Australian actor Mel Gibson, right, is pictured with fellow Aussie actor Geoffrey Rush during the National Institute of Dramatic Art's stage production of Waiting for Godot in 1979. The play bears a striking symmetry to today’s generation, writes Paul Abela.The Associated Press
Paul Abela is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Acadia University.
Occasionally a great text will surprise you.
As the spring term wound down this year, I had the opportunity to share the experience of watching Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with a group of philosophy students.
On its own, that wouldn’t normally merit much comment. Mr. Beckett’s absurdist play has been chewed over by professors and curious students since it hit the stage in Paris in the early 1950s.
What was unique, to me at least, was the striking symmetry between what I was watching in a filmed adaptation of the play, and what I have been witnessing in my students over the past decade. The play’s characters and their modern audiences lead lives in a state of endless waiting. This play, in a manner that Mr. Beckett could not have imagined, speaks to – or is a lament for – a generation that has had its sense of time, space and attentive consciousness fractured by the promethean power of the new information age. Here was an audience hunkering down for 100 minutes while waiting for the next cellphone hit – a few under their desks getting a quick fix – while viewing a play where the characters struggle uncomfortably in an unceasing state of anticipation.
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For those unfamiliar with Mr. Beckett’s masterpiece, it’s a play where nothing happens. Yes, you read that correctly. We are met with two tramp-like figures, Vladimir and Estragon, who, through two acts, struggle to pass the time as they wait for the ever-promised, but never-delivered, Godot. His arrival will be their “salvation.” Each evening a messenger assures them that while he won’t arrive today, he will arrive tomorrow “without fail.”
The play itself is rich in exposing themes dominant in 20th-century philosophy. Here the focus is less on traditional philosophical questions like “What is the good life?” and more on “What is a fit human life in a world devoid of meaning and purpose?” We are offered a barren landscape and denied a sense of identity through time and memory.
While resisting any definitive reading, the play offers a literary expression of the late 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that man suffers not so much from suffering, but from the meaninglessness of suffering. In the temporally fractured barren landscape offered, the play echoed what many Europeans no doubt felt mid-century as they found themselves amidst the rubble (material and cultural) of that century’s devastating wars.
Watching my students watch the play, I was struck by how the fractured texture of their modern lives mirrored what was up on the screen.
This is the Godot generation: a new creation delivered from the womb of 21st-century technology. It is fated to live in a perpetual state of waiting, eagerly anticipating a sound or vibration signalling the next fleeting message to be read quickly and as quickly forgotten. Time is fractured. Attention is fleeting. Memory is displaced. The promise of deliverance postponed until the next message. Punctuated boredom, not wickedness, is the enemy.
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The recent work of cognitive scientists and social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and others has been instrumental in mapping out the ways in which this generation’s cognition has been rewired by the new social media technologies (without a Research Ethics Board in sight!). Tallying those effects and looking to governments for relevant legislation to protect the young from the saturating reach of these neurologically transformative technologies is long overdue.
Waiting for Godot is a master-class on the ensuing cultural transformation now coming into view.
Mr. Beckett’s play has never been easy to watch. We witness a host of evasions, repetitions, desperation and comic/tragic responses, including contemplating suicide. When watching the play, I’m sure some have felt the tug to flee the theatre at intermission. But just as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913 changed music with a fist fight or two at its premier, so too Waiting for Godot changed theatre. A recent Broadway production serves a reminder of its enduring broad appeal.
Recognizing my student’s fears about the effects of social media proved a useful way into the play and its themes. We had a fruitful discussion. The weight of living in an endless waiting posture was palpable throughout the room. While something less than catharsis was achieved, the students were eager to share how their lives are increasingly lived in an atmosphere of undelivered expectation; in many cases sleeping beside devices within arm’s reach.
Sound familiar?
As I was leaving the lecture hall, watching students eagerly grasping for their phones as they entered the corridor, I was brought back to the play:
Estragon: “Let’s go.”
Vladimir: “We can’t.”
Estragon: “Why not?”
Vladimir: “We’re waiting for Godot.”