Waiting for Godot

 Thinking Activity: Waiting for Godot

"Why you should read Waiting for Godot"  

Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights originally Wrote “Waiting for Godot” in 1949 in French as “En attendant Godot”, later translated into English in 1954. This play has been performed as an absurd drama after the Second World War. As Martin Esslin addressed this play as, “One of the successes of the Post-war theatre” (Esslin). In this play two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for Someone known as Godot, who does not make an appearance throughout the play. The play begins with waiting for Godot and ends with waiting for Godot. The Subject of the play is waiting rather than Godot.

ESTRAGON

Let's go!

VLADIMIR

We can't.

ESTRAGON

Why not?

VLADIMIR

We're waiting for Godot.

ESTRAGON

(despairingly) Ah!

In act I Estragon said: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!” this becomes one of the themes and central ideas of the play as well as of the Twentieth Century.

 In Beckett’s this play, we can find the bourgeois ideology of late modernism. Vladimir and Estragon encounter Pozzo and Lucky, they discuss their miseries and consider hanging themselves, but they ended up waiting for Godot. They do not know why they were put on the earth, they are seeking existence, and they wait for Godot for enlightenment, it is salvation for them. The play begins and ends with the same words. Its final lines are: "Well, shall we go. / Yes, let's go. / (They do not move)."

[In both the acts speaker changes]

The nature of time is also an interesting subject of the play, for some and boring for others in the play. Time moves in a cycle, with the same events recurring repeatedly. The characters are living in a never-ending loop. Vladimir, who remembers everything knows that they have been there the other day to wait for Godot, but Estragon remembers nothing. If we look at the plot, both the acts are almost similar, it would be possible to increase the number of acts with this technique of Beckett.

In both Acts, evening falls into night and the moon rises. How would you like to interpret this ‘coming of night and moon’ when actually they are waiting for Godot?

The classic interpretation of night and dark represents death. The falling of night is as much a reprieve from daily suffering as death is from the suffering of a lifetime.

Unlike traditional literature, where the falling of the night and rising of the moon is regarded as bad omens, evening fades into night and the moon rises. However, in this play, everything is different because it was created in the modern era when writers/artists were defying every rule and regulation of tradition and that is one of the many reasons. 

There’s also the issue of the moon, as its appearance in the sky is the real signal that night has come and the men can stop waiting for Godot.  

Estragon, in act I comments, the moon is "pale for weariness […] of climbing heaven and gazing on the likes of us." Though the man who remembers nothing of yesterday, he does at this moment seem to comprehend the endless repetition of his life.  And if the moon is weary just from watching, imagine what that says about the predicament of the men themselves.

If we look at the falling of night and the rise of the moon, we can perceive it in two ways. One is that the moon is providing some form of relief to them since it is the end of the day and thus the end of the waiting. The other way to look at it is with hope because Godot did not appear and there is still a chance that he will appear the next day. 

It is exactly similar to what we do throughout our life. We, humans, are accustomed to the cycle of the sun. We go to work at sunrise and come back at sunset. As soon as the moon rises we fall asleep. well, not in times like this but that is what people used to do. But the sleep through the moonrise gives them another stress and that is another day of waiting.

W. B. Yeats' Poems

 Thinking Activity: W. B. Yeats' Poems

This blog is a response to the thinking activity assigned by Dr Dilip Barad Sir. In this blog, I am going to find the pandemic element and background in Yeats' poem "The Second Coming"

Pandemic Reading of "The Second Coming"

The Second Coming is one of Yeats’ famous poems, written in 1919 soon after the end of World War I. As the title suggests, it describes the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yeats is giving the mysterious and powerful alternative of the Christian idea of the second coming like Jesus’s prophesied to return to the earth as a saviour 

What is the Second Coming?

The Second Coming was the religious teaching of the Catholic Church which stated that Christ would return to the Earth for the final judgment. During the Middle Ages, the idea of the second coming was of great importance to people and was widely discussed, from the Church to the people.

The Title:

This poem is very complex to understand and is debatable. At first, the critics criticize the title of the poem. According to them, the title is against Christian belief. Athletic remarked that the title of Yeats’ poem is not even a misnomer but a misleading device for conferring upon the poem a range of reference and imaginative power that it does not possess and cannot sustain. The poem should have been called“The Second Birth” which is the wording Yeats first employs in its draft. According to the critic, by giving the title of“The Second Coming”. Instead of the second birth, Yeats disgraces the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

 

Pandemic Reading:

Nowadays the pandemic reading is very easy as we are going through the Covid-19 Pandemic. Before our times no one has ever thought about the possibility of reading this poem through the pandemic lens. Many have always seen it through religious or anti-religious poems. Many writers have talked about the war aspect of the modern era, but we find very few works that include the impact that pandemic has made on the respective era.

We can find some works like Elizabeth Outka’s “Viral Modernism: The influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature”. The book looks at the small group of authors who addressed the pandemic head-on in their work but also argues the works of some of the great writers like T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf. W. B. Yeats was deeply affected by the pandemic. By combining literary analysis with the flu history Outka is making clear that the pandemic wasn’t Forgotten it just went underground.

Why diseases are recorded differently than War in Our Mind:

Diseases are recorded differently by our mind than something like war. Both the situations are different but a massive amount of death is certain in both. Diseases are highly individual, where you are fighting your own battle. War is Different from pandemic by nature because nations fight each other. War is something that nations and politics give importance to and respect the deaths of the soldiers. Whereas in Contagious diseases people must maintain their distance, it creates a different fear among people. To record the massive impact of the pandemic is a very difficult process, you can record the economic loss, to keep the records of the dead bodies which is something beyond tangible in times like pandemic, is too difficult. 

The Second Coming Poem and the Pandemic:

The Second Coming was published in the year 1919, if we investigate the history of pandemics, we can find The Spanish Flu or the Great Influenza epidemic had struck in the year 1918 and two years later, nearly a third of the global population, estimated 500 million people was affected. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it the second deadliest pandemic in human history.

Elizabeth Outka Writes, “In November 1918, at the height of the pandemic’s deadly second wave, W. B. Yeats watched helplessly as his pregnant wife, George, struggled to fight off the virus at their rented house in Dublin.” (Outka) In this pandemic unlike so many pregnant women of the time, George Survived coming on the verge of death. Further, as Outka writes, “Just a few weeks later, during his wife’s recovery, Yeats wrote arguably his most famous poem, “The Second Coming,” one widely read as channelling the zeitgeist of its turbulent moment." (Outka)

Where can we find such a thing in the poem?

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.” (1-8)

Turning and turning can be seen as the symptoms of a disease, things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, can be read as the body is going through intense pain and dizziness it might because of that reasons 'Centre' (mind) not control the body. ‘The blood-dimmed tide’ could be related to influenza and ‘The ceremony of Innocence is drowned’ could be related to the death of the newborn/yet to born baby or mother by the flu.

Work Cited:

Outka, Elizabeth. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. , 2020. Internet resource.

Yeats, W.B,. "The Second Coming By William Butler Yeats | Poetry Foundation". Poetry Foundation, 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming.

Existentialism

 Flipped Learning: Existentialism

This blog is a Flipped Learning task on the philosophy of Existentialism, assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this task we have to watch video resources, which is available on teacher's blog, to understand the concept of Existentialism and ask questions from/related to the videos or the philosophy of existentialism

What is Existentialism?

"A philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will." (Oxford)

"A system of ideas made famous by Jean Paul Sartre in the 1940s in which the world has no meaning and each person is alone and completely responsible for their own actions, by which they make their own character." (Cambridge)

 

Existentialism is a philosophy that emphasizes individual existence, freedom and choice. It is the view that humans define their own meaning in life, and try to make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational universe. It focuses on the question of human existence and the feeling that there is no purpose or explanation at the core of existence. It holds that, as there is no God or any other transcendent force, the only way to counter this nothingness (and hence to find meaning in life) is by embracing existence.

In short an individual trying to find what is the meaning of life and if the answer is nothing or life is meaningless then he/she might try to commit suicide. Just like the character in the following video.

The above video is from the Japanese Animation Series Called Naruto Shippuden adapted from Masashi Kishimoto's original manga series, Naruto. In this video Itachi (little boy) have seen/fought in the war (Great Ninja War). At a very little age, he is trying to understand why everybody killing each other. He asked his father why did he try to kill me? his father replied, "It is the war between nations, that's why strangers kill each other meaninglessly, that is what shinobi world is." Later at the graveyard, he asks another person who is standing aside and says, "grieving over the dead is meaningless". Itachi did find an answer from him that is 'There is no meaning in life if it is not eternal'. Further in the video, we can see him attempting suicide, that's what existentialists call 'Leap'.

I like the fifth video 'Existentialism: a gloomy philosophy’, because whenever we hear about the theory of Existentialism the first thing that comes to our mind is a depressed person who can not find any reason or purpose worth living life so he bends towards the thought of committing suicide. it seems a negative subject. But this video is showing the complete picture that why it is not a negative subject.

Theory of Archetypes

 Thinking Activity: Theory of Archetypes

This blog is a response to the thinking activity assigned by Dr Dilip Barad sir. In this blog, I will discuss Archetypal criticism and Northrop Frye's Archetypes of Literature.

What is Archetypal Criticism? What does the archetypal critic do?

Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works. The word came from the Greek archē, "beginning", and typos, "imprint". 

"In literary criticism, the term archetype denotes narrative designs, patterns of action, character types, themes, and images that recur in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even social rituals."

It dates back to 1934 when Classical scholar Maud Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. Archetypal criticism peaked in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, largely due to the work of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991).

The term was adopted and popularized by literary critics from the writings of the psychologist Carl Jung, who formulated a theory of a “Collective Unconscious.” For Jung, the variations of human experience have somehow been genetically coded and passed down through successive generations. These primitive image patterns and situations evoke surprisingly similar feelings in both the reader and the writer.

The first work on archetypal literary criticism applies Jung’s theories about the collective unconscious, archetypes, and primordial images to literature. But Northrop Frey theorized archetypal criticism as a purely literary term. Frey’s work is distinct from anthropological and psychoanalytical precursors, Frazer and Jung.

What is Frye trying to prove by giving an analogy of ' Physics to Nature' and 'Criticism to Literature'?

At the starting of the essay “The Archetypes of Literature,” Frey stated: “Every organized body of knowledge can be learned, and experience shows that there is also something progressive about the learning of literature” (Frey). In addition to that, he says that the opening sentence itself is semantically doubtful because,

“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not that he is learning nature. Art, like nature, is the subject of a systematic study and has to be distinguished from the study itself, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to “learn literature”: one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature." (Frey)

In this quote, he is proving that Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature. The students of physics can that he is learning physics not nature because physics is only a part of nature. Art is the subject of a systematic study, that’s why it is impossible to learn literature we only can study it which is criticism. So, we cannot expect literature to behave like science.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 Thinking Activity: "The Great Gatsby"

This is a thinking activity on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This task is assigned by Dr. Dilip Bard sir, after the movie screening of Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby.

The novel The Great Gatsby is written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was published in 1925. Set in Jazz Age New York. The novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, he tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth. Gatsby’s quest leads him from poverty to wealth, into the arms of his beloved and eventually to death. 

How did the film capture the Jazz Age - the Roaring Twenties of the America in 1920s?

“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” Fitzgerald famously wrote of the 1920s in a 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age.” 

The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles rapidly gained nationwide popularity in the United States. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. 

"Jazz’s lineage—difficult as it is to pin down—was tightly bound up with African-American performance, the music often came to signify black American cultural production, and so, whenever Fitzgerald invoked jazz, he was often, simultaneously, invoking blackness. Yet The Great Gatsby’s usage of jazz is complicated, as Fitzgerald was simultaneously a proponent of the then-new, race-crossing music and a writer prone to resorting to racial stereotypes when black characters appeared—a combination that, unfortunately, was far from uncommon in Fitzgerald’s day." (Bellot) 

 The Jazz age is also know as the Roaring Twenties of America. In the current times the Jazz music coincided a classic music/dance. In the movie it is mostly shown in the parties of the new self made millionaire and a mysterious character Jay Gatsby. 

How did the film help in understanding the symbolic significance of 'The Valley of Ashes', 'The Eyes of Dr. T J Eckleberg' and 'The Green Light'?

In both the novel and the movie The Eyes of Dr. T J Eckleberg is shown over the valley of ashes. Which appear on the advertising billboard of an oculist. these eyes are very significant in the novel and movie.These eyes almost become a moral conscience in the morally vacuous world of The Great Gatsby, to George Wilson, they are the eyes of God.

They are said to “brood” and “[keep] their vigil” over the valley, and they witness some of the most corrupt moments of the novel: Tom and Myrtle’s affair, Myrtle’s death, and the valley itself, full of America’s industrial waste and the toiling poor.However, in the end, they are another product of the materialistic culture of the age, set up by Doctor Eckleburg to “fatten his practice.” Behind them is just one more person trying to get rich. Their function as a divine being who watches and judges is thus ultimately null, and the novel is left without a moral anchor.

The movie starts with the scene of the ocean and the green light. The green light is the symbol of hope in the novel. This light is at Daisy's Dock.Throughout the novel, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is a recurrent image that beckons to Gatsby’s sense of ambition.

It is a symbol of “the orgastic future” he believes in so intensely, toward which his arms are outstretched when Nick first sees him.It is this “extraordinary gift for hope” that Nick admires so much in Gatsby, his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.”

In essence, the green light is an unattainable promise, one that Nick understands in universal terms at the end of the novel: a future we never grasp but for which we are always reaching.

The Ocean is not that much important in the novel but it is an archetype. The Archetype of Water in Northrop Frye’s Archetype of Literature: The water realm is Represented by rivers usually ends with comedy and the seas and floods signify the tragic end.

Thinking Activity: The Waste Land

This is a thinking activity on "The Waste Land" and its possible reading through various schools of thoughts. This task is assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir.

Introduction:

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is divided into five parts The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, and What the Thunder Said. The poem is written in a way that it seems, we are looking at the shattered mirror.  Eliot has used a lot of references from the various cultures and myths, that he had read throughout his life.

The title of the poem is very clear, The Waste Land. Eliot made this very clear that the poem is going to talk about some ‘Waste Land’ and the Waste Land here is ‘The West’ or the western society. As Eliot believes, in modern times western society was rotting and as a result, it became the ‘Waste Land’. 

This five-part poem is made up of a collage and it seems that we are looking at the shattered mirror. The shattered image reflects the same image, but the poem is showing us many things out of the five images. If we look at the thing deeply then we can say that Eliot is trying to show the same thing by these broken pieces. It is showing the brokenness and isolation of modern life. The other parts of the poem are showing death and rebirth, sex, perverseness, lust, religion, spirituality, nihilism, and the past.

1) What are your views on the following image after reading 'The Waste Land'? Do you think that Eliot is regressive as compared to Nietzsche's views? or Has Eliot achieved universality of thought by recalling mytho-historical answer to the contemporary malaise?

Eliot is using the myths of various cultures in The Waste Land. He believes that western society is so much involved in materialism and perverseness and lust, so he recalls myths and histories like Upanishad, Buddhism, and Christianity hoping that these moral stories will bring a change into the world. We can say that Eliot is a regressive and backwards-looking man who is trying to find the solution to the contemporary malaise in the past. Upanishad, Buddhism, Christianity and many such religious books and stories were written in the past for their time, where there could be more malaises that they had observed and to remove that they came up with these myths. These myths were supposed to remove that rot, but they failed to do so that is why we are still suffering from the same problems. That means roughly speaking, there is no guarantee that Eliot’s regressive and backward point of view is going to work. Because it will be very hard to argue with the regressive thought if the person is not religiously blind.

Friedrich Nietzsche is the opposite of Eliot. Nietzsche gave the concept of Übermensch (Superman) in “Also sprach Zarathustra” (1883-1885). According to Nietzsche, “Superman is an individual who has surpassed both the Christian morals and values of humanity and transcends pure rationality”. At the first glance, it seems that Nietzsche is also talking about his mythical creature than how different it is from Eliot?

Well, in this case, the answer is very simple Unlike Eliot Nietzsche believed that ‘God is Dead’ he thought that it was an old-fashioned idea of a less civilized society. Superman is beyond God and evil, he recognizes the morality that only exists concerning human beings. Nietzsche believed that the ‘Death of God’ led to Christianity and Christianity is an “evil-doer” and a “slave driver” which seeks to “break every will to power.” Christian morality was an obstacle to progress.

According to Russell: “The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms.”

Nietzsche believed that life ought to be lived without any religious faith. As he said: “He who has given himself his law, lives most pleasantly; the freeman thinks pleasantest thoughts because he does not fear their consequences; there exists no greater contrast than between what we do out of pure joy and what we do only as a duty. Duty! obligation! (legalism!). Take now thyself as thou art!” 

So, I can say that Eliot is regressive compared to the views of Nietzsche.

Thinking Activity: Auden's Poem

This blog is a thinking activity task assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir, to present our understanding on W. H. Auden's poems, “September 1, 1939”, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, and “Epitaph on a Tyrant”. 

Introduction:

This blog will connect these poems with current times like pandemics and the Russia-Ukraine war.  In the poem “September 1, 1939” Auden referred to Nijinsky and Diaghilev. So, we’ll see that poem in the context of the queer study, and we will also see if Auden really created duality in the interpretation of the poem.

Auden’s poems seem to be written in our time. In fact, the poems (September 1, 1939, and Epitaph on a Tyrant to be precise) were written in the era of World War II, but we cannot deny the fact that these poem were written about the war. We are also going through the pandemic and war phase. So, it seems that these poems are written for our time. This is a fact that we cannot break out of the cycle, in the past there were war and pandemics hit the world, in the present we are also facing that and the future will also face the same problems. This poem will keep on reminding us  that it is written for our times.

The poem “September 1, 1939” is one of the famous poems of W. H. Auden. The poem is written on the outbreak of World War II In the poem, the narrator is not disclosed but many readers and critics have interpreted the narrator as Auden himself. The very first lines of the poem are enough evidence to think that Auden himself is the narrator and the place is one of the Dives (Bar) in Fifty-second Street of New York City. Dorothy Farnan Wrote that it was written in the Dizzy Club, an alleged gay bar in New York City as if the statement in the first two lines, “I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street…” were literal fact and not the conventional poetic fiction.

Now if we explore the poem, we find we find that the poem seems to be for our times. This poem was originally written for World War II, but we are (Ukraine to be precise) going through the same circumstances. As Auden writes,

“As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death” (4-10)

The narrator is sitting “uncertain and afraid” and despairing over the past decade describing it as a dishonest decade.  If not anger, we have also experienced waves of fear through “the unmentionable odour of death” in and as the result of that fear we are experiencing the waves of anger as a war and people also who are sick of the rotten decision of the government. We have yet to know how bad the Russia-Ukraine War and its aftermath will be.

He also wrote about a tyrant in the poem “Epitaph on a Tyrant” the tyrant this poem was Adolf Hitler. In this era,  Vladimir Putin is another constantly coming name on the list of tyrants.  Just like Auden wrote, “Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, / And the poetry he invented was easy to understand…” (1-2). This line can relate to lines from the “September 1, 1939” poem, 

“A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.”

Why Russia declared war on Ukraine (click here to read this BBC article).

"Russia refuses to use the terms war or even invasion; many of its leader's justifications for it were false or irrational." This is the poetry invented by Vladimir Putin. And people are also believing that he is saving Ukraine from Nazis. "He claimed his goal was to protect people subjected to bullying and genocide and aim for the "demilitarisation and de-Nazification" of Ukraine. There has been no genocide in Ukraine: it is a vibrant democracy, led by a president who is Jewish." He wants to make Ukraine a pro- Russian Country. The Current president of Ukraine is Anti-Russian. Ukraine moved towards the European Union and the west military alliance, NATO.  Russian accused NATO of threatening "Our historical  future as a nation".

Above image is showing the allies of Ukraine and Russia but we can see many undeclared countries.

Every country knows the fact that what Russia has done/doing to the innocent civilians of Ukraine and to the country itself is not the act of saving them. Countries like India and China is not supporting Russia, neither has it opposed. On the surface it seems that they are neutral but they are just waiting for the right time and opportunity that interest them.

"All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:"

In these lines Auden is saying that the poet cannot do anything besides unfolding the lies of the authorities, the lies that authority has filled in the brains of the "sensual man-in-the-street". They are the people who lives in their 'ivory towers' ultimately the 'man in the street' has to suffer.