DECONSTRUCTING DRAMA

Structure
Objectives
Introduction
Waitingfor Godot .A Deconstructive Analysis
5.2.1 Waitingfor Godot and the Theatre of the Absurd
5.2.2 The Problem of Meaninglessness
5.2.2.1 Meaningless to Meaningful
The Problem of Godot
5.3.1 Godot as the Transcendental Signified
The Problem of Time
The Problem of Consciousness
5.5.1 Examining the Play
Let Us Sum Up
Questions
Glossary
Suggested Readings

5.0 OBJECTIVES
In the previous Unit, we acquainted you with the process of deconstructing poetry.
This Unit aims at familiarizing you with how to deconstruct a play. The play is
specially chosen: Waitingfor Godot by Samuel Beckett. It is special because unlike
other plays, it does not use, but deconstructs conventional oppositions associated
with notions like meaning, consciousness and time. The play, as you know, suggests
the meaninglessness of life by showing the meaninglessness of a number of notions
on which the conventional meaning of life depends. So, this Unit instead of analyzing
the larger argument of the play focuses on these problematic notions. At the end of it,
you should be in a position to figure out how a play can question accepted
oppositions instead of using them.

5.1 INTRODUCTION
Samuel Beckettt (1906-90) wrote Waitingfor Godot sometime between 1945 and
1950 soon after his return to Paris in 1945 at the end of World War 11. The death,
destruction, horror and utter chaos experienced by Beckettt during and after the war
years both as a member of the French resistance and in his tenure as a Red Cross
volunteer in Ireland, seem to have created a ferment, which made the next five years
a particularly fertile phase in his life. Apart from Waitingfor Godot he wrote four
other plays, all in French.

Waitingfor Godot explores a static situation. In Act 1two tramps Vladimir and
Estragon wait on a country road for an appointment with someone called Godot.
Godot never comes but the tramps meet an aristocrat and his menial: Pozzo and
Lucky and a messenger boy who informs them that Godot will not come 'today' but
definitely 'tomorrow'. Act 2 repeats Act 1with some'important differences. But the
basics remain the same-Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot but meet Lucky and
Pozzo and a messenger boy who canies the same message again.

If you have not read the play, please read it now.

Deconstruction 5.2 WAITING FOR GODOT :A DECONSTRUCTIVE
ANALYSIS
In order to deconstruct this rather difficult play we must be clear about the literary
philosophical movement from which it derives :Theatre of the Absurd.

5.2.1 Waiting for Godot and the Theatre of the Absurd

The phrase was coined by Martin Esslin in his book of that name. He used it to
denote a group of playwrights who he thought shared some common philosophic and
artistic premises. In the beginning of this book, Esslin stresses that there is no such
thing as a movement of absurd dramatists, the term is useful as "a device to mark
certain fundamental traits, which seem to be present in the works of a number of
dramatists."

The common traits identified by Esslin are 'a sense of disillusionment and loss of
certitude characteristic of our [Modem] time'. All the unshakeable assumptions of
man had been swept away and had not been replaced. Progress, nationalism,
secularism, fascism which had emerged as the new ideals had also collapsed and had
not been substituted. Man engaged in life with the same zest and dedication
sudScc!v lost the goal of his actions--was at a loss about the meaninglpurpose of his
existence. Therefore, man felt like an irremediable exile. His original homeland had
been lost and no new one was available. "This divorce between man and his life, the
actor and his setting truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity" (Esslin).

Eugene Ionesco, in his definition of the absurd, also echoes a similar sentiment.
"Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose . . ..Cut off from his religious,
metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost, all his actions become senseless,
absurd, useless. "

As you have probably felt in these preliminary statements, the Theatre of the Absurd
borrows its basic principles from Existentialism. It acknowledges the fundamental
meaninglessness of human existence but takes it a step further. Instead of accepting
the meaninglessness of human life as a simple fact which can be talked about. The
Theatre of the Absurd goes on to show that not only is life meaningless, but
everything with which we can talk about this meaninglessness is also fundamentally
meaningless.

In his book, Esslin attempts to establish Waitingfor Godot as a representative play of

the Theatre of the Absurd--displaying the anxiety and lack of rational discursivity
characteristic of these plays. So, according to Esslin ,the play enacts the predicament
of the modem man caught in a meaningless existence and puts it forward in an
equally meaningless way.

In the process of living a meaningless existence, man creates a number of institutions

with which to cover up the meaninglessness. Society (represented by Pozzo and
Lucky), knowledge ( represented by Lucky ' s speech), friendship, art, religion and a
number of similar institutions are shown to be constructs and thus fundamentally
meaningless. For the common man, they serve to cover the fundamental
meaninglessness of life. All through life man keeps hankering or waiting for some
kind of absolute meaning or significance, while life slips by.

5.2.2 The Problem of Meaninglessness

What you read above was a conventional absurdist reading .of the play. On a close
reading however, this interpretation (seeing the play as meaningless), runs into
problems. Let's see where and how. In order to do this, let us start by investigating Deeonstructing
where the meaninglessness shows in the play. - Drama

Well, it's pretty obvious. Recall what happens in the play - two tramps, uttering
almost nonsense and doing nothing substantial, wait in an uncertain timeframe for a
dubious appointment with someone they do not know and who doesn't come. They
are not even sure of the place where they are supposed to wait. However, even this
uncertainty is not certain. A messenger boy creates a dubious hope that Godot might
come the next day. If that is the plot of Waitingfor Godot could there be anything
more or even equally meaningless?

Everything conventionally used in a play to generate meaning: that is its story,

character, time and dialogue is carefully rinsed of any potential to signify. This lack
of conventional meaning generating elements is carefully engineered to suggest the
lack of any fundamental meaning in human life. So, the meaninglessness of the play
is supposed to suggest the meaninglessness of life.

Then, what is the problem with it ? The problem is that in spite of all this, the play
cannot be taken as a statement of the absolute meaninglessness of life, on the
contrary, it suggests a certain kind of meaning to it.
I
5.2.2.1 Meaningless to Meaningful!

Why does the charge of meaninglessness encounter problems? In order to find this
we have to investigate how this charge was constructed.

That label of meaninglessness was inspired by the absurdist vision. So, as Ionesco
argues "Cut off from his metaphysical, transcendental and religious roots " man finds
his existence meaningless. This is the meaninglessness or vacancy we thought was
suggested in the play. In saying this two problems immediately ande:

(a) The exact iniplications of the word meaningless. Contrary to the general
expectation of vacancy, the expression meaningless has a special sense
here. The point I'm trying to alert you to is that the concept meaningless
functions through a system of meaning and is as loaded with significance
or meaning as any other term in the English language. Therefore to use
this word as a description of something is not to describe a vacancy in
the literal sense but a vacancy in a very special sense of the term. To
function in this sense, a framework is required within which it can
suggest the idea of vacancy.

Let's investigate the framework within which this statement of meaninglessness held
true for Waitingfor Godot and to do this let us go back to Ionesco's statement:

Cut off ftOm his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man
is lost, all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

What are the metaphysical, religious and transcendental roots in the first place?
Rationality, Christianity, and an unbounded faith in the doctrine of Prop-ne
.
could say The Western man had fostered the illusion that there was some absolute
meaning and significance to life, controlled by the infallible powers of Reason, God
and Progress.

Then what caused the severance? The bloody Revolutions, ceaseless exploitation,
dehumhnization, and other problems associated with industrialization in Europe,
including the two devastating wars. By the end of the Modem era, it was clear that
Deconstruction life was the product of a number of social, cultural and political forces, which far
from being ideal and infallible had such terrible implications.

It is only when we understand these roots and their severance that we get the
framework within which the cry of meaninglessness makes sense. So, it is because of
the Western man's earlier assumption that there was some absolute meaning and
significance to life, controlled by absolute powers like god and reason, that life has
now become meaningless. Outside this framework, life remains as meaningful /less
as before. The meaningless in other words is a special case of the meaningful.

(c) At another though related level, is the problem that the text seems to suggest a
meaning to life. Ironically, an act of interpreting the text transforms its
meaninglessness into meaning. That is, the play seems to be saying that this state
of severance from the metaphysical, transcendental and religious roots is a given
fact, which creates a certain vacancy. That is one of the meanings. Additionally,
absolute meaning in metaphysical, transcendental and religious terms may be
absent but other kinds of meaning may be available. What the absurdist had
considered absolutely meaningless was a context bound vision. Life takes on
another meaning once we change the context. The meaningless, in other words,
is once again revealed as a special case of the meaningful.

Sc, the play too opens up to a number of symbolic and metaphoric interpretations.
One signllTicant landmark in this regard is the performance at the San Quentin
Penitentiary.

So, Esslin ana Iqnesco may label life as meaningless, but a close reading d the play
can question this label. This reading, apart from arguing the context-bound
significance, and the meaning of meaninglessness would go on to argue that we
cannot be sure about the meaninglessness of life until we are sure about its
meaningfulness. Meaningful and meaningless instead of being opposites are thus
revealed to be interconstitutive. If you refer back to the two questions raised above,
they too are saying the same thing : the meaningless harbours some of the key traits
of the meaningful. So, the deconstructionist seems to be saying that no absolute
statement about human life as meaningfuVmeaningless can be passed. It is for this
reason that Godot acquires a dubious status: neither can we be sure that he will come,
nor can we be sure that he will not.

5.3 THE PROBLEM OF GODOT

The character (?) of Godot is a specially problematic site in the play where some
important conventional oppositions are questioned in a deconstructive manner. One
such opposition is presence / absence.

In conventional philosophy, presence has always been privileged over absence. So, it
is commonplace to think of presence as the given superior term and absence as a
deficiency or lack. Read the section on logocentrism in Unit 2 to figure out this point.

However, in the hierarchical opposition presence / absence, the deconstructionist

would want to demonstrate that for presence to function as it is said to, it must have
the qualities that supposedly belong to its opposite - i.e absence.

Consider for example Zeno's paradox of the flight of an arrow. At any given
moment, a flying arrow is at a particular spot--and since it is always in a particular
spot, it could never be in motion. We on the contrary want to insist, quitejustifiably,
that the arrow is in motion at every instance, yet its motion is never present at any
given moment. Motion can be present only if the present instance is not something
given but the product of the relations between the past and future. Something can be
52
present at a given instant only if the instant is already divided within itself, inhabited Deconstructing
by the non-present. Drama

This paradox is a fairly effective critique of the notion of presence. We think of the
real as what is present at any given instance because the present instance seems a
simple absolute. The past is a former present, the future an anticipated present---both
somehow deriving from the present. But it turns out that the present instance can
serve as that ground only insofar as it is not a pure and autonomous given but is
marked by a difference and d e f e r e n c d a t is differance. Thus, instead of defining
absence in terms of presence, as its negation, we c m treat presence as the effect of a
generalized absence or differance.

How is all this related to the character of Godot? The answer is simple. Like Zeno's
paradox, the character of Godot is a site where the hierarchy presencelabsence is
questioned and the superiority of either is left undecided. Godot is a dramatic
reminder of the fact that presence is constituted by absence. Let's see how.

Is Godot present or absent? The text is non-committal. If you investigate it closely, it

offers plenty of evidence that Godot is present and perhaps an equal amount that s h e
(?) is absent. Textual evidence puts us on a see-saw .
I
On the one hand, is the pre-textual fact of the appointment with Godot; on the other,
is the complete textual uncertainty about it. The boy as a stage device argues both for
and against Godot's existence. For example his presence, his reference to a concrete
physical place where Godot lives, his message, and most important his expectation
about a response from Vladirnir and Estragon suggest that Godot is a real I present
figure. However, when we consider his responses carefully we realize that they are
evasive and u n c e r t a i ~ o t h i n gis committed through them. The reference to his
brother which draws a parallel with Cain and Abel gives Godot a mythical ring and
prompts us to equate him with the Old Testament God.

At the end of having studied this summary of textual evidence, how far are we from
deciding the question of Godot's presence I absence? Perhaps as far as we were in
the beginning. This play is notorious for taking with the left hand what it gives with
its right. Therefore, no certainties can be arrived at about Godot in this play.

Then what does this uncertainty point to? It appears to be an effective attack on the
assumptions of conventional philosophy which banks on presence and absence as
absolute, independent and hierarchically arranged categories in terms of which we
can understand the world. Godot questions this confidence and highlights the fact
that presence and absence instead of being opposites and in that order are actually
interconstitutive and do not follow that order. In order to be sure of the absence of
something, we have to be sure about its presence and vice-versa. By showing that
v neither presence nor absence can be considered the superior term, the assumptions of
conventional philosophy are deconstructed.

5.3.1 Godot as the Transcendental Signified

The character (?) of Godot by its perpetual suspension between presence and absence
suggests interesting parallels with an idea in poststructural linguistics, which is
central to the idea of Deconstruction.

Derrida's critique of Saussure's linguistic theory in Unit 2, reflected on the notion of

the transcendental signified. From that critique we know that a signified is not an
independent entity but the product of the interplay of a number of signifMs. So, the
search for a signified always leads to an infinite number of signifies. A
transcendental signified, as you have already read, would be one that escapes this
Deconstruction play of signifiers and has a privileged existence. Such a signified, as Derrida tells us,
is a philosophical fiction.

Analogically, we can think of the play as a complex set of signifiers in search of a

transcendental signified called Godot. It would then be clear that like the dog-song at
the beginning of Act 2, or a text in the current sense of the term, it can never escape
from its endless chain of significations and arrive at that signified - that is Godot is a
fiction and can never arrive. Yet, just as the poststructuralist theory of language has
to presume the dubious presence of some transcendental signified, simultaneously
generating and generated by the act of differance, to explain the origin and
functioning of meaning, (See Unit 6). Similarly, the text has to presume the presence
of a Godot whose arrival will give it meaning.

5.4 THE PROBLEM OF TIME

'
Just as Godot is simultaneously present and absent in the play, so is time. Let's see
how.

Time can be considered absent because the play operates within an extremely
uncertain time frame. No one, including Beckettt seems to be sure about any of the
time fixing factors in the play.

Let's examine some primary textual evidence in this regard. What is the time frame
in which the play exists? We cannot be sure. Act One takes place one evening
between twilight and moonshine--so does Act Two. That is all one gets out of the
play in terms of its time scheme.

How much time has lapsed between Act One and Two? One day as the stage
direction would have you believe. Other things suggest the contrary. The bare tree
now has three or four leaves. Pozzo has gone dumb and Lucky has gone blind, apart
from growing much older. Definitely more than a day has passed. How long have
Vladimir and Estragon been together ? The play is again notoriously evasive in its
response . At the beginning of the play, Vladimir, consoling himself about the
terrible nature of his existence explains :

Vladimir : ... (Cheerfully. ) On the other hand what's the good of losing
heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million
years ago, in the nineties.

At the end of Act One, Estragon asks Vladimir how long they have been together and
Vladimir's response is"50 years perhaps". The point I am trying to alert you to is
that the text is not going to give you any certainty regarding its time frame.

Even other questions like Vladimir, Estragon, Lucky, Pozzo's age encounter similar
evasive responses. The play's distrust of time is most potently suggested in this
speech at the end of Act Two:

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's
abominabie! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day
like any other day, One day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one
day we will go deaf, one day we are born, one day we shall die, the same
day, the same second, is that not enough for you?

In other words, the play seems to do away with thesconventionalnotion of time.

Then, how and where is it present? Examine the following conversations:
i Vladimir: Time has stopped. Deconstructing
Drama
Pozzo: (cuddling his watch to his ear). Do not you believe it, sir, do not
you believe it. (He puts his watch back in his pocket. ) Whatever you like
but not that.

Now let us move on to this:

.
Pozzo : What time is it?
..
Vladimir :(Inspecting the sky). Seven o'clock. Eight o'clock. ..
Estragon: That depends on what time of year it is.
Pozzo : Is it evening?
Silence. Vladimir and Estragon scrutinize the sunset.
Estragon :It's rising.
Vladimir :Impossible.
Estragon.: Perhaps it's the dawn.
Vladimir :Do not be a fool. It's the west over there.
Estragon : How do you know?
Pozzo: (anguished). Is it evening?
Vladimir :Any way it hasn't moved.
Estragon : I tell you it's rising.
Pozzo: Why do not you answer me?
Estragon: Give us a chance.
Vladimir: (reassuring). Its evening, sir, its evening, night is drawing
nigh. My friend here would have me doubt it and I must confess he
shook me for a moment. But it is not for nothing I have lived through
this long day and I can assure you it is very near the end of its repertory.

In statements and conversations read so far, two concepts of time are evident. The
first is clock or linear time and the second subjective time. Clock time is a construct,
operating through differences and thus can be questioned. This is what is suggested
dramatically in the confusion between the rising and setting sun. But the agony of
having lived a meaningless existence is real--Vladimir can vouch for that. Whether
one calls the duration morning or evening is immaterial. The fact that Vladimir has
lived through the agony of the day is guarantee enough that time exists.

James L. Calderwood in an analysis of time in Waitingfor Godot takes a theoretical

route to the same conclusion. He approaches the question of time through the
problem of memory. So, he says

The absences and uncertainties of memory on the characters' parts would

seem to suggest that they live entirely in the present. But what is the present
without the past and the future? Its home is the temporal space between the
"no longer" and the "not yet". But for Didi and Gogo the present exists
merely as an unbearable route to a future in which Godot's arrival will justify
their present waiting. If he comes. But he won't. The past is lost to
memory, the future is not yet and never to be, and the present is negated.
From one standpoint--the felt presence of the duration-there is a dreadful
excess of time in Godot. From another--the erasure of past, preserd and the
future - there is no time at all in it. Time in this timeless play is
simultaneously present and absent.

The argument about absence needs annotation. Calderwood is borrowing the

deconstruction of presence quoted earlier which suggests that the present instance is
constituted by the past and the future. Because this play operates within a framework
of uncertain past and future, the present itself becomes uncertain. That is the reason
why time is considered absent.
Deconstruction What does this questioning of Time point to? The fundamental experience of living is
felt as a flux which we choose to label and control by the mechanisms of
conventional time. Clocks, hours, days, etc. are all devices to shape and control this
perceived flux. By virtue of being external impositions on this flux these categories
are dispensable. Time understood as these categories can be thought of as non-
existent. On the other hand, the felt duration of life is real. Time as a subjective
experience is present. The questioning alerts us.to this fundamental difference
between the subjective and objective experience of time. In one sense it is present, in
another it is absent.

55.- PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Waitingfor Godot, as we have seen, deconstructs many important oppositions of
conventional Western thought. The last opposition we are going to discuss as being
deconstructed by the play is conscious 1 unconscious.

A powerful humanistic tradition of which Descrates is only the most obvious

representative has always defined the human subject in terms of its consciousness.
The 'I' is that which thinks, perceives and feels. Following this tradition, pre-
Freudian psychology had looked upon consciousness as a plenitude and the
unconscious as its negation or complication.

One of Freud's achievements is that he questions the hierarchical opposition

conscious I unconscious. In The Interpretation of Dreams he writes:

It is essential to abandon the overvaluation of the property of being

conscious, before it bekomes possible to form any correct view of the origin
..
of what is mental. The unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes
within it the smaller sphere of the conscious. Everything conscious has an
unconscious preliminary stage; whereas what is unconscious may remain at
that stage and nevertheless claim to be regarded as having the full value of a
psychical process. The unconscious is the true psychical reality.

To speak in Freudian terms, the human qind can be seen as structured in three
layers: the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. Images and ideas move
from the unconscious to the conscious, which may later be repressed into the
preunconscious. At no point of time however, is the complete unconscious
transformed into the conscious. Therefore, what is in the conscious necessarily
originates in the unconscious whereas what is unconscious may never come into the
c o n s c i o u ~ e m a i ninaccessible to it.

The conscious according to Freud is the tip of the iceberHmplying thereby that the
main body is the unconscious. Taken literally, it implies that 90 percent of the
human mind is the unconscious-only 10 percent conscious.

In most of his writings on dreams, jokes, neurosis, children etc., Freud discusses the
determining force of the unconscious over the conscious, making the conscious a
particular derivative instance of the unconscious process. Freud implies that the
unconscious is not a product of repression of the conscious but it is the unconscious
that creates the conscious. In order to explain the origin of the conscious and
unconscious in the human mind, Freud takes recourse to something similar to the
Demdean differance. For Freud, the unconscious is both constituted by repression
and is the active agent of repression. Like differance,which designates the
impossible origin of difference in differing and of deffering in the difference, the
unconscious is a non-originary origin which Freud calls primary repression, in
which the unconscious initiates the first repression and is constituted as repression.
Three points have been made in the last three paras: Deconstructing
Drama

!
I
(a)

(b)
The unconscious as the origin of all and the conscious as the destination of
some ideas.

The unconscious occupying a much larger portion of the human mind than
the conscious.

(c) The unconscious as a constituting force over the conscious as well as itself.

All the three arguments suggest that contrary to the assumptions of pre-Freudian
psychology, it is the unconscious, which is the primary plenitude of which the
conscious is the derivative. Let's see how Waitingfor Godot arrives at a similar
conclusion.

5.5.1 Examining the Play

The play investigates the issue of the unconscious through devices like the dream or
a close introspection of consciousness itself. Consider this little chat between
Estragon and Vladimir:

Estragon: I had a dream.

Vladimir: Do not tell me!
Estragon: I dreamt that -
Vladimir :DO NOT TELL ME!
Estragon: (gestures towards the universe.) This one is enough for you?
(silence. )

Estragon's gesture deliberately obliterates the divide between dream and reality an-
act he tends to commit in other instances in the play. Such attempts to substitute
dream for reality alert us to the play's tendency to view reality / consciousness as a
special case of the dreai?; / unconscious. The tendency changes into a disturbing
question when we read this soliloquy of Vladimir at the end of Act Two:

Vladimir: W a s I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping

now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?
That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I
waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he
spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?
(Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again.
Vladimir stares at him. ) He will know nothing. He wiU tell me about the.
...
blows he received and I will give him a carrot. At me too someone is
looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing,
let him sleep. (Pause. ) I can't go on ! (Pause. ) What have I said 7

This important speech by Vladimir raises some important problems. Vladimir

(a) cannot verify whether he was asleep or awake in the past.

(b) cannot verify whether he is asleep or awake then.

(c) cannot find sufficient guarantee that one is awake when one thinks so.

(d) is not convinced that consciousness and memory are sufficient guarantee of
one's being awake.

(e) is unable to convince himself that he is awake.

Deconstruction And these problems are not only specific to Vladimir but to every introspecting
mind.

Systematically, Vladimir undercuts all the certainties associated with consciousness

to finally reveal that consciousness by itself is unverifiable. We cannot be sure that
the conscious exists. In that case thestate of human mind would be a generalized
state of unconsciousness which may lapse into a consciousness whose actual status is
extremely dubious. We have come back to the privileging of the unconscious--not
via the Freudian but the textual route.

5.6 LET US SUMUP

In this rather brief detour of a fairly large amount of theoretical ground, you should
have crossed the following points:

(a) Waitingfor Godot as a representative play of the theatre of the absurd

challenges some important oppositions of conventional Western thought.

(b) As an absurd play, it questions the rationalist assumption of meaningfulness

of life and the existentialist assertion of its meaninglessness. In doing so, it
questions the oppositions meaningfuVmeaningless showing that the
meaninglessness of life actually suggests a kind of meaning.

(c) Through uncertainties relating to Godot, the play questions the primacy of
pesence by showing that it is always already inhabited by absence.

(d) Like Godot, Time is shown as both present and absent in the play.

(e) Vladimir's speech questions the conscious/unconscious hierarchy showing,

like Freudian psychology, that the conscious is actually a derivative from the
unconscious and not vice versa.

Each of these cases, you will realize is hitting against a conventional hierarchy which
was serving particular ideological ends. Rationality, cognition, classification as
control and the immediate as the real-each of these ideas can be seen as
constructing their respective hierarchies and as being perpetuated by it in turn. As
Derrida argues, a powerful humanistic tradition appears to be behind all these.
Deconstruction does not step outside this tradition but implodes it in a spirit of self-
critique.

5.7 QUESTIONS
(1) Examine how Waitingfor Godot questions the meaninglessness of life.

(2) Godot is more of a stage device to put across a theoretical point rather than a
real character. Discuss.

(3) Discuss the notion of clocWlinear time and explain how it is absent from the
play.

(4) Consciousness is a presumption, unconsciousness a certainty. Elucidate

from your reading of Waitingfor Godot.
5.8 GLOSSARY Deconstructing
Drama
Modern A diffuse period between the end of the nineteenth
century and the first half of the twentieth century
characterized by a feeling of disorder as a result of
the collapse of all certainties in human life.

Rational discursive : Rational denotes something based on reason.

Discursivity refers to the attribute of proceeding by
argument. Put together the two denote a way of
arguing or thinking that proceeds in a reasoned,
logical and connected manner.

San Quentin Peitentiary: An American prison house.

Let me quote Esslin's description of a performance of Waitingfor Godot at this

penitentiary:

"On the 19th November 1957, a group of worried actors [of the San
Francisco Actors' Workshop] were preparing to face their audience [ of
fourteen hundred convicts]. ...No wonder, the actors and Herbert Blau, the
director were apprehensive. How were they to face one of the toughest
audiences in the world with a highly obscure, intellectual play that produced
near riots among a good many highly sophisticated audiences in Western
Europe? .... Herbert Blau decided to prepare the San Quentin audience for
what was to come. He stepped on the stage and addressed the packed
darkened North Dining Hall.. .. Blau compared the play to a piece of jazz
music 'to which one must listen for whatever one may find in it'. In the same
way he hoped there would be some meaning, some personal significance for
each member of the audience in Waitingfor Godot.

The curtain parted. The play began. And what had bewildered the
sophisticated audiences of Paris, London, and New York was immediately
grasped by an audience of convicts. "

The San Quentin News on the following day reported that "The prisoners had no
difficulty in understanding Godot." One prisoner said 'Godot is society', another
said 'he is the outside'. A teacher at the prison house said "They know what is meant
by waiting and they knew that if Godot finally came, he would only be a
disappointment."

5.9 SUGGESTED READINGS

Beckettt, Samuel. Waitingfor Godot. London : Metheun,l986.

Calderwood, James.L. "Ways of Waiting in Waitingfor Godot". Modem Drama, 29

(1986)

Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology .Delhi: Moti La1 Banarsi Das , 1976.

Esslin, Martin. Theatre of the Absurd. London: Penguin, 1968.

UNIT 6 RE-ASSESSING DECONSTRUCTION
Structure
Objectives
Introduction
The Turn Towards Language
6.2.1 Positioning Structuralism
6.2.2 Positioning Poststructuralism
Deconstructing Deconstruction
Some Impofiant Problems
6.4.1 The Problem of Responsibility
6.4.2 The Problem of Practical Experience
6.4.3 The Problem of Telos
6.4.4 The Charge of Hypocrisy
The Rise of New Historicism and Cultural Critique
Let Us Sum Up
Questions
Suggested Readings

6.3 OBJECTIVES
At the end of this introductory survey of the theory, implications and applications of
deconstructl?q, let us pause for a moment to re-assess what we have read so fai and
try to see why this theory emerged and critique the parameters within which it
functions. It is especially necessary to do so in the case of deconstruction because left
to itself, the theory sounds all-encompassing, and can lead us to the view that all
meaning and interpretation are futile activities. Just as it is important to understand
what is useful in deconstruction, similarly, it is also important to understand where
the theory falters and why. It is with this aim in mind that the last Unit has been
conceived and written.

6.1 INTRODUCTION
Deconstruction as a theoretical movement falls under the broad category
poststructuralism. Therefore, in order to assess deconstruction properly we should
first be clear about poststructuralism.

Poststructuralism as a movement carries forward ideas from Structuralism at the

same time as breaks h a y from it. Language appears to be at the heart of both.
Therefore, our initial thrust is going to be an understanding of the special status
accorded to language in critical thought in the second half of the twentieth century.

We will then move on to examine the socio-political conditions under which

poststructuralism emerged.

Having done so, we will begin our re-assessment by turning deconstruction against
itself. Following this, we will highlight some important problems associated with this
theory and finally show how the problems prepared the grounds for its displacement
by other theories.