Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006

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The Shape of the Beckettian Self: Godot  and the Jungian Mandala

by

Ioana Sion

University of Toronto

 This paper explores the ontological function of the four characters of Waiting for Godot in connection to Dante and analytical psychology, and finally focuses on the emerging model of the immanent, universal soul of contemporary man proposed by the playwright. In order to determine the identity of Pozzo and Lucky, Vladimir and Estragon, I will rely on Jungian theories of the self.  According to Eva Metman, “Beckett leads us into a deep regression from all civilised tradition, in which consciousness sinks back into an earlier state of its development” (Metman 1965, 129), to its ground zero, to the dissolution of the conscious personality into its functional components. Jung compares this inward regression to a descent into Hell. Godot’s infernal characters appear as the four archetypal components of contemporary man, a dismembered human image of the modern world.

Martin Esslin and other commentators have pointed out that Didi (the practical one) and Gogo (the poet), as well as Pozzo (master) and Lucky (slave), on a more primitive level, have complementary personalities.  I would argue that the two pairs reflect the two possible ways of living: the active (Pozzo and Lucky) and the contemplative (Estragon and Vladimir), one awake and one in a state of twilight, one anchored in reality (extrovert), the other removed from reality (introvert). Pozzo is supposedly able to decipher the twilight for the benefit of his companions: “I have talked to them about this and that, I have explained the twilight, admittedly” (26).

Waiting for Godot, according to John Calder, gives us a “realistic portrait of love as companionship, a bonding that will last as long as the protagonists survive” (Calder 2001, 59). Most of Beckett’s protagonists can only function in pairs: Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell of Endgame, Winnie and Willie of Happy Days, Bom and Pim of How it is, Mercier and Camier, again echoing Dante’s famous couples: Paolo and Francesca, Ulysses and Diomedes, Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri. The Beckettian protagonists are “glued two by two together” (Beckett 1964, 121), and take turns in acting as tormentor and tormented. In the case of Didi and Gogo the roles are interchangeable. As for Pozzo and Lucky, their roles seem to be fixed, only to be partly reversed in act 2, where Lucky is actually guiding Pozzo. Their progress from one role to another is reminiscent of the semicircular movement of the avaricious and the prodigal in the fourth circle of the Inferno, who clash together when they meet.

In Dante…Bruno. Vico…Joyce (1929), Beckett insists on the symbolism of the number three in Dante’s Comedy. Beckett himself had a similar preoccupation, according to James Knowlson. He argues that, for instance, Murphy pictures his mind in terms of three zones: hellish light, hellish half-light, and darkness. In a later text, Lessness (1969), the number “four” appears twice or even four times on each page in the following combinations: “four square”, “four walls”, ”in four split asunder”.

With Godot (1953), we witness the abandonment of the trinity in favour of a quaternity, shaped by the two couples. Moreover, the four Beckettian characters form a quaternity inscribed in a circle, a quadratura circuli or mandala. According to Carl Jung, the quaternity is an archetype of universal occurrence, and is also a valid pattern in analytic psychology. As Jung explains in Psychology and Religion, the mandala is the ultimate reconciling symbol, it expresses completeness and union of the four elements or archetypes of the psyche, it unites the wholeness of the celestial circle and the squareness of the earth, God and man. Jung clarifies as follows the concept of quadratura circuli – the way from chaos to unity:

The squaring of the circle was a problem that greatly exercised medieval minds. It is a symbol of the opus alchymicum, since it breaks down the original chaotic unity into the four elements and then combines them again in a higher unity. Unity is represented by a circle, and the four elements by a square. The production of the one from four is the result of a process of distillation and sublimation, which takes the so-called ‘circular’ form: the distillate is subjected to sundry distillations so that the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ shall be extracted in its purest state. (Jung 1968, 124)

Mandalas are unconsciously summoned up in periods of crisis and have the therapeutic effect of re-establishing balance and order, of producing a new centre of personality. As Susan D. Brienza indicated, in a later mime, Quad (Quadrat, parts I and II, 1981-2), the four characters rhythmically draw mandala pictures that reveal concentric circles and include four quadrants. The dancers’ counter-clockwise pacing evokes Jung’s patient’s leftward movement, which is equivalent to a progress towards the unconscious. They desperately attempt to achieve “centering” and reinstate order and peace, to abolish the separation between the unconscious and the conscious mind. Jung regards the archetypal image of the mandala as depicting the centralizing process of individuation. The ritual diagram is not only used in Buddhism and Hinduism as an aid to contemplation but is also one of the oldest religious symbols of humanity.

In 1956, Jackson Pollock made three attempts to watch the play in New York. On his second approach, he told Ruth Kligman, his companion: “Waiting for Godot is the most important play I’ve seen. It’s abstract.” During Lucky’s speech “he started to cry, really cry, and then the crying turned to sobs and then it went into heartbreaking moans” (Kligman 1974, 69). The extra-linguistic, unconscious element had triggered the artist’s swift visual grasp, followed by a therapeutic, necessary heart-breaking cry of purification. His eyes were closed and he seemed lost in a transcendental trance, not realizing where he was. Nothing could stop him, and so they had to leave the theatre because his crying was so tumultuous - as if his heart was breaking. In my opinion, this is the perfect example of a reaction manifested by somebody who has grasped the vision of Beckett’s mandala play.

The mental image I had when first reading the play was that of a cross inscribed in a circle. It was this sudden grasp that prompted me to explore Jung’s mandalas in connection to Godot. The author’s drawings of stage movements from various productions (mainly the 1975 Berlin production he directed) contained in his rehearsal notebooks preserved at the University of Reading, display the very geometrical signs that I imagined. Interestingly enough, there is an abundance of crosses and circles scattered throughout his Green Notebook and Schiller-Theater Regiebuch, as if he had been haunted by the same image (see Green Notebook, pp. 23, 26, 32, 50, 58, 61; Regiebuch: pp. 8, 30, 32, 36, 40). A series of circular and linear approaches to the tree and the stone forms Beckett’s subliminal stage imagery, according to Dougald McMillan. John Calder also emphasises that:

cruciform designs abound, both in the wakes of the characters and the crossed heaps of bodies when Pozzo falls in the second act and is unable to rise. Besides crosses there are many circles to describe how the characters should move around the stage, and the origin of these is Dante’s concentric circles of hell. (Calder 2001, 90-1)

Peggy Phelan, in an article in the PMLA from October 2004, describes her explorations in finding the real painting behind Beckett’s play - the one that she conjured up when first reading the play, which would possibly coincide with the one Beckett had as inspiration for the play. Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic paintings Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819) and Man and Woman Observing the Moon (1820) are according to Ruby Cohn the source for the play. Knowlson maintains that Jack Butler Yeats’s The Two Travellers (1942) is the one, and Marilyn Gaddis Rose proposes Yeats’s Men of the Plain (1947). Phelan is convinced that Yeats’s The Graveyard Wall (1945) is the true source of inspiration and that Beckett most likely saw the painting in the artist’s studio that year. The spiritual kinship between Yeats and Beckett is indisputable, however, in my opinion, the play is most “abstract”, totally detached from the figurative. Concentric, geometrical images are more in tone with Beckett’s philosophical-mathematical mind, and his visual discourse inspired by l’esprit de géometrie. The movements of act 1 trace one half of the circle, and those of act 2, the other half. Three times in each act, Vladimir and Estragon take curvilinear and rectilinear walks between the tree and the stone. Beckett’s major structural device, according to Dougald McMillan, is the recurrent “configuration of arcs and chords forming two halves of the circle” (McMillan 1988, 99).

Phelan insists on Beckett’s “biocularity” and his continuous translation between visual and textual: “He was both bilingual and biocular, as it were: he saw the visual as worded and he understood that the act of speaking inevitably created a pictorial image” (Phelan 2004, 1285). According to Beckett, understanding comes through a “sudden visual grasp, a sudden shot of the eye” (Beckett 1984, 125). One way of gaining instant access to the non-lingustic self is through vision. In the radio plays, for instance in Cascando, Words and Music, he will explore another access channel, sound, the ultimate imageless language of emotion. Sight and sound will occasionally grant sudden apprehensions of the wholeness of being. For Beckett, writing can be equated to seeing, it is a visual art that aspires to the ideal status of music: “music is the idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena” (Beckett 1965a, 92). In Godot, a new dramatic vocabulary arises from the combination of spoken and visual language, as Beckett dramatizes his vision of the modern self.

The four archetypal personalities or the four aspects of the soul are grouped in two pairs: the ego and the shadow, the persona and the soul’s image (animus or anima). The shadow is the container of all our despised emotions repressed by the ego. Lucky, the shadow serves as the polar opposite of the egocentric Pozzo, prototype of prosperous mediocrity, who incessantly controls and persecutes his subordinate, thus symbolising the oppression of the unconscious shadow by the despotic ego. Lucky’s monologue in act 1 appears as a manifestation of a stream of repressed unconsciousness, as he is allowed to “think” for his master. Estragon’s name has another connotation, besides that of the aromatic herb, tarragon: “estragon” is a cognate of estrogen, the female hormone (Carter 1997, 130). This prompts us to identify him with the anima, the feminine image of Vladimir’s soul. It explains Estragon’s propensity for poetry, his sensitivity and dreams, his irrational moods. Vladimir appears as the complementary masculine principle, or perhaps the rational persona of the contemplative type. A possible interpretation emerges: the Pozzo-Lucky couple parodies the average, collective ego (Pozzo), and its shadow (Lucky), representatives of an invalid normality, while the other couple, the persona and image of the contemplative soul of the poet, which is above the average: Vladimir (persona) and his feminine counterpart, Estragon (anima). The four archetypes of the psyche re-establish a traditional prototype for the modern consciousness as a mix between the active and contemplative types, between the Western and Eastern models, between the “historical vision of humanity seen as the perpetuation of Cain and Abel,” and the timeless, “non-historical humanity of the two tramps” (Strauss 1959, 257), associated with the highly developed spirit of the meditative poet and with Jesus, the most accomplished archetype of the self.

“Everything is dead, but the tree…” (59B). The tree by which Vladimir and Estragon are supposed to encounter Godot recalls the Edenic tree of life or the cross – the only symbol that comes alive in the midst of the deserted landscape of this Ante-Inferno. It is the only visible emblem of our four characters, itself a quaternity, the central point around which all four gravitate, the symbol of the self placed at the centre of the mandala. As Jung acknowledges, “the central Christian symbol, the Cross, is unmistakably a quaternity”(Jung 1995, 53). In the Gospel of Nicodemus, the tree of knowledge is a pre-figuration of the cross: “What was lost through the tree of knowledge was redeemed through the tree of the cross” (Gounelle 1997, 199). In act 2, Didi and Gogo “do the tree” which can be defined as “doing the cross”. Ruby Cohn suggested that this was a version of a yoga exercise.

 VLADIMIR: You're right. (Pause.) Let's just do the tree, for the balance.

 ESTRAGON: The tree?

Vladimir does the tree, staggering about on one leg.

VLADIMIR:  (stopping). Your turn.

Estragon does the tree, staggers.

ESTRAGON: Do you think God sees me?

 VLADIMIR: You must close your eyes.

Estragon closes his eyes, staggers worse.

ESTRAGON: (stopping, brandishing his fists, at the top of his voice.) God have pity on me!

VLADIMIR:  (vexed). And me?

ESTRAGON: On me! On me! Pity! On me!    (49-49B)

The two tramps re-enact the crucifixion scene, in the attempt of attracting the final divine judgement that would sentence them to proper Hell or possibly, would grant salvation. Their supplication to God echoes the thief’s appeal to Christ for mercy. According to St. Augustin, Bishop of Hippo, the cross symbolises a judgement place: “Nevertheless even the cross itself, if thou considerest it well, was a judgement seat; for the Judge being set up in the middle, one thief who believed was delivered, the other who reviled was condemned” (St. Augustin 1848-9, 124). Vladimir and Estragon, the contemplative archetypes (focussing on the speculative mode of knowing) envision the judgement place where they are, while Pozzo and Lucky, the more primitive, active archetypes (pursuing the experiential mode of knowing) embark on a journey in space to meet their judgement.  While judgement occurs in the second case, it will be deferred endlessly for the first pair.

Pozzo and Lucky are tied to their journey in time and space, to movement, to Purgatory, while the other two to the stasis of the Inferno. Unlike Didi and Gogo, Pozzo consults his watch repeatedly and seems to follow a schedule (24B, 25). The opposition stasis-movement emerges as central to Beckett’s definition of the two realms: “In the absolute absence of the Absolute, Hell is the static lifelessness of unrelieved viciousness. Paradise the static lifelessness of unrelieved immaculation. Purgatory a flood of movement and vitality released by the conjunction of these two elements” (Beckett 1992, 125-6). Belacqua, impersonated by Didi and Gogo, is described by Benvenuto da Imola (ca. 1375) and Anonimo Fiorentino (ca. 1400) to have replied to Dante’s reproaches with Aristotle’s dictum: “Sedendo et quiescendo, anima efficitur sapiens.” Aristotle’s words “are in praise of the contemplative life, which throughout the Middle Ages was the highest goal, the life closest to God” (Caselli 1997, 88).  If, during the Middle Ages, contemplative life was an acceptable excuse for indolence, in Beckett’s era it is punished with Ante-Inferno. Paradoxically, the primitive, average life of the other couple is punished with Ante-Purgatory. The two vestibules coincide for a brief moment.

The multiplicity of references to the Divina Commedia frequently provokes the desire to identify individual works with one realm or the other. And yet, because reference to both may coexist in a single work, no direct and consistent parallel can be maintained. (Robinson 1979, 70)

All sources are blended in the integral consistency of Beckett’s oeuvre. “Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping” (Beckett 1992, 107). However, our disposition to devise theories and detect symbols incessantly produces an array of analogies. Although the ones presented here might appear to some extent vulnerable, there is enough textual evidence that Dante is unequivocally present in the Beckettian play as well as the unique sub/version of his concept of neutrality, once again revealing Beckett’s lifetime dialogue with the Florentine poet. As the Dantesque model shapes Joyce’s entire oeuvre, according to Joseph Campbell, Dante provides once more the inevitable background for Beckett’s writing. Christopher Ricks, among many, acknowledges that “from first to last, Dante was crucial to the author whose final days at the end of 1989 were spent with a copy of The Divine Comedy” (Ricks 1995, 27).

The play contains a multitude of possible symbols and lends itself to a great number of interpretations concomitantly valid and invalid. For instance, I will mention two controversial ones, one based on a quaternity, the other on a trinity. According to Guy Christian Barnard, Beckett’s four characters can be associated with William Blake’s four Zoas or functions of the psyche, outlined in his Prophetic Books: Imagination (Estragon), Thought (Lucky), Feeling (Vladimir), Sensation (Pozzo).  Man’s fall arose because these functions could not maintain a harmonious balance and warred against each other. Barnard maintains that Beckett provides a different version of the same conflict within the split psyche.

In a quite different vein, Bernard Dukore develops a triadic theory in “Didi, Gogo and the absent Godot,” based on Freud’s trinitarian description of the psyche in “The Ego and the Id” (1923) and the usage of onomastic techniques. Dukore defines the characters by what they lack: the rational Go-go embodies the incomplete ego, the missing pleasure principle: (e)go-(e)go. Di-di (id-id), who is more instinctual and irrational, is seen as the backward id or subversion of the rational principle. Godot fulfils the function of the superego or moral standards. Pozzo and Lucky are just re-iterations of the main protagonists. Dukore finally sees Beckett’s play as a metaphor for the futility of man’s existence when salvation is expected from an external entity, and the self is denied introspection. Subsequently, Endgame underwent the same type of analysis: Clov was identified with the ego, Hamm with the id and Nagg and Nell, the parental authority, with the superego.  I will conclude by returning to the present interpretation, equally in/valid.

In an interview with Tom F. Driver, Samuel Beckett stated:

The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates.  To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. (Beckett/Driver 1961, 23)

It is the form that endures, after the content details are no longer certain. In my view, it is the shape of the quaternity that sticks to mind, after the forming elements become indistinct, and individual explanations are blurred. After witnessing the staged play, we are pursued by images of the circling or encircled tetrad, the pain of squaring the circle or of perceiving line and arc as identical.

The quaternity is reducible to binary structures: two pairs of characters with interchangeable roles inside each unit. Besides the two couples on stage, the play displays further binary constructions: the two parts of the self - linguistic and extra-linguistic, the two repetitive acts of the play, the boy and his double, the two thieves, the self (a multiple of two) and its Doppelgänger, Godot, representing the other - the unique counterpoint of the quaternary self. Ultimately, each character or element has a double “other” that cancels the first component of the pair, and the play aspires to be the metaphor of neutrality itself. Vladimir and Estragon can be associated to Dante’s neutrals from the waiting room of Inferno 3, Pozzo and Lucky to the fallen angels from the same canto. The Doppelgänger motif structures the play as much as the quaternity defines the self. The Boy, or the pair of boys - the one who minds the sheep and the other that minds the goats - is the go between the self and the other, the connecting or disconnecting element between the four characters onstage and the offstage world of the whole other.

Beckett’s text works indefatigably against our need for distinct meaning and logical interpretation. The play is a fusion of opposites, or a subversion of one by the other, it merges tragedy and comedy, anguish and exhilaration, doom and salvation, division and synthesis of the four partitions of the circle. It oscillates between two poles, or juxtaposes them: self and other, memory and oblivion, motion and stasis, progress and regress, presence and absence, zero and wholeness, totality and nothingness. The zero encapsulates a totality, it is symbolised by a circle and represents the completion of the cycle of life. Beckett dramatises the impossibility of unity while celebrating the existence of the one as the other side of the zero, of Godot, as the whole equivalent of the partitioned self. The four parts of the self are reshaped “into a collage/montage which is itself the degree zero of psychic unity and semantic plurality” (Anzieu 1994, 32). Beckett’s neutrals aspire to the point zero where all difference is neutralised and wholeness is attained. Just as Dante uses Satan’s fall from heaven, which created the Mountain of Purgatory on the other side of earth, as the means by which humankind can return to heaven, Beckett uses the parable of the zero soul as a means by which the reader/spectator can retrace the path to wholeness.

Beckett inverts the Sartrian notion that: “modern man’s inability, or refusal, to make choices defines his Hell” (Cuddy 1982, 49), by suggesting that precisely the refusal to make choices can lead to ultimate transcendence. The annihilation of the evil will and the purging of desire can be beneficent. Neutrality is a punishable sin as well as a first step outside the cycle of life. Being unrepentant about one’s passivity acquires a heroic quality. Non-action, losing the “good of the intellect”, neutralising the will power, getting rid of all social rights and constraints instils a sense of calm, of integration of the self within the cosmos.

Beckett’s drama emerges as a ritual preparation for the journey beyond life and death. At a second glance, Gogo and Didi’s Ante-Inferno appears as a reward and not a punishment, an elevated mental space of waiting for spiritual rebirth. Their “sin” stimulates ritual regeneration and not the degeneration of their human condition. The lukewarm, scorned by life and death have the chance to exit the endless cycle of incarnation and excarnation. Pozzo and Lucky’s Ante-Purgatory emerges as the real damnation within the inescapable cycle – disintegration followed by physical rebirth. Dante’s concept of neutrality is subverted, the grim waiting room becomes a necessary stage in the process of individuation and renewal.

Through the re-enactment on stage of a modern mandala within a Dantesque frame, Beckett’s play provides not just a metaphor for our existence, but acquires a metaphysical quality of transformation and regeneration. It conjures up spiritual rebirth while performing a ritual of inner descent to the central point zero or wholeness of being. In times of crisis, Beckett attempts the healing of the modern soul by summoning up old archetypes, which have the therapeutic effect of re-establishing balance and order. As usual, Beckett’s audience is confronted with a paradox: as they behold four clownish tramps, dissociated and neutralised fragments of humanity on the verge of disintegration, they are magically placed within a protective circle.  Instead of leaving the spectator or reader vulnerable and depressed, the playwright’s stern, agonising vision often provokes quite the opposite effect. The zero of extreme despair equals the one of extreme hope. The reconciling vision of Godot’s mandala provides a feeling of harmony and guides us inwards and downwards to the ultimate centre of our self.

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