Instructor: Walter Metz

Lecture: "Intertextuality and the Modernist Text: Sitcoms and Waiting for Godot"

Since this is a class comprised mostly of film students rather than theatre students, I want to attempt to ask questions about plays that will illuminate the similarities and differences between the theatre and the media that we are more familiar with (notably, film and television). To do so, I will pursue what I am calling an "Intertextual Method." A critic performs an intertextual analysis when he or she compares a text under study to another text. In today’s case, I want to make a few claims as to how we can understand Waiting For Godot in a new way through intertextual criticism.

There are a number of kinds of intertextuality. Most commonly, critics talk about intertexts which are referred to within the text itself. This is called "referential intertextuality." Waiting for Godot activates a number of referential intertexts.

Referential Intertexts in Waiting for Godot

1. Lucky’s tirade (on page 45) is a parody of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Critics have made this claim largely because it was Beckett to whom the blind Joyce dictated the novel. Beyond this, the lyrical, rambling language in Finnegan’s Wake is replicated by Lucky’s tirade. The larger question is, What does it mean that Lucky, who hasn’t spoken a word up until this point, is the most voluminous, and most poetic, talker in the entire play? What are we to make of this?
2. Of course, intertextual criticism can work from another point of view. That is, Waiting for Godot can serve as an intertext for a subsequent play. Part of the work in this class is to build up our experience with the history of theatre to such a point that we will be noticing these intertextual connections. One example of this will be how Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead reworks William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the case of Godot, we will find that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America replicates Beckett’s absurdist use of an unexpected sexuality. Vladimir gets excited about the prospect of hanging himself because it will give him an erection (page 12). This sort of sexual play is replicated in Angels: whenever the angel appears, the man to whom it appears experiences an erection.

But not all intertexts are referential. Instead, intertexts can be grounded in forging connections between seemingly disparate sorts of texts. I should like to call this sort of intertextuality, "imaginative intertextuality." I have a few examples of how imaginative intertextuality might help us come to identify with Godot more fully.

Godot is a comedy, yet few students I encounter find it very enjoyable, much less laugh-out-loud funny. Beckett describes the play as a tragicomedy. What does this mean? The play immediately works to break down our organizing principle for the history of theatre: plays are either comedies or tragedies (this is how we divide Shakespeare’s plays, for instance). So, what makes Godot a tragicomedy? It combines simultaneously the tragic with the comic. For me, the best example of this is when Estragon takes off his belt to hang himself and his pants fall down (page 108). At one and the same moment, a character is in such tragic despair that suicide seems the only option, and yet the moment is funny because it uses one of the classic sight-gags in the comedic tradition.

The tragic nature of Godot is perhaps more obvious (the characters obsess about the futility of their existences). The comedic moments are a bit more difficult to spot, so I will suggest some possibilities.

Comic Moments in Waiting For Godot

• Page 7 features a typical bit of questioning without getting any answers. If you recall the Abbott and Costello routine, "Who’s on First?," we have found a suitable imaginative intertext that will help us understand Godot’s comedy.

CLIP #1:  The Abbott and Costello Show: The "Who's on First?" Routine

• Like most low-brow humor, the comedy of Godot relies heavily on "scatology" (otherwise repressed human bodily functions). My favorite is contained in Lucky’s speech, where he stumbles over the words "academy" and "anthropometry", converting them into scatalogical references. In a favorite of students, the academy becomes the a-caca-caca-medy! (page 45). The conversation stopping, "Who farted?" (page 93) is also a useful example of Godot’s scatological humor.

• The play is also full of more conventional jokes [The "Loud Speaking Gag" (page 84)] and visual sight-gag routines [The "Hat Switching Gag" (page 80)].   The play also uses many moments which are set up according to the classical conventions of comedy:  for example, the unexpected results from the expected.

CLIP #2:  The Immigrant (Charlie Chaplin, 1915): Opening

Given Godot’s comedic nature, I thought it would be a good idea to pursue our most common form of theatrical comedy, the sitcom, in reference to the play. I have chosen "The Chinese Restaurant" episode of Seinfeld to make this imaginative intertextual comparison. In both Godot and Seinfeld, the characters wait for the entire narrative. Does it matter that they are waiting for different things? Is Seinfeld any less absurd than Godot? Why do we "like" Seinfeld more than Godot? DO we like Seinfeld more than Godot? Why or why not? Is Godot about something more weighty than Seinfeld? What?

CLIP #3:  Seinfeld ("The Chinese Restaurant")

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This page was last updated on June 16, 2001

Questions or Comments?  Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send an e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman