Charlie Rose

REMant  06/16/2009 01:16 AM Report

We did this play when I was in college, not long after it came to the US, and I've always thought of it as a model of play-writing, and of Beckett as kin. It was quite popular on campuses at that time, and made a nice fit with the existentialism, authenticity, relevance and other notions of the New Left. I have little doubt that it reflects the same in postwar France. I take Pozzo's and Lucky's changed circumstances in the second act to reflect the effect of the war and find it puzzling when ppl say nothing happens. If all plays were like it I might have thought about a career in theater, tho I don't even like the idea of acting, and can't imagine having to say the same thing the same way twice, much less once or twice a day for weeks on end. Actors, I think, rarely understand anything about the characters they portray, but in this case I may be wrong. (Just kidding)

Waiting for Godot seems to me simply an essay on the human condition. Well, perhaps not simple, given the amount of literary crticism it has attracted with all of its literary references. I think you have in Vladimir criticism of the intellectual revolutionary type; in Estragon of lower-class Catholics; in Pozzo of aristocrats and capitalists; and, in Lucky, the academics and intelligensia. All done from a viewpoint you could call existentialist, altho I doubt it is the same as Sartre's, but actually Stoic and quite republican and Protestant. I would argue that Beckett is really just saying life is what you make of it, nothing more nor less, really no different from Aristotle's view that the good life while ideal, must be lived and make you happy. Tho he might have considered this idea destroyed as well, I don't consider him that much of a skeptic, and real skeptics are usually not, in fact, critics.

The Stoic's developed from Aristotle the idea of oikeiosis, often translated as self-preservation, though not at all the Social Darwinist sort we generally think of, and wrongfully pin on Locke and Hobbes, but is probably what Jefferson had in mind when he substituted the phrase pursuit of happiness for property, the latter having unwanted connotations not only of ownership, but also of egotism and establishment, and which is in fact what Locke meant by having a property in one's own person. In so doing, incidentally, TJ was simply lifting an idea widely prevalent in natural law writing, which he could have found in any number of books, for instance Vattel or Blackstone. Oikeosis meant to the Stoics what is appropriate to a being, which for men meant a life-long pursuit of conceptual understanding and they avoided fatalism by placing the whole into a dynamic, interconnected universe growing in rationality, fitness, or design. Later writers would call it virtue.

clarebraux  06/15/2009 05:26 PM Report

Thank you Charlie for this exciting segment; it was heartwarming to hear these genial actors and you laughing so spontaneously. And thank you for all the other conversations you have with creative people, artists and scientists - intelligent, upbeat television to balance all the downbeat info we are bombarded with every day. You make my day, almost every day here in Canada. Merci beaucoup.