Beckett in Times of Crisis

A review of Lance Duerfahrd, The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis.  Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013.

Why does Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot have such resonance when performed in extreme circumstances? Why does a play in which little happens, and which offers little hope for transformation, have such strong “emotive appeal” when performed for those locked in prisons for long sentences, for those undergoing the siege of Sarajevo, or suffering from the hurricane, flood damage, and inadequate government response in New Orleans? Why does a play that is not overtly political or “committed,” and that does not put forth a prospect for change, illuminate the conditions in which it is performed (the prison, the city in crisis) in ways that the plays of Brecht would not?
 
Lance Duerfahrd’s The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis provides illuminating and multilayered responses to these questions, as it develops an understanding of Beckett’s writing as “destitute art,” a work of elimination, subtraction, and depletion, an “impoverished aesthetic.” At the center of this lively, engaging, and well-researched study are chapters that explore the performances of Waiting for Godot in prisons (most famously San Quentin, but several others around the world as well) and in places of civil catastrophe (Susan Sontag’s performance of Godot in Sarajevo, Paul Chan’s in New Orleans). These first two chapters open up our understanding of this much discussed play, deftly exploring several ways in which the play and the situations it is performed in illuminate each other. The second half turns to some of Beckett’s prose works, focusing on the figure of the vagabond, and on reader response. How do we confront “the indigence of Beckett’s work and respond to its needfulness without substituting something of value in its place?” (10). The book concludes with a brief discussion of Duerfahrd’s own staging of Waiting for Godot in Zucotti Park during Occupy Wall Street.
 
The Work of Poverty opens with a short introduction that incisively juxtaposes the work of Beckett and Brecht (a juxtaposition that was central for Adorno) and wonderfully analyzes Brecht’s own rarely discussed efforts, very late in his life, to rewrite (to produce a Gegenentwurf of) Waiting for Godot. Brecht’s attempt to rework the dialogue hit an impasse, and he decided instead to recontextualize it, preserving Beckett’s words but projecting cinematic footage of social revolutions behind the actors. Duerfahrd writes, “Brecht understands something crucial in his effort to elicit meaning from Beckett: though too poor to instantiate a reality, Godot demands juxtaposition to one. The condition of need on Beckett’s stage exerts a radiant effect over contiguous spaces” (4). This discussion serves to set up Duerfahrd’s larger point that the performances of Godot in prisons and in Sarajevo and New Orleans are not footnotes to the play’s performance history, not deviant or aberrant performances (and Beckett was notoriously restrictive in allowing productions that took license with his work, altering the text or even stage directions), but rather are essential for understanding Beckett’s “aesthetic of poverty.” Duerfahrd claims, “The response of the flood evacuee, the inmate, and the siege victim help us engage the play’s drastic address. As I will show, these audiences’ reception illuminate waiting, structures of the waiting process, names for waiting, and the awaited” (6). For the inmate, with plentiful experience of impoverishment and destitution, and certainly of waiting, the play is not the type of mimetic representation that it is for the theatergoer in New York or Paris.
 
The first chapter, exploring the production history of Godot in various prisons, and Beckett’s own involvement with some of these productions as well as his interactions with prisoners, is the most wide ranging and provocative part of the book. It contains fascinating material, including information gleaned from Duerfahrd’s own discussions with Rick Cluchey, who first saw Godot as an inmate in San Quentin and later became friends with Beckett and acted in several of his plays. Particularly interesting is a biographical anecdote about Beckett’s writing space in an apartment of his that looked out at the Santé Prison, and his communication in Morse code with an inmate across the way. In each part of the book, Duerfahrd articulates several key ideas for grasping Beckett’s texts, and here he identifies four aspects of Waiting for Godot that invite “prisoners to relocate the performers and performance within their predicament . . . exposure, routine, closed space, and the movement on Beckett’s stage” (16). This chapter skirts the risk of presenting the prison performances of Godot as the genuine staging of Beckett (all else is mere theater) and the prisoners as having special access to the play (as with Althusser’s suggestion that members of the working class can grasp Marx’s Capital more easily than bourgeois intellectuals). Duerfahrd’s arguments never come close to this reductionist endpoint. Rather, Duerfahrd continually gives us counter-interpretations—not (yet another) new perspective, or the revelation of hidden or essential meanings that are covered over by conventional theatrical contexts, but persistent reframings of the concepts and terms that structure our understanding of the play.
 
Duerfahrd writes, “The play takes great measures to keep the characters’ thinking from coagulating into knowledge, something for either us or them to know” (55), and he elaborates this idea by examining the prisoners’ responses to the play:
 

[T]he prisoners raise some of the fundamental questions about the play, not in an essay or review but by hurling the questions at the play itself and at the character on stage: What is a performance of thinking? What knowledge (useful or otherwise) is rendered by the characters? How de we separate blather and thinking? When does the thinking on stage become our own thought? (55)

 
Duerfahrd’s own writing proceeds by elegantly hurling and tenaciously addressing such questions. Nothing here feels cranked out, or written to meet the demands of producing a book for tenure. Rather, there is a strong effort throughout to pose questions that clearly matter to him, and also to engage an audience.
 
At the heart of this book is a dynamic questioning that moves between the work and the conditions in which it is received. The second chapter focuses on two well publicized productions of Godot in “crisis” situations—Sontag’s during the Bosnian war and Chan’s in the aftermath of the flooding and destruction in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Duerfahrd writes:
 

History conspires to turn the description of a city under siege into a synopsis of Beckett’s play. Abandonment, hunger, the limit of the bearable, life without assurance: uncannily these are the fundamental terms for any analysis of Godot. It suggests that Sarajevo had become a living paraphrase for the play Sontag brings to the city. . . As with the inmates, it is not a question of what the Sarajevans see in the play but of how they experience a feeling of affirmation because the play sees (understands, anticipates) the audience.  (67-8).

 
This chapter develops increasingly nuanced probings of the interplay between abandonment and affirmation. Not unlike the play itself, Duerfahrd keeps pressure on the particular descriptions and analyses he puts forth:
 

Godot begins by announcing that nothing is to be done. What it performs is all that must be undone, a diligently negative labor. It undoes the questions through which we coercively ferret out the practical value of the artwork. It requires us to rethink the use value of theater. Godot achieves this not by reasserting its utility but by belaboring, even tiring out, all the variations on this question of “Why?” (74)

 
A similar critical movement is at work in Duerfahrd’s description and critique of Sontag’s staging of the play. In discussing Sontag’s decision to make her performance of the play one act rather than two, Duerfahrd explains what he thinks Sontag gets wrong about aspects of the play, offers a critique of some of the main criticisms directed by others at Sontag’s production, and then uses Sontag’s (and Chan’s) productions to push further against our notions of “context.” These productions become essential for understanding both something further about the play and about the world we live in. Duerfahrd does not proceed towards an interpretation that would be the best one, threading the needle between the various positions he analyzes, but rather unsettles and rethinks the standpoints from which we would generate our own critiques.
 
The concluding pages of the chapter are especially insightful, exploring how the “image made by Godot in Sarajevo and New Orleans differs starkly from images of the respective disasters disseminated through television and other media” (110). Duerfahrd’s discussion of the weaknesses of Robert Polidori’s After the Flood and Chris Jordan’s In Katrina’s Wake demonstrates a striking visual awareness that in turn highlights what Sontag and Chan achieved. In contrast to the photographs—in which “this stocktaking is made literal while it becomes the mourning of lost property . . . the name brand emerges here as a life raft for our perception” (110)—Sontag’s and Chan’s performances
 

enact a subtraction process directed at the remnants allotted to the stage. . . By means of vagabonds speaking in rage and irritability about the “enough,” Beckett produces images insufficient unto themselves, which echo (rather than merely indict) the absence of Godot. (111)

 
Duerfahrd’s writing is often animated by such striking and memorable sentences, which complicate as much as they illustrate the point that is being made (“These performances absorb the environment beyond space of audience and stage, not like a sponge but like a concussion” [106]).
 
The second half of the book is less compelling, though still rewarding. It offers readings of selected prose works by Beckett that elaborate various forms and figures of poverty (the vagabond, indigence) and provides a more standard contribution to the already enormous mass of Beckett criticism (of which Duerfahrd amply demonstrates his awareness and grasp). The third chapter centers on a discussion of the “vagabond” and on Molloy (really, Molloy, the subject of the first half of that book). While filled with sharp insights, the subtle yet forceful dynamics of the earlier chapters are stripped down here, and the larger tension isn’t sufficiently worked through: the emphasis on the “vagabond” reinforces a reliance on some form of subjectivity even as the analysis traces its dismantlement.
 
The last full chapter addresses the role of the reader and asks, “What is an impoverished reading of Beckett?” If a key task in grasping an “aesthetics of poverty” is to avoid moving from poverty to aesthetics, from lack to value, how are we to avoid in turn transmogrifying lack into a positive category? Duerfahrd acutely explains the ways Bersani and Dutoit’s analysis of How It Is seems “to cancel the poverty of Beckett’s work,” and he offers strong alternatives to their interpretation of the narrator as “a kind of stopping point for voices” and “a collecting depot for all the words” (160). Yet his own critique seems to endow the work with a transformative and thereby redemptive power: “Beckett’s impoverished syntax makes us, as readers, into beggars. The nonrelation between terms on the page forces our eye to take a vagrant itinerant path rather than obeying a syntactic regularity” (159). Do Beckett’s texts really have such an “impoverishing” power, turning us into beggars, vagrants, itinerants (we who are also immersed in the scholarly discourse about Beckett)? And if they do, wouldn’t this be the ultimate sign of their richness? Even if these tensions are not fully worked through, the sophistication and liveliness of the interpretations push the reader to confront the trajectories of lack, reduction, and impoverishment that Duerfahrd establishes. This chapter fittingly ends with a discussion of Beckett’s late Worstward Ho, brilliantly reading it as a response to Shakespeare’s King Lear.
 
In the “Afterword,” Duerfahrd writes that each “performance of Godot in this book assaults theatrical decorum in its unique way, breaching the line between the play and its surroundings” (188-9). This describes the power of The Work of Poverty as well—a book that works to disturb if not assault some of the boundary lines that regulate academic discourse, even as it makes a substantial and important contribution to Beckett scholarship.