Thoughts on Waiting for Godot and History Boys

[x_los]

fuckfuckfuck. The ONE person I didn't want to deal with in the history department is who I have to go through according to most recent email. (Well, one of two people, tbh.) GodDAMMIT.

Ah well.



Something Old:

I have a weird history with Waiting for Godot in that due to bizarre, uncontrollable circumstance I’ve thrice started it and never finished it fully and properly until last night. Fortunately with this play, in which the whole point is that it’s more of the same, that’s not so much an issue.

It’s also one of those Big Works about which I don’t feel I could possibly say anything new or interesting, except to note that 1) I’ve seen the manuscript in a Trinity College exhibition once and that 2) it’s more approachable than Beckett’s Fizzles, which I’ve done a project on for Grad Essay and hated. But I DID bake a “Fizzles” cake as part of that project—an act of nerd-dom from which there is no salvation.

I have a lot of questions about it which I feel would possibly be answered by reading some good critical analysis (I so nearly said meta: because academia is fandom, avec funding). Was the pants bit at the very end an allusion to Vladamir dismissing the escapist possibilities offered by sexualizing he and Estragon’s relationship, for example? Wiki says that interpreting the push-pull embrace-abandonment dynamic between the leads as some form of romantic entanglement is a homoerotic reading—I just kind of thought it was /the reading/. Especially given the odd, super-private veil around Beckett’s own sexuality, with threads of possible tendency towards that direction. Though advocates of close-reading would frown on conflating the man and the work like that. God I hate super-obsessive close-reading.

What really strikes me is how foreboding this play seemed to me in high school (given its reputation and my lack of real experience reading modern plays), and how easy and thick with interpretive possibility is seems now. Perhaps I have matured as a reader via college, despite what seemed at the time to be not so much progress as scrambling for purchase (assignment-wise, not a ton of deadly-hard material).

There was a typo—well instead of we’ll—in my copy. Unless there wasn’t. Hard to tell with Beckett.

I dunno how much I'd enjoy seeing this staged. I should try it at some point though.

Something New:

On to history boys, which I listened to via audio play rather than read.

You know how one of the highest virtues of an exciting bit of art is that it fills you with the desire to rush out and create art yourself, not with a hubristic notion that you’re going to outdo your inspiration, but will full faith in your talents and the belief that you can, you must produce something spectacular right now? History Boys, if you’re in the right mood, is that kind of play.

It’s also moody, deeply heartbreaking, and a little wistful, and its strong charm lies in the ability to contain all these extremes without bursting, to make you feel sympathetic towards a pederast and a pedant and cruel boys and an unashamedly bitter woman without shattering under the weight of its own divided loyalties.

It also almost resists description or praise because of Hector’s condemnation of banal thought about ‘literature.’ Which reminds me a bit of the passage in Anna Karennina when Levin thinks about how his very cultured, intelligent brother in law from the city talks of his ‘love for the peasants.’ Levin doesn’t ‘love the peasants’—he lives with them, breathes their air, and sometimes they’re shoddy, terrible people and sometimes they pull through and sometimes they’re kind but he doesn’t /love/ 'the peasants' as one singular atemporal, non-circumstantial Entity because he /lives/ them.

Similarly, this is what Cynthia Ozick says in her introduction to Bloodshed, when she’s explaining that she doesn’t /love/ language because it’s too close to her, a medium and a form of self-hood. Hector doesn’t have to love literature because it’s too inextricably a part of him to separate like that.

Which is a higher form of devotion, but perhaps defeats some of the frisson of passion that comes from the unbridgeable separation between the self and the love object.

I already had a long, squee-ful discussion with my kind benefactor who uploaded the play in question about the great bits and the tragically sad bits, so it would be odd to just recapitulate it all again here, but really, do read that or listen to it. But not the film, apparently that’s not any good. I was going to say it 'was rubbish’ but then it sounded unforgivable English and I realized I had probably just stolen it from aralias.

Comments

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Thing about Beckett is that in every exposure to him, I've always felt i detected a certain vibe of sublimated homoeroticism. I dunno, maybe it's just the way he seems to linger on intimate little details; there's something about him sometimes that seems almost voyeuristic.

That separation from things you "love" is a point I've seen referenced in many places and always find fascinating. Most recently, I came across a real "live" demonstration of it (if you can call watching a travel show "live") where the host (Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations--a show I'd actually recommend to anybody because under the veneer of food and local color lie very deep waters) complimented some Malaysian farmers on their, hm, idyllic existence. He was thinking of it in sort of idealistic 'back to nature' terms, of course, but when he told them, "I like it here," one family member waved at him dismissively and told him, "Then you can have it!" Which led Bourdain to muse on what we think we want.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Mm. That's a good way of putting it, actually. Esp. as I usually associate that 'lingering on the intimate details' in writing with female writers? Like Woolfe or something?

Huh! That's interesting, esp. that they're off to Malaysia rather than the tired 'yay, Western Europe' destinations. ooh, that actually does sound really cool! I should check that out, thanks!