The Concept of Time and Space

/, Theatre/Film, Blesok no. 25/The Concept of Time and Space

The Concept of Time and Space

Beckett avoids entrapment in clock time and physical space by blurring specifics in the background of the action. As the date of the appointment with Godot wobbles and the certainty of the characters recedes with the onset of anxiety and skepticism, the initial specificity of the appointment is dissolved into some universal temporality of ‘meeting’.
Beckett has no qualms about dealing with discrete pieces of times and places at the same time, fusing them into a heterogeneous scene in one comprehensive view. The viewpoint of the characters jumps from the present to a biblical past, and then jumps back to the present. The action moves from one place to another without any restriction. When several episodes with different historical backgrounds are juxtaposed in the same context, the particularity of individual episodes gives way to the neutralized universality of the situation. The whole action turns into an ahistorical miscellany of events, and an atemporal overview of the human condition.
In Waiting for Godot the dramatist connects the humble life of the two tramps with the idea of Christian vigil, elevating the lowest form of life (humilitas) to the biblical dimension (sublimitas). While pretending to depict the most trivial type of life, Beckett evokes the noblest and holiest mode of being. On the realist stage there is the depth of time. In each scene we witness a moment in the history of the community presented in the work. When the curtain is raised, we assume that the place we see on the stage has been there before we see it and that it will continue to exist even as an imaginary society after the curtain goes down. In Beckett’s drama the kind of community that we commonly experience in our daily life does not exist, and it is irrelevant and meaningless to try to trace the social origin of the characters or to evaluate their action in accordance with the dynamics of conventional dramaturgy. Beckett’s characters and their world have no known history and no pre-established relationships among them (Lyons 130). His ‘homeless’ people have simply been thrown into a strange land without any preliminary explanation about their situation. They hardly recognize each other as members of the same community, nor know what to do with each other or the time given them. Beckett’s scene operates in such a manner as to function in an endless present or in a spatial, temporal vacuum. The action is filled with questions, not with answers.
In Act II of Waiting for Godot, Vladimir showers Pozzo with questions about their identity because Pozzo and Lucky look the same, and at the same time different.
VLADIMIR: So it is he?
POZZO: What?
VLADIMIR: It is Lucky?

POZZO: I don’t understand.
VLADIMIR: And you are Pozzo?
POZZO: Certainly I am Pozzo.
VLADIMIR: The same as yesterday?
POZZO: Yesterday?
VLADIMIR: We met yesterday. (Silence.) Do you not remember?
POZZO: I don’t remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow I won’t remember having met anyone today. So don’t count on me to enlighten you.
Vladimir’s idea of time as continuum from past to future with no missing link is not compatible with Pozzo’s discrete, indeterminate time. Vladimir tries to view in the Pozzo he sees at this moment the same, continuous extension of the Pozzo he met in the past, whereas Pozzo has successively changed into a different person over time. Pozzo becomes tired with Vladimir’s linear perspective and his questions about why, when, where, and who, and finally cries out:
POZZO: 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 same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
For Pozzo, time is not precisely divided into past, present, and future. Nor is it a linear, consistent progression. It is discrete and fragmentary. Life is a long continuum of time consisting of innumerable moments. But it can also be shortened to a day, or a moment.
Beckett employs a similar method about place. His stage remains an empty space in the historical sense. When proper names and places are used for the locale of a particular scene, they are almost empty, non-referential nouns which can be replaced by any other ones. They hardly have relational ties with other names or objects in their world. The ‘here’ that Vladimir recognizes for a moment as the meeting place with Godot has no geographical name for it. The dramatist withholds from the action any kind of characteristic that might indicate the particularity of the place other than the fact that it has a tree and a bog. In Act II Vladimir and Estragon think that they are in the same place as the previous day: they recognize the tree; the boots and hat are where they had been left; Pozzo and Lucky return to see them as in Act I, and Estragon has the wound from Lucky’s kick. On the other hand, there are changes in the place: the bare tree has now sprouted a few leaves, and Pozzo and Lucky are much different and do not remember ‘yesterday’; the boots are the wrong color and do not fit… The objects on Beckett’s stage are hollow and independent without any necessary connection to the characters and the world where they are found.
Realist stage is charged with history and relationship among the characters, objects and their environment. The objects and the environment reveal many things about the characters, who in turn define the objects and the world by dealing with them. On the other hand, Beckett’s theater is the ’ember’ of Realist theater. We see in Beckett the theater in ruins in which the traditional function and method of signification have been emptied from the stage. The language, the set, the characters, and the objects on his stage point to a fact, that Beckett’s stage is a closed space. Although there are entrances and exits, the three short stage directions at the opening of Waiting for Godot (A country road. A tree. Evening) invite the audience to an open and loose space which is not defined or demarcated in any terms. The stage seems like a completely free world. On close examination, however, author invisibly restricts the characters’ spatial freedom. Pozzo and Lucky are doomed to repeat the same entrances and exits endlessly. Vladimir and Estragon are free to move around and even leave the stage if they want to. But no matter where they may go, they have to return to the original place, as if tied to each other. Their journey does not proceed forward nor backward. Neither do they have any place to go. The stage is not a house nor a living room. His characters are never allowed to rest on the stage. They are prisoners, so to speak, who seem most free simply because there are no visible bars to limit their immediate activities. Their existential predicament is suggested in the dilemma between their words and behavior:
ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
In Happy Days the existential condition of the characters is visualized in the mound tightening around Winnie who is sinking deeper and deeper. The nearer she gets to the end, the slower does Winnie sink, and never does the end come to release her from the pain of being smothered in the mound. What Beckett wants to represent is the endless repetition of dying moments rather than death itself. His characters wish to finish life but the end never comes because the clock becomes slower and slower. There is still time, always:
“There always remains something. (Pause.) Of something. (Pause.) Some remains.”
Deceleration includes another strand: repetition. In Waiting for Godot the characters do the same meaningless activities throughout the play. Towards the end of Act II the same boy comes in again to inform Vladimir and Estragon that Godot will not visit them that day but will surely come the next day. In Happy Days Winnie begins her day with the same daily routine she has done a thousand times. Both plays have two acts, and the second act is basically a repetition of the first. The spectators may think that they will see the same characters do the same things again if there is a third act. The Beckettian repetition builds a cyclical structure. Due to repetition, Beckett’s action loses any sense of movement and turns into a static state. In Happy Days, every morning Winnie examines her own body, but finds no particular change:
“No better, no worse – no change.”
She speaks and does things constantly, but the sum total of all her activity always remains zero:
“Yes, something seems to have occurred, something has seemed to occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all, you are quite right, Willie.”
Or, she longs to end her life but there is “Nothing to be done”.
Under the light that never shifts into darkness, Winnie and Willie seem suspended at a point of infinite noon. They are trapped in static time. A critic’s comment on Waiting for Godot aptly puts the nature of Beckett’s action in a paradoxical sentence of three words: “Nothing happens, twice” (Mercier 144-45).
The emphasis of the action switches from the coming of Godot to the state of waiting. Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot not to ‘meet’ him but to ‘wait’ for him.
The end of conventional tragedy usually coincides with the death of the protagonist. Beckett’s protagonist never dies at the end of the action. Nor does his world end once and for all. His tragedy is not of death but of the impossibility of death. The final destination for man after a lifetime of learning is death. Knowledge brings no solution to the existential problem. Habit is not potent enough to keep the void at bay forever. No matter how effectively she tries to extend the length of time for each habit, Winnie does not succeed in filling her day with the habits she mobilizes. Time still remains, leaving her without any more resources. Beckett’s character is bound to be exhausted, and language, her instrument, is not something that lasts forever either. It too runs out. When she dreams of being “sucked up” into the air, she is in fact sinking deeper and deeper. When the tension between her aspiration and gravity reaches the maximum point, her parasol catches on fire. As she says: “Ah earth you old extinguisher”, Winnie ultimately gives in. The earth will ultimately devour her and leave nothing.

AuthorRichard Frank
2018-08-21T17:23:40+00:00 March 1st, 2002|Categories: Theory, Theatre/Film, Blesok no. 25|0 Comments