PADGETT POWELL
IN HIS SEMINAL 1961 WORK THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD, Martin Esslin warns against reductive attempts to demystify Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s masterwork and one of the defining plays of the twentieth century. Hasty explanation goes wrong with any work of lasting merit, but Esslin contends that it’s especially senseless when confronted with the soul-rattling complexity of a play such as Godot—a play that is itself partly an articulation of our inability to understand ourselves in a cosmos way off-kilter.
Beckett himself could not point to whom or what Godot was supposed to be: “If I knew, I would have said so in the play,” he told Alan Schneider, director of the inaugural American production in 1956. And yet it is a testament to the play’s bewitching command that we have been for six decades trying to decode the thing, to decipher the cryptic message that stares us down like fire-lit hieroglyphs. Beckett arouses in us our human rage for explication, our madness to impose order wherever disorder plants a flag, to clarify the recondite. We are irked by the unexplained, galled by negative capability. If we love a mystery it’s only because we are satisfied once we solve it.
If a cabal of critics has insisted upon Godot’s interminable difficulty as an utterance of our difficult state as human beings, then there was at least one group of astute theatergoers who received the play by mainline, who required no assistance from the obfuscations of academics. Esslin begins The Theatre of the Absurd with the extraordinary vignette of Godot’s 1957 production at San Quentin State Prison, just north of San Francisco. The director, Herbert Blau, was atremble with anxiety: “How were they to face one of the toughest audiences in the world with a highly obscure, intellectual play that had produced near riots among a good many highly sophisticated audiences in Western Europe?” To help settle his own rattling nerves, Blau introduced Godot to the inmates and compared it to jazz, “to which one must listen for whatever one may find in it.” But his introduction wasn’t necessary because “what had bewildered the sophisticated audiences in Paris, London, and New York was immediately grasped by an audience of convicts.”
Esslin goes on to speculate about why these caged men might intuitively comprehend a plotless play about abject wastrels conversing obscurely on a country road, waiting for someone who will not appear, someone about whom they know only rumors. Either the circumstances in Godot paralleled the men’s incarceration and they merely identified, or their lack of formal critical skill rendered them especially susceptible to Beckett’s meaning. Esslin suggests that the San Quentin inmates might have been “unsophisticated enough to come to the theater without any preconceived notions and ready-made expectations, so that they avoided the mistake that trapped so many established critics who condemned the play for its lack of plot, development, characterization, suspense, or plain common sense.”
There’s nothing unsophisticated about this convict reviewing Godot for the prison paper, the San Quentin News:
It was an expression, symbolic in order to avoid all personal error, by an author who expected each member of his audience to draw his own conclusions, make his own errors. It asked nothing in point, it forced no dramatized moral on the viewer, it held out no specific hope. . . .We’re still waiting for Godot, and shall continue to wait. When the scenery gets too drab and the action too slow, we’ll call each other names and swear to part forever—but then, there’s no place to go!
A goodly number of book critics now writing can stand to learn something from this prison newspaper at San Quentin. The reviewer’s insight about “error” is especially astute: the tramps inhabit an erroneous world, a world gone wrong, and they themselves have gone wrong, helpless to say how or why. In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom contends that “error about life is necessary for life.” But some errors cannot be corrected, and existence itself is the largest error of all: “Life is something that should not have been,” says Schopenhauer. (The young Beckett read hungrily in Schopenhauer; often he could read no one else. Schopenhauer meshed well with his developing sense of human calamity).
Beckett’s hobos and the convicts at San Quentin might have a polished perception of error—both the errors they have committed and whatever errors of justice have been committed against them—but part of Godot’s point is that many of us are, to one extent or another, waiting for the erroneous to right itself. Vladimir and Estragon perfectly embody the oft-quoted sentiment at the end of Beckett’s novel The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Everyone, believer and unbeliever alike, has his Godot. The San Quentin convicts perceived the absent Godot as “society” or “the outside”; others perceive him as God, as the tarrying messiah. Considering Beckett’s emphasis on enigma and the uselessness of language, Godot for the tramps might be any source of understanding, of clarification, of correction in a world rampant with error and eager to befuddle us.
Padgett Powell’s newest novel, You & Me, is described as “a hilarious Southern send-up of Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot,” and anyone who’s been delighting in Powell’s distinctive gifts since his debut novel Edisto in 1984 will experience no surprise at this overt homage to the master. A onetime student of Donald Barthelme at the University of Houston, Powell has been shunning convention since the outset. Even in his more orthodox early work his narrative technique and language have about them an unobtrusive air of not caring what you think. Barry Hannah once said that Powell was the only exciting force in American fiction. Across six novels and two story collections he’s made a world recognizably ours but always somehow aslant, asunder: a world in which our consciousness is at bottom both heartache and hilarity.
His last novel, The Interrogative Mood, was a barrage of questions, a kind of gleeful bastardization of the Socratic method, a perversion of dialectic in which one side takes place silently in your ever smiling mind. “Do you realize that people move on steadily, even arguably bravely, unto the end, stunned and more stunned, and numbed and more numbed, by what has happened to them and not happened to them?” That inquiry alone encompasses much of Beckett’s warped cosmos. “Life is missing things, not getting them,” says narrator Simons Manigault in Edisto Revisited, and no one in Beckett would argue with that.
You & Me raises the Southern art of front-porch badinage to metaphysical heights and then drops it into depths of the ridiculous. A native Floridian who spent much of his youth in South Carolina, Powell has a roundabout relationship with the South. He has admitted to occupying “a liquid fey interface between ‘believing’ in the South and making fun of folk who believe.” One senses the matriarch of Southern lit looming behind Powell’s every page; he refers to Flannery O’Connor as the “goddesshead,” and they make a superb pair: recalcitrant, fed up with the pharisaical, ambivalent about the South, absolutely certain and unashamed of their convictions. You & Me is not distinctly Southern any more than Godot is distinctly French or Irish—you won’t be sure where, when, or over how long a period this dialogue takes place. The italicized prologue is as giving as Powell gets here:
Somewhere between Bakersfield, California, and Jacksonville, Florida—we think spiritually nearer the former and geographically nearer the latter—two weirdly agreeable dudes are on a porch in a not upscale neighborhood, apparently within walking distance of a liquor store, talking a lot. It’s all they have. Things disturb them. Some things do not.
Those four sentences deadpan in vintage Powell: the priceless “we,” the only half-earnest “spiritually,” the everyman use of “dudes,” the calm overstatement of “it’s all they have.” Powell’s prose immediately distinguishes itself from the crowds of barely-there sentences. “People are hungry for new utterance,” he wrote in A Woman Named Drown, and providing that utterance is part of his aim.
Unlike Vladimir and Estragon, Powell’s two unnamed front-porch dudes have nothing to wait for, no pipedream of a Godot-like explainer or savior. Elderly and self-righteous—we are all of us self-righteous about something—they have substituted talking for waiting: “What would we do if we did not talk?” “Precious little else, darlin’.” When the one asks what losers are supposed to do with their lives, the other replies: “Live until we die, without any more pondering than a dog,” but still they ponder, high and low, as if discourse, however pointless, has the charms to ward off their confusion.
But in true Godot fashion, their discourse stutters, falters, peters out, switches back. Godot is, among other things, a linguistic manifestation of our spiritual state, our problem of being: pauses, platitudes, paradoxes, tautologies, non sequiturs, redundancies, contradictions, dichotomies, neologisms. (All those loaded pauses implemented to such effect by Harold Pinter would not have been possible without Beckett, who served as mentor to the young playwright. Pinter wouldn’t put a play onstage until it had Beckett’s approval.) Our postlapsarian situation announces itself most persistently in our use and misuse of language, in its restless inadequacy: “a jangling noise” and “hideous gabble,” as Milton has it. One of Powell’s dudes says, “Life will not be explained,” and the duo seems determined to contribute to the mystery or else be at ease within it:
Iyuh hayev ayuh mayarble.
What?
It’s my new language: two-cylinder instead of one. Two-stroke.
Liyuk, cayool?
Roieet.
We are insane.
We are inSAYane.
Insane enough to call one another by names not theirs—names perhaps from a past they can no longer grasp—because what’s a signifier in a world bereft of significance? What’s in a name when the rose has withered, when nothing much matters anymore?
It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter.
What doesn’t matter?
I guess I am saying that nothing matters.
I have no idea what you are saying, but when you say “it doesn’t matter” what is the antecedent of “it”?
I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter what the antecedent to it is.
You have lost your mind.
Yes, and it doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters.
Correct.
When the one says, “We are going to hell,” the other replies, “We’ll enjoy it,” except they might very well have arrived already on hell’s front porch, an eternal rack not of Dante but of Sartre in No Exit—of course hell is other people: what they do, what they say, what they are. Powell’s two dudes might be “agreeable” in one regard, and yet they are also each other’s loquacious tormentor:
Incorrigible.
You said irrigible?
I did.
What does that mean?
I don’t know, I’ve never heard it.
It sounds like it should be a word, though.
It does.
The irrigible thug. Almost the opposite of the incorrigible thug. Is corrigible a word?
I think not.
If Beckett’s tramps pass their lives waiting, they also spend lots of time misremembering or else trying to remember. Much of Beckett’s mission in Godot is an accentuation of how memory and its missteps cannot be extricated from the daily business of knowing ourselves. (In an interview Powell has said, “It is very hard for us to comprehend who we are,” and although he was referring to Americans, he meant everybody always.) When a boy who may or may not be Godot’s page meets Vladimir and Estragon on the road each afternoon, he doesn’t recognize the pair, nor does the pair recognize Pozzo and Lucky even though their confused interaction plays out day after day.
Pozzo’s memory doesn’t work, either: “I don’t remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow I won’t remember having met anyone today.” Vladimir tells Estragon, “You forget everything.” These men inhabit a land in which nothing is worth remembering; victims of both everyday and otherworldly curses, they wait in a gray limbo where north might be south, the past an inferno and the future impotent.
Powell’s dudes have the same memory deficiency but it doesn’t bug them very much. “I forget you’re here sometimes,” one says. An early chapter begins, “I forget where we are,” another with, “Where exactly are we?” Someone mistakes T. S. Eliot for W. B. Yeats, and the poetically minded Powell means this as an enormous bungle: you might as well mistake George Herbert for the Earl of Rochester. “I don’t know anything at all, you get right down to it,” says one, but both know that “the lesson of civilization is that sooner or later we will fuck everything up.”
Throughout their dialogue are nuanced suggestions that these men live in a postapocalyptic nowhere or else their own purgatorio: “Did we leave the earth, or were we never on it?” “We tried to be on it.” (In Beckett’s Endgame, Hamm says: “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!”) When one dude asks, “Why can we not live real lives?” the other responds simply, “I don’t know.” Four pages later there’s this exchange:
We are fools to even try to be alive now.
We are not, really, alive now.
No, we are not.
We are not miracles either.
Miracles as in resurrection, redemption, eternal life? And is this really a short dialogue between two, or the fractured monologue of an isolato, a solitary psychotic? Powell is perfectly comfortable with questions and perfectly content to let us spin ourselves dizzy attempting answers.
Of course You & Me is not a novel, and Powell knows that. Its joy derives not from the traditional pleasures of the novel—narrative, character, conflict, resolution, prose rappelling into the hidden caves of the soul—but from a spell inside Powell’s unwonted mind. His facetious swagger and splenetic breed of comedy are on abundant display here: “Does the hippie want hemp in everything he uses?” “Tang. What a drink that was”; “Jejune Longing is the chewing gum of life. It’s what they named Juicy Fruit after.”
With each book Powell moves farther away from the forms of traditional fiction because he aims to find, in Beckett’s words, “a form that accommodates the mess.” As Beckett offered in conversation in 1961: “One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess . . . What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be a new form and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else.”
The mess, the chaos: they are everywhere. Padgett Powell does not shiver before that truth, and we all—from critics and convicts to college seniors and senior citizens—require his particular theater of the absurd. It would be a harder life without it.
—Los Angeles Review of Books, AUGUST 1, 2012