COL49 _Courier's Tragedy_

[jbor]

on 8/20/01 5:22 AM, MalignD at aol.com at MalignD at aol.com wrote:

> <<But the "promiser" in _Godot_ is surely "Godot" himself, in whose existence
> and appearance there is a persistent faith, for want of a better term, just
> as the "promiser" in _Lot49_ is Pierce Inverarity.>>
> 
> Faith in Godot's existence and appearance doesn't vouchsafe that existence.

Nor does Oedipa's "projection" vouchsafe the existence or persistence of
Inverarity's "legacy". Each time Vlad and Est are about to lose all hope and
give up the ghost along comes Pozzo or "the Boy" to recorroborate Godot's
existence and imminence for them, almost tauntingly. Same sort of external
insistence for Oedipa in the accumulation of signs and signallers: Metzger,
Driblette, Cohen, Bortz.

All of Beckett's works rewrite _Godot_ to a large degree, and each one
denies its audience what Frank Kermode astutely called "the sense of an
ending". In _Lot49_ Pynchon is tossing the same ball around, in my opinion.

> It is that Godot doesn't exist and will surely not come but is awaited anyway
> because, finally, there's nothing else to do, (I can't go on, I'll go on)
> that gives the situation it's power, that makes it tragic and absurd.  Pierce
> Inverarity is (in the reality of the novel) an actual person, now deceased.
> He may have done no more than name Oedipa executor of his will.  I find the
> comparison strained.

Fair enough. I didn't and don't, and I'm inclined to agree with those
critics who read Stoppard's early work as deriving from Beckett and
absurdism. It's a difference of opinion we can both live with I'm sure.
 
> <<Stoppard himself hasn't gone much beyond expressing admiration for Beckett
> ...>>
> 
> In fact he's spoken a fair amount about Beckett and his influence, which he
> decribes as stylistic and theatrical, not philosophical.  In one interview he
> said:
> 
> "I can see a lot of Beckettian things in all my work, but they're not
> actually to do with the image of two lost souls waiting for something to
> happen, which is why most people connect Rosencrantz with Waiting for Godot
> because they had this scene in common ... I wasn't thinking so much of what
> [Beckett's plays] are about so much as the way in which Beckett expresses
> himself and the bent of his humour.  I find Beckett deliciously funny ..."

Yes, I'm familiar with what Stoppard has said. I read the above as an
attempt to play down a rather obvious influence rather than any definitive
proof that _Godot_ was not influential. I'm not certain how easy it is or
would be to divorce the stylistic and theatrical from the philosophical, and
this is certainly something which comes up in the discussions between Oedipa
and Driblette and Oedipa, Bortz and his students in the novel, and also in
Beckett's comments about the productions of his plays. The reaction to
_Godot_ was quite phenomenal: it was enormously influential across the
board.

> <<The film version of _Ros and Guil_ which Stoppard directed? The
> 'Shakespeare in Love' screenplay?>>
> 
> I was thinking of theater work.

I wasn't sure. _Ros and Guil_ is generally regarded as his "major" play. It
is also generally regarded as absurdist, which was my point.

Principles from J-J. Bernard's Theatre of Silence and Artaud's Theatre of
Cruelty are both referenced prominently in the way that the performance of
_The Courier's Tragedy_ is modulated in the text of _Lot49_. I don't find it
a stretch at all to bring Beckett and Arrabal into that mix, whatever labels
one does or doesn't wish to apply to their work. Same with Stoppard:

    Stoppard does, of course, readily discuss the play's allegiance to
    _Hamlet_ but argues that _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern_ is much more
    than a Shakespearean pastiche like the burlesque one-act he wrote two
    years prior to the play, _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear_.

http://www.arts.ilstu.edu/shakespeare/research/rosencrantz.html

That'd be 1964-ish. Ros and Guil were also envoys, messengers, supposed to
"deliver" Hamlet from his madness. Theirs was a "tragedy" very much the
result of a lost or thwarted message. In terms of length, scale and theme
I'm more inclined to look back at 'Prufrock' rather than _The Wasteland_ and
'Bartleby' instead of _Moby Dick_.

best