The Third Wheel

I also couldn’t help thinking that the Age of Beckett is, if not over, on its last legs. Beckett’s worldview subscribes to existentialism’s most pessimistic conclusions. His plays reflect the non-conviction that not only is there no meaning to existence beyond what people bring to it, but that any effort to create meaning is essentially futile. Winnie may keep the gun at bay, but nothing she does in the course of her “day” makes for a persuasively worthwhile alternative. Beckett’s frequent humor is usually mined from the utter pointlessness of his characters’ actions. It’s in all his major plays. In Waiting for Godot, there’s Didi trying on a bunch of equally crummy bowler hats. In Endgame, there’s blind Hamm ordering his servant to stand up a three-legged toy dog. In Happy Days, there’s Winnie and the aforementioned parasol. Each of these bits is followed by uncomfortable silence, as if to enforce the point that it may all be one big joke, but the only alternative is death and void. The point is exasperatingly circular. Life is absurd, but let’s carry on with our trivia, because the only other choice is death, which would deprive us of our absurd lives.

An artistic vision of this scope simply will not do for an age whose most defining image remains the attack on the Trade Towers. That moment crystallized not merely the possibility of sudden annihilation, but of human beings’ potential to greet it with heroic renewal. That ought to have been the lesson Beckett and other major writers took from the Second World War. There was plenty of evidence on its behalf, such as the emergence of a thriving Jewish state from the ashes of the Holocaust. But Beckett and his literary kin chose instead to brood. Beckett himself is said to have been an extremely generous person, but his view of humanity seems with retrospect petty in its dogged futilitarianism. Our age demands and deserves better.