The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [323]
What makes Waiting for Godot exceptional is how, in one particular respect, it characterised the end of that psychological road which storytelling had been travelling since the dawn of Romanticism more profoundly than any other story. Here were two trapped, lost figures, symbolising the inmost essence of human existence when it is reduced to nothing more than the ego. So meaningless has life become that they might as well end it in suicide. Nevertheless, the play's power lies in their awareness that there could be something else. If only they could find whatever it that is symbolised by this mysterious Godot, their world could be transformed. They would be saved.
By definition, neither Beckett nor his characters know anything specific about this elusive missing dimension which could give meaning to their lives. Such fragmentary hints as we are given dress it up in the symbolism associated with religion. Godot's very name, of course, carries the echo of `God'; and his messenger, the boy-Child, describes him as having a white beard, evoking the Wise Old Man image associated with God to which Lucky explicitly refers in his mad monologue. But everything we hear about this shadowy figure indicates that he represents that archetype which had for so long been dropping ever further out of sight in western storytelling, the transforming power of the Self. The peculiar power of Waiting for Godot lies in how it expresses the moment when that process finally hits rock bottom. On a conscious level, we are presented with all the rootless emptiness of life when viewed just through the ego. But so far has its life-giving complement, the Self, now been driven into the unconscious that at last, in shadowy, mysterious form, it reappears; even if only as an off-stage presence with which the characters are doomed never to make contact. One of the central laws governing human psychology is that, whenever any powerful component of the psyche is not integrated, it does not just vanish. It remains buried in the unconscious, ready to re-emerge in some shadowy `inferior' form; and this is just as true of the most important archetype of them all, that representing human wholeness, as it is of any other. The special contribution of Waiting for Godot, which gave it its unique place in twentieth-century storytelling, was precisely that it evoked this missing Self more hauntingly than any other story of the age.
Never again was Beckett's work to refer to the lost Self in this way. From now on his plays merely expressed the emptiness of existence seen through the eyes of the ego, in ever sparser, more concentrated form. As an admirer of Proust, he produced the monologue Krapp's Last Tape (1958), in which a shabby old man forlornly tries to recapture the intensity of his earlier life by listening to recordings of his younger self. Happy Days (1961) shows an old woman buried up to her waist in a mound, obsessed with the contents of her handbag. Come and Go (1966) features three female characters in a text of only 121 words. Breath (1969), thirty seconds long, consists only of `a pile of rubbish, a breath and a cry'. And his final offering, Not 1 (1973), is no more than a `brief, fragmented, disembodied monologue delivered by an actor of indeterminate sex of whom only the "Mouth" is illuminated'.
In all this we might