way they've given. They are not just our predecessors, but our progenitors. Right. Our ancient culture, you know, you remember in history class, it's kind of taught as if these ancient cultures were sort of the right. They're giving birth to everything that follows. We are who we are as civilized, supposedly people. Our civilization is built on top of those civilizations. So we look at those origins. It's almost like the fascination with parentage in a certain way. But also we can't overcome the alien ness of those origins. It's not unlike a relationship to deities and religion, where it's something about focusing on an origin. But also the concept of the alien is. Is ever a problem, or at least according to certain philosophers. Right. Hegel thought he was kind of solving that problem. Like faith in the Kantian sense leaves God too much of an alien presence because he's unknowable. And Hegel wants to say he's. Well, actually, he is noble. So in this case, it's the unknowableness of the. Of Egyptian culture. Culture because it does remain really weird and alien. It's like it's hard to get your mind. It's hard to. Just hard to imagine what it would be like to be a person back then in that kind of society. Maybe this feeling is superficial. Maybe, you know, maybe we shouldn't look at hieroglyphs and various other artifacts and the strangeness of mummification and think that it's all that different. Right. These are people who are just people and have the same everyday concerns as we do. But I think part of it has something to do with this idea of feeling like we're trying to come to terms with a kind of origin that is nevertheless alien to us. It's no coincidence that people want to say the pyramids were created by aliens and that in a way, it's another sort of creation myth. They want to. Alien style. Where did human beings come from? Well, from aliens. You know, never mind the theological questions that arise from that. Where did the aliens come from? Why don't we just go straight to the source? We really need the middleman. 29:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: But anyway, yeah, what you were saying, even before you connected it, I was thinking, oh, yeah, this sounds. You're exactly right. This sounds just like aliens. And that, I think, is something that we also covered in our podcast on Alien. The idea that this is maybe part of what the film was exploring was obviously was sex itself or something about the sex organs themselves. And therefore also this idea of parentage and who our progenitors are, and the Egyptians are sort of filling that same role. The aliens that placed us here in some way. Yeah. So I think that's interesting. I had thought about, you know, Mummy versus Zombie, Mummy versus Vampire, but I really think Mummy and Alien are really the closest relatives. And I should have thought of that because I was also thinking about this film in relationship to Picnic and Hanging Rock, or maybe even a mirror image of Picnic and Hanging Rock and the kind of lessons of colonization that that film has. Maybe we could start with that in part two and Then maybe transition to looking at the film a little bit more closely. Though I still have a lot to. I feel like, to say about just the figure of the mummy itself, but we'll. We'll try to dive into it a little more. 30:29 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And get into the romantic comedy aspect too. 30:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: Sure. Thank you. 30:34 Wes Alwan: Thank you.

Existence and Expectancy in “Waiting for Godot” (Part 2)

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. Upcoming Episodes: The Mummy Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 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.

Existence and Expectancy in “Waiting for Godot”

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. Upcoming Episodes: The Mummy Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes Alwan: 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 as 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 Becket is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Today we pass time by discussing waiting for Godot and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I had suggested this just because I thought it might pair with Withnail and I, which we just did. I didn't think about it very carefully. It was just an association. And then I thought, well, also, it's something we should do, because my mom wrote her master's thesis on this at Trinity in Ireland, and for some reason she was fascinated with Beckett. I've always been afraid of doing it. Just vague associations of the avant garde and boredom. You didn't sound super excited to do it. What's your experience with the play? 1:51 Erin O'Luanaigh: I didn't like it when I was younger, I'll admit. I was recalling the other day that I was taking a class. It must have been on 20th century lit. And the final was a, you know, Blue Book exam. And we had covered a bunch of plays, and the question required us to choose one of three plays to analyze. We had to pick one and then write about it. And after the exam, just in talking with people, you know, when you're all kind of staggering out of a room, I discovered I was the only one who didn't choose Beckett. 2:28 Wes Alwan: So is that because it's. Yeah. Why is that? 2:33 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think I thought in my ignorance, or maybe in my perceptiveness, I thought it was both too easy and too difficult to write about, because I think that probably what everybody else did was they were smart to choose Beckett, and. And they did an allegorical reading which was maybe a little bit more straightforward. Is that the right way to go in terms of a really deep understanding of the play? Probably not. Was it the smart thing to do in a three hour Blue Book exam. Probably I wasn't perceptive enough to see the comedy in it. And I think the extent to which this is played for humor, I think really determines the extent to which I'm going to appreciate an adaptation of it. So the version available online from 2001 I find to have some moments of greatness, of course, and the performances are great, but mostly dour and really difficult to get through and really bleak. And the little glimpses that I've seen from the Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen Broadway adaptation from 2013, and I think they also did an earlier one. That one seems to me like a version of Godot that I would really enjoy because I think ultimately it is sort of a black comedy version of Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin, and the humor makes it work. So probably when I was in college, I didn't understand how funny it was or how funny it could be. 4:00 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And so this 2001 version, this was Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy and Alan Stanford, director Michael Lindsey Hogg. And was it BBC? Is that. 4:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I think so. 4:14 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So, yeah, I really like that. It's, it's. I thought it was very good. You know, Rainn Wilson was recently in a. They did a production in la. There's no video. 4:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, yeah, I heard that. 4:25 Wes Alwan: But they have some little teaser videos that are really interesting. 4:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: Did you take a look at any of the videos from the McKellen Stewart? 4:33 Wes Alwan: No, no, I wish I had. I didn't know about it. I didn't really didn't look at. I looked at the, you know, the one BBC one, but I didn't do a lot of research into different productions because I spent so much time with the play, which I think benefits a lot from being produced. It's not the most satisfying reading experience. I know you've taken an acting class because I know you've done some acting, right? And you can get. You do an acting class and they give you an exercise and they say, say one word over and over again, but with different emotions. You can do a lot with little. I was going to say Beckett's giving us very little, but that's not true. Famously, they say it's the play where nothing happens twice. Right. Because everything is repeated in the second half. But quite a bit does happen. It's just that a lot of it is verbal and it's wordplay and it's unclear. I don't know. How do you capture this? How do you capture this quality of the play? 5:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's routine based it's like vaudeville act. That's why I think comedy works for it. 5:43 Wes Alwan: It's like who's on first for the whole. 5:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. I mean, very much so. Very much so. It's Abbott and Costello, it's Laurel and Hardy. I mean, there's also quite a lot physically that is done in the play. Physical routines, the hat, the boots, falling down, trying to hold themselves up, falling down again. You know, there's a lot of business, comedy, business. Anyway, I ultimately, I think in spending a lot of time with the play, I came to a much greater appreciation of it than I had expected. And I also found it far funnier than I was expecting to find it primed, as I was sort of halfway through by looking up some of those clips from the McKellen Stewart adaptation which people said was too funny. You know, they were making it too funny and it should have been sadder or bleaker or something. That seemed to be at least one wing of the critical consensus about that adaptation. But I started to think, really, unless you want to be punished severely in your theater going experience, really, this should be, I think, done in a comedic way. And that seemed to be the heart of it. 6:48 Wes Alwan: Absolutely. There's plenty in the wordplay and stage directions to suggest that, yeah, you should play it up. Do a lot of this with humor. Yeah. And play it up. And you can do, you know, with much of the dialogue, you can make decisions that play it up even further. And I would say, yeah, I agree with you. The way to go is to play it up and try to breathe some life into what is otherwise potentially very sparse. Right. Put a few leaves on that tree, so to speak. In a way, it is a. It does enact desolation. Right. And it enacts timelessness and placelessness. Perhaps you can read it. Perhaps it's just allegory, which means the characters are, in a way just ciphers for something else, which is another form of desolation. There's not enough plot for the average person and there's not enough investment. You're not induced to enough investment in the characters to have some strong emotional reaction for them or to be induced by them. Right. So there's a lack of pathos, maybe, is the way to put it, Unless you go for the comedic element. But it's interesting. Yeah. Is it an allegory? 8:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: I hope not. I hate allegory. 8:08 Wes Alwan: Why do you hate allegory? 8:10 Erin O'Luanaigh: I don't know. A one to one relationship doesn't interest me. Or the allegorical reading has infected so much of art. There's this idea, I think, that people have increasingly, with, I don't know, maybe we're contributing to it with the podcast. I hope not. But people are out there trying to retrieve information easily. The CliffsNotes version of something. They want to know, what is this really about? And this is particularly pernicious in. In poetry, you know, what is the poem really about? As though everything is just these two levels. There's the veneer and then there's whatever is underneath it. And that's the level that you have to access. And you can ignore the veneer entirely and just sort of capture the meaning underneath. And that's the way that you have of rather, that's the way in which you can master the material. So suddenly you figured it out. You have the secret knowledge. And I think increasingly, no matter how complex or interesting or multivarious the potential interpretations of a work of art, people are looking for that sort of snappy way to get their arms around something. So people are trying to boil things down to a sort of an allegorical or something that looks like an allegorical read to me. And so that's. I think it flattens it, I think, to say that this play is allegorical on the one hand is probably true in a way. I mean, you know, it can be allegorical. But I think it's also. It's more than that. And insofar as I think what Godot maybe ultimately represents is something like the impossibility of an easy reading or the impossibility of settled meaning itself, even if that is, say, the allegorical answer, that immediately also complicates that one to one ratio. If you. The meaning is that there is no meaning, or if the meaning is that meaning is absent, then that automatically kind of complicates that one to one ratio that allegory would seem to suggest. 10:19 Wes Alwan: Well, as you know, I unapologetically read with a view to finding out what it's about. That's why, like, Subtext is the name of the book podcast. And I do it, you know, and. And so I'm. 10:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: But you don't do it in that way. 10:33 Wes Alwan: And I think there is. Right, well, I'm about to elaborate on that. So it's. So I do think there's something, you know, that. That works of art are about, even if they don't know they're about that, or if the. The creators don't know what they've written about, and it doesn't even require attribution of some unconscious intent or something, something like that. I just Think that the material itself has a certain dynamic and has a layer of manifest content, but there's something underneath and. Or there's something that's being expressed, a sense that goes beyond the mere reference. But in analog, right, that doesn't mean. So in other words, we can read. You know, we can read anything we want with a view to some sort of symbolic element or with a view to the thematic. It doesn't have to be symbolic or a view to the effective truth, the emotional truth that might underlie what's going on. But now, allegory, I guess, is a little bit more rigid, right? So you have the literal level, and there's this really systematic coordination between that literal level and some other. Right. So the literal level, characters and action and setting, and then what they're supposed to represent some conceptual level. So, for instance, you know, the allegory where warriors are fighting and the warriors represent virtues or something like that, it deadens the surface layer. It kind of saps it of content, makes it desolate, Right. Much like the setting here in this place. So perhaps he's speaking to the fact in the desolation of the setting for this play. He might already be speaking to the fact or warning you that if you read this allegorically, you're. You are sapping it of content and perhaps participating in this very thing that's going to be associated with waiting or expectation of a certain kind. So then. Yeah, then the question is, how do we read the play? I think it invites allegory, right? It certainly invites it. It strongly invites it because we get. Give me a few biblical allusions up front and. Right. It invites it because it's so sparse. It invites it because we're not learning necessarily a great deal about the inner lives of the characters and invites it because of the sparseness of the plot. I think we are tempted into simply reading it in an allegorical way. So what does Vladimir represent? What does Estragon represent? These are very suggestive names, right? Estragon is just French for. For what is it? Tarragon for French herb, Bernaise sauce and other things. Vladimir sounds Russian, and maybe there's some kind of regal aspect to it. Vladimir is more coherent and directive, maybe like an ego or a superego. Estragon is much more disorganized and can't remember. In fact, it's not even clear that he's actually waiting for Godot. In a way, maybe it's just Vladimir because estragon can't remember enough and has to be reminded constantly by Vladimir, that they can't leave because they're waiting for Godot, so he could be assimilated to the id, or at least to some aspect of the psyche which is not rational, maybe what Freud calls primary process, something more primitive and associative and dreamlike. And you can do that all day long with this play and do it in various different ways. And I think there's some worth to at least taking note of those parallels. Right. But if you get stuck in a Freudian reading or a social reading or one reading or another. Yeah. It quickly becomes a bit barren and unrewarding. On the other hand, how do you read a play in which. Right. Vladimir and Estragon, it seems like there aren't even full people. They do seem like psychological moments or moments within a psyche representing different psychological functions. But on the other hand, they're not just that. So I just want to reinforce your point that it's. And I know it's a point that's been made by critics as well, but it really does put you in an odd position as a spectator or reader. Right. Is it an allegory? Isn't it? How should I receive it? 14:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: I purposely didn't look at any secondary literature because I didn't want to be. I was familiar with it way, way back when I read this in college. And of course, I'm familiar with some of the pervading allegorical readings of the play, but I was really cautious to not be contaged by anyone in particular. You know, you said it invites allegory. I think at the same time, it disinvites it for the reasons that you've already outlined. You know, the play is not really. It's not, to me, very systematic in its symbols or its series. Right. 15:33 Wes Alwan: It invites you only to confound you because it's so disorganized. But you. 15:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, the biblical illusion that you talk of is also immediately toyed with, deconstructed in a way by the characters who, as you've already said, have no. You know, Vladimir also has a very limited memory. Pozzo has a limited memory. Lucky we can intuit sort of from his speech, also has a limited memory. So the fact that they're so disengaged even from their own history, and then you have the repertory quality of the play itself in that Act 1 and Act 2 are simply recapitulations of each other, but maybe with something like entropy, a bit of entropy that has happened in the second replay or what have you. You know, this idea of a play in which nothing happens twice, or this idea of nothingness, or this idea of maybe having it both ways, allegorical and anti. Allegorical is reflected linguistically in the play quite a bit. I did a lot of tracking of words across the play. My big obsession for a while became pronouns, specifically the pronoun it and how squishy and unlocatable the referent sometimes is for for it. Which made me think a lot about nothingness and ultimately led me to a reading of the play which was almost mathematical. I started to think that the play was a lot about math and a lot about zero and nothingness. But if we want to start, for instance, with the first line of the play, Nothing to be done. The concept of nothingness, I think ties together a lot of where we're already going. I mean, in a way that's sort of comedy. Like the question of what actually goes on in the play, whether things actually happen. They do in fact happen. One of the things that we could say happens is simply these routines of speech which ultimately don't really lead anywhere. You know, these are things which in comedy would be like vamping or distraction maybe from whatever the structure of the plot is, would be a comedy routine sort of inserted into a film. Like the who's on first Routine. 17:50 Wes Alwan: Right. 17:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: If you've ever seen the film, which that is, in which I have seen several times and I can't think of the name of the film right now, but you know, obviously there's a scene with a baseball game and then they. They basically pause the action of the larger plot to do that who's on first routine. So it's as if the entire play is made up of those types of vamping comedy vamping moments where you do these verbal routines or these physical slapstick routines which would be a break from the plot in any other plot based film or play or whatever, but here make up the entirety of the plot, more or less. I started thinking a lot about nothingness and idling or vamping or of some kind of stasis or looping back on yourself. Returning the song that Vladimir sings about the dog having a kind of cyclical structure to it and the cyclical nature of the entire play and whether or not the whole play is an expression of this kind of circular rather than of nothingness as negation and cancellation. The nothingness of idling and stasis, which I take to be a sort of different kind of nothingness. 19:04 Wes Alwan: The work that nothing here is doing in the beginning of the play involves estragon trying to take off his boots and not being able to. So it's nothing to be done. He's giving up. Although I think at various points in the play. I mean, okay, so this is repeated several times in the play. Vladimir says it, Estragon says it. And in fact, Vladimir says it shortly after. It's actually, it's not much further into play that Vladimir says it. He says, sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer, how shall I say? Relieved. And at the same time, appalled, Appalled. Funny, Nothing to be done. And he's referring to that line that I mentioned before, which he says, prior to that, the last moment, hope deferred maketh the something sick. That's a reference to Proverbs. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. But when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. And so, of course, he leaves out the more hopeful second part. Although, of course, the tree of something or other is right there on the set. So what is it? You know, what is it he's referring to when he says I feel it coming? I think that's one of the questions that the play invites us to answer. What is it they're waiting for? And there's some obvious invitations, right, Giddo. God. But we might think more generally that they're waiting for some sort of salvation. They even say it, something to save them. And that salvation, right, it can be God. But people seek this in a secular way as well. Sometimes it's just associated with grandiose ambitions. Hey, when I'm a great such and such, I will be saved. I was reminded of the saying by Seneca, the fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of tears. Its course lies wholly toward the future. He is always, and he says elsewhere, he's always getting ready to live. And the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. We are arranging what lies in fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours. Seneca, of course, was stoic. So that's a very stoic sort of idea. That kind of idea recurs through ancient classical literature. This idea that a focus on the future can kind of denature the present, that it can devitalize it. It can take you out of the present and prevent you from enjoying life, prevents you from appreciating what you have. So I think when he says, you know, sometimes I feel it coming on. I mean, what do you. What do you think of that? Sometimes I feel it coming all. All the same. What is it referring to? 21:51 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, I wonder that myself I, you know, it could be hope, it could be sickness. I think ultimately it is plot, really. Any kind of plot. They are waiting for the plot. That's as close as I'll get to an allegorical reading of the play, I suppose. So they're stuck waiting for something to happen to move things forward. So sometimes he feels the whatever coming to relieve him from the position that he's in of kind of not having anything to do. What you read of the Seneca also, I think speaks to that in a way. Right. You're sort of in the anteroom of action. And action is ultimately what plot is made of. And their anxiety and their heartsickness over this waiting and anticipation, their depression is over the fact that they are stuck in this anteroom before the action can commence or something like that. 22:53 Wes Alwan: Yeah. I think of them as living in the setting of the play is almost representative of the state of expectancy that Seneca talks about. I think that the sexiest way to read the play is make it self referential about playwriting. And it's the least. It's the most. Every other reading can be attacked as sort of reductive, maybe, but there's something. If it's become self referential, it's less reductive. But I'm also, I think also the sort of. The psychological essence of it, it gets at something worthwhile. So they live in a place. They don't live there, but they are in a place that is. Right. It can't be located. It's sort of barren that There's a timeless quality to it. It's without memory. So the word utopia literally means no place. Right. The. The utopia that one might expect or might yearn for in a state of expectancy can't come. And so the shadow of that. Right. Is the. Is the sort of no place that you find yourself in that you might find yourself in psychologically. If you are oriented entirely towards a utopian future or towards a, you know, conception of the object of desire, which as something that might complete, you know, when nothing can really complete us. Right. Just sort of these unrealistic expectations about life, they produce a desiccated present on the reading where in a way it's self referential. The state of expectancy maybe is a little bit of teasing about the state of expectancy of the audience. Right. We are kind of teased for the possibility that we might be bored in the way that Vladimir and Estragon often seem to be bored. And they're often contemplating, well, what comes next. And is this entertaining enough and, yeah, Death Strangleman will say, yeah, that's the idea. Let's insult each other now as if they themselves are the playwrights. But playwrights without any real memory figuring out how it is that they're going to produce some interest in the audience. And that usually is the goal. At least one of the goals of a storyteller is to introduce some element of suspense or pathos or whatever. But here we're not getting that sort of satisfaction. And so that kind of breaks down or deconstructs the typical experience of a theater audience, maybe, and speaks to, I don't know, their state of expectancy as an audience. 25:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: You're making me think about what dialogue normally, let's say, amounts to. The interiority of character. Maybe something in the past that is revealed over the course of a conversation. Maybe some conclusion. Because, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking of is that how much does really happen in a play? You know what I mean, as opposed to a film, say, how much really happens in a play at the level of action versus, say, of dialogue? I don't know. I'm going off the track of where my train of thought was originally taking me. 26:00 Wes Alwan: But, yeah, it depends. But usually it's quite confined in terms of time span and place. Not always. There are Shakespeare plays in which the. Yeah, there's a lot of different settings and scenes. And a lot he conveyed, just like a film would. There's the. The scope. That sort of background scope feels much bigger than what we actually ever see on stage. You know, we get a sense of time passing and big events going on and a world beyond. But usually we are getting restricted, quite restricted to some very local space and time. 26:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right? That's true. There are murders on stage. There are all kinds of things. But also, I think a lot. A lot in plays is, say, moved out of the realm of physical action and inserted into speech. It's put into speech. You know, an obvious example that springs to mind is Oedipus, where everything that he's done really kind of precedes the action of the play. And in the play, through dialogue, we're watching him come to the realization of the significance of events which predate, you know, the start of the action of the play. So, I don't know, it just occurs to me that maybe rather than doing something insanely different from what we come to expect from a play or an experience in the theater, Godot is radical for leaning into an already present phenomenon all the way. So that the action of the play really Just does become word games, circular types of constructions where we're waiting for one or the other character to get back to their original train of thought or to think of the thing that they wanted to say, or to finish the other's, or give a counterpoint to the other's idea. In other words, maybe it's just an exaggerated. You know, it's not doing something different. It's just doing something sort of metatheatrical. Maybe that's just an obvious point and I've taken the long way to get there. But in this opening line that you've already pointed to, where Estragon is saying nothing to be done, and he's talking about the difficulty of pulling off his boot, I thought about this sentence quite a bit and the implications of it. Nothing to be done. So, you know, it's a passive construction, obviously. It removes the actual subject from the sentence and takes the object and puts it into the subject position. So not we can do nothing, but nothing to be done. It got me thinking about, because of that, that passive construction, this difference between the idea of doing nothing and the idea of being nothing, the nothing that is idling and stasis and just sort of, say, vamping, for lack of a better term, since that's kind of a comedy word or a vaudeville wor. And then the nothing of cancellation or negation, the nothing of being. I think with idling and vamping, what sustains the doing nothing is a kind of circularity rather than the canceling out of the being nothing. Obviously, you can't do a play about being nothing because it would just be. The curtains would open and there would be nothing there, and then you would go home, which I think Beckett, like, almost did something like that. Didn't he just do a play where there was just a mouth talking on stage and that was it. 29:29 Wes Alwan: Ye. 29:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: So he almost got there. All of that to say that Estragon starts by saying nothing to be done. It actually has a kind of application to the boot. Even though the boot ultimately leaves him nowhere, his efforts leave him nowhere. But the action of trying to pull that off and repeatedly failing, the result is ultimately nothing. And then Vladimir's words which follow. I'm beginning to come round to that opinion, hint at the circularity inside the nothingness, the sort of tempest in a teapot quality that I think recurs over and over again in these bits throughout the play. And then the longer speech that he begins with, you know, all my life I tried to put it from me saying, vladimir, be reasonable. You haven't yet tried everything, and I resumed the struggle. So that too, I see often in Vladimir's speech a kind of circularity in it. And so in this he's describing, like, trying to get his arms around something and then ultimately failing and he's back at the beginning. 30:36 Wes Alwan: Yeah, it really reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus a bit. 30:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Absolutely. 30:41 Wes Alwan: A lot in this. And of course, there's a lot of, you know, existentialist readings of the play. 30:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: But, yeah, I'm interested in all of these various expressions of nothingness, which ultimately are about traveling quite, quite a ways to get back to the beginning. So to get functionally nowhere versus in almost like a taxonomy of nothingness, a sort of more negative view of life. An idea of total negation that one would think would be suggested by some of this language. One of the most famous lines, certainly from the play, about giving birth astride a grave, that seems to me an expression of the idea of being nothing or of nothing being right. The play doesn't end in a death or anything like that. Instead it ends in this sort of perpetual vamping and dilation of time. Maybe another way of putting this is they're not being metabolized in the play, though the play exists in pairs of characters. The two are not canceling each other out. They're persistent. They refuse to be defeated by the play. Neither of them ends up dead. Neither of them ends up saved either. 31:58 Wes Alwan: If you're trying to write a scene in a play or movie, you're told there's gotta be some element of conflict and struggle in order to elicit the attention of the audience. And that you're right. And that attention is very picky and discriminating and not easy to hold. And then in scenes that are very dialogue based rather than action based, right, you might introduce an element of something, some sort of visual struggle, like people might be, or even just activity. A character might be doing something while talking to another character just so that there's something happening, so that there's some sort of action. And I think there's a kind of gesture to that, right? With Estragon trying to take off his boots in the beginning and not being able to. That's a perfectly fine premise for an entire scene, especially a slapstick scene, right? You could bake as much of that as you want. And then he gives up. And then Vladimir sort of picks up on that and thematizes it or dramatizes it. Makes it more about life, right? Assimilates it to the idea that he's been struggling and he's tried everything, but here they are again. And of course, what he actually says is, so there you are again, Nestrokop says. Am I right? He seems to speaking to your concept of nothing. He seems to have forgotten whether or not he even exists or at least whether he's standing in this particular place at this particular time. You're given a little bit of hope in the beginning that, oh yeah, maybe this will be about some well defined significant life struggle, as it would be in an ordinary play, and it'll be resolved tragically in one way, or there'll be a happy ending or something like that, but it's never going to be given any content except for the waiting for Godot. And so Godot is. The whole. Is a little. Right. The whole concept of it is a bit of a parody of suspense and dramatic resolution. Godot is just the stand in. It's a way of referring to plot structure in a way. And instead of being told the content of suspense, we are just given something, a name, something very hollow, and asked to be curious about that, whether you know, who Godot is and whether he's going to actually show up and all that. But none of that is ever going to be satisfied. 34:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I love that. The boot sort of being transformed in speech into life itself in Vladimir's misapprehension of Estragon. So we have something material then transposed in language into something abstract, which is then commented on for its own meaninglessness. So it's almost like the boot disappears and goes out into the ether over the course of that little exchange. And that routinely, I think, happens over the course of the play, another place maybe where we can go and sort of talk of this pronoun thing. Nothing to be done, you know, has a sort of maybe implied pronoun like nothing to be done about it, which later, Vladimir will supply. All my life I've tried to put it from me, as we've already said, but then on page two in the discussion of, you know, maybe of suicide, which you don't really understand that it's about suicide until part of the way into it, Vladimir says, when I think of it all these years, but for me, where would you be? You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute. No doubt about it. Estragon says, and what of it? And Vladimir, it's too much for one man. On the other hand, what's the good of losing heart? Now? That's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago. In the 90s. So the. It just keeps being. It's so actually difficult to track. It keeps being changed or displaced. But, you know, at first, when I think of it, the it there is the abuse, I guess, that's being visited on Estragon every night. He's getting beaten up, and then he says, no doubt about it. Which is. I guess you'd call that a situational pronoun where you're just referring to kind of a whole circumstance rather than any one. One particular thing. And then it's too much for one man. Again, situational. We should have thought of it a million years ago in the 90s. And the it. We learn later when he says, hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, that it is actually suicide. 36:29 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So what is. And they wouldn't even let us up. They tried to go up and commit suicide, but weren't let up. 36:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Now they wouldn't let us up. He's imagining that they wouldn't be let up. Yeah. 36:41 Wes Alwan: Yeah. I was wondering if the suggestion is that again, we're being invited to give these symbolic readings, but these guys, they're in purgatory or hell because they've committed suicide. I think that seems to be the suggestion. 36:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, I see. No, interesting. 36:57 Wes Alwan: Or they were thinking about it. They're caught in the situation where they're constantly thinking about suicide. Isn't that. I may be misreading this. Isn't that the suggestion? Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. Among the first to jump off in the 90s. When was the Eiffel Tower built? 37:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I think in the late 1880s. 37:16 Wes Alwan: We get almost no proper name, references to places. We get this, and then we get macaw. 37:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I never thought of that. 37:26 Wes Alwan: Those sort of transcend this weird world that they're in. Right. It's almost like they pierce the veil and speak to some previous concrete, richer realities. So I want to point that out, even though I think you're right. We're meant to sort of reject, ultimately, an allegorical reading or a symbolic reading or it's supposed to fall apart at some point, but we certainly are invited to it in various ways, especially in the beginning, and then we'll get to this in a second. But the talk of Christ and all 37:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: that stuff, I'm really intrigued by that. I never saw it that way. So you're saying, in other words, you could take the purgatorial reading of this even more literally by assuming that they have already done this, but that they are in fact dead. 38:09 Wes Alwan: Or. What's the alternative reading of this? 38:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: We should have thought of it a million years. So we should have killed ourselves before it got to this point. So we should have killed ourselves long ago. And now we've been vamping ever since. So they're in the sort of afterlife of their usefulness. 38:27 Wes Alwan: No, I think you're right about this. And I was confused because. Yeah, I mean, literally. Right. We should have thought of it. We would have been among the first, I think. Must be what it meant, what it means. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. Yeah. So they had the opportunity. 38:42 Erin O'Luanaigh: Okay, Right. 38:44 Wes Alwan: Which is the way I initially read it. And then I thought, well, if they're in purgatory, maybe they actually did it. 38:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: So anyway, yeah, that's really interesting. 38:50 Wes Alwan: But I think, yeah, the reading that they had the chance to do and didn't, I mean, that is, you know, the reading that's more faithful to what. To what the text actually is saying. So. Well, thinking about suicide's a sin too. Just kidding. 39:01 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. So another rich moment for pronouns is when they start to talk about the thieves. So we should get into that parable. This is getting alarming. Vladimir says. And then he says, one of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage, I suppose. 50% is the meaning of it. And it's a reasonable percentage because there are two thieves. Suppose we repented. I'll tell you the truth. These lines. Suppose we repented. Repented what? Oh, we wouldn't have to go into the details. Our being born is maybe the weakest part of the play for me. I'm not convinced by this part at all. The idea of repentance. I don't know what they would have to repent for. And they don't know either, since they can't remember anything anyway. Vladimir asks Estragon, did you ever read the Bible? Estragon says, the Bible? I must have taken a look at it. Do you remember the Gospels? Vladimir asks. Estragon replies, I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Colored. They were very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy. Vladimir says, you should have been a poet. And Estragon says, I was gesturing towards his rags. Isn't that obvious? Anyway, so Vladimir says, ah, yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story? No. Shall I tell it to you? No, it'll pass the time. Two thieves crucified at the same time as our Savior. One estragon cuts in our what? Vladimir says our Savior. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other damned estragon. Saved from what? Vladimir? Hell, I'm going. Vladimir. And yet how is it this is not boring you, I hope? How is it that four of the evangelists, that of the four evangelists, only one speaks of a thief being saved? The four of them were there or thereabouts, and only one speaks of a thief being saved. And then a bit later, one out of four of the other three, two don't mention any thieves at all. And the third says that both of them abused him. So it seems like good odds at first. Basically, one of the thieves is saved of the two. But then it occurs to Vladimir, actually the numbers are not as promising because one of the two is saved. In one of the four of the stories and in the other three evangelists accounts, in the other three gospels, the thief being saved story is not mentioned at all. So this, I guess, erodes his coin toss faith in salvation and turns it into more like less than an eighth of. An eighth of a chance that you would be saved. Something like that. 42:04 Wes Alwan: Right. I think we're meant to wonder perhaps whether they are thieves or, you know, that's again, what they're doing in this purgatory like place. And what they're waiting for perhaps is salvation. I mean, they even say it's to be saved and it's salvation is what they're waiting for. They'll be saved if only Giddo comes. But there's also an element to this which seems like a crisis of faith, Right? Based on testimonial evidence. Is the testimonial evidence reliable? Is the Bible reliable? In other words, are we actually. Is the thing that we're waiting for, does that actually exist? Meanwhile, estragon is not even attuned to that function of the Bible. For him, it was a vacation brochure and a very ironic one because I don't think the Dead Sea is supposed to think that you're going to slake your thirst. Right. So what are the associations of the Dead Sea in the Bible? Sodom and Gomorrah. How's that related to the Dead Sea? The Jordan Valley is once lush and fertile, and the Dead Sea is kind of the result of God laying waste. I think that might be true. I think so it's at the border of the. I mean, it's east of Eden Right. It's on the eastern side. And I guess the prophecy is that there are prophecies concerning the sea, that it will come alive or something. I think the association is to some sort of desolation. Right. And they're in a desolate place themselves Right. Now, maybe they are at the Dead Sea, so to speak. But for Estragon, it's the fact that the maps were colored and therefore that because the Dead Sea was in blue, he took the signifier as the signified. Right. So if it's pale blue on the map, then it must be something that's going to slake my thirst. And as usual. Right. Estragon is very attuned to this. Right. His. He's hungry or he's thirsty or this or that. He's very attuned to satisfying various bodily needs or whatever. Whereas Vladimir can get more abstract and philosophical. So here they just. As usual, they just talk past each other. I don't know why Vladimir thinks this makes him a poet. I guess that's a way of giving a very generous reading to what it is that Estragon is saying. 44:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: You don't think it's. You don't think this moment is lovely? 44:26 Wes Alwan: Yeah. 44:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think what Estragon says is really nice. 44:28 Wes Alwan: They do, you know, they do have a lot of affection for each other. 44:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Is this their honeymoon? I know it's not, but. 44:35 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Well, the word honeymoon is also an odd. Right. We'll go there for a honeymoon. 44:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. 44:41 Wes Alwan: Lovers. 44:42 Erin O'Luanaigh: One can imagine. Yeah. That he's talking about his prior life, his prior existence. But this too makes me think of. Makes me think of Laurel and Hardy expressing a sort of male female dynamic, often in the two Men comedy routine where they're kind of in a marriage, and often one or the other of them, but primarily one will express more of the feminine characteristics of that pairing than the other, which then, of course makes me think about estrogen. But, yeah, you know, I'm sure there are lots of readings of that, but it is in Laurel and Hardy. 45:18 Wes Alwan: Yeah. With regard to estragon. So. Yeah. Meaning tarragon, which makes me think of tarragon. So it's like a, you know, very commonly used French herb or commonly used in French cooking, including in bearnaise sauce, which I immediately associated to. Just because we read it recently, Julius Caesar and Casca. Right. Brutus thinks he's dull, and then Cassius says, well, he gives sauce to his wits or something like that. By basically being like a common man and speaking the way the common people speak, almost like a Politician sauce to his wit so that it'll go down easier. And I thought, well, maybe the idea is that Estragon is supposed to balance out the wit. He's supposed to, in a way, be sauce to the wit of Vladimir. In other words, he's much more concrete and much more focused on the body and much more. That's the kind of concreteness that you need in writing or performance to keep it too interesting. If it gets too abstract, then you lose interest. But of course, he's not very saucy. He's not rich enough to actually rise to the level of the sauce. So he's just stuck being tarragon. He's not balancing out. He's not balancing out Vladimir's wit or Vladimir's sort of rational consciousness very much. He's just being stuck in. Or maybe he is, but I prefer Estragon. 46:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think he. I'm just. I don't know. 46:51 Wes Alwan: Yeah, well, I mean, I prefer neither of them, but. 46:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, I was gonna say. I'm just making that up. 46:58 Wes Alwan: I think the second part of the play is a bit boring. The first part, I think, is quite entertaining, actually. But to see it redone and with that entropy aspect that I think you mentioned. Right. To see it fall apart even more, there's something a bit painful about that and tedious. So I enjoy. You know, I especially enjoyed the first act and I enjoy these two characters and their relationship, but I can't say that they. Right. Are they fully fleshed out? Are they not? There's actually. That's a difficult question to answer. Again, so it's not just allegory. They're not just symbols. You know, it's not like Vladimir is just ego and Estragon is ID or something like that. And they don't have any. They don't have a life of their own. They do have a life of their own. They are characters. It's just that they are caught in this timeless, memoryless place. Right. There's not much content that they can use to give to their characters. So, for instance, they can't really. We get the one Eiffel Tower reference and a couple of other references, but otherwise there's no memory. There's no talk of what they did in the past. We don't know what their jobs are. If they were. Maybe they're tramps, as they're usually a bum anyway. Tramps. 48:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Wes, maybe we can talk just a little bit about the tramp at the beginning of part two. I do think that's an interesting element of These characters, something that helps them to maybe take on a bit more shape as characters or gives them a little bit of a history in the cultural imagination that they can use to sort of get along in our minds. That helps to advance them as characters for us a little bit. 48:33 Wes Alwan: Lucky and Pozzo. 48:34 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes, Lucky and Pozzo. That's right. 48:36 Wes Alwan: All right, thank you. 48:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: Thank you.