Waiting for Godot

 4, 3, 2, 1. As the cast members of his plays diminished in number, Samuel Beckett only grew in stature. And so, although it's in many ways a minimalist play, with just two principal characters and a brief visit from two others, one might say that his Waiting for Godot falls in the middle of Beckett's range. From the start -- it premiered in Paris in 1953 --  it's been his most frequently performed play, bringing together a strange range of actors, from Bert Lahr and E.G. Marshall (shown above), Zero Mostel and Burgess Meredith, to (most recently) Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, it has, like a rubbery cartoon character, been run over again and again and still holds its shape.

At my alternative high school in the 1970's, we put on a production that I still very vividly recall. Given its long strings of seemingly non-sequitur lines, we built in a back-up: if anyone realized they didn't know the next line, the actor was to say "What time is it?" -- and the other to reply "Why beleaguer the obvious?" -- at this cue, nonchalantly walking 'round to the back of the tree (then, as ever, the only prop on stage) and consulting a copy of the script concealed there.

The old reading was always that "Godot" was a stand-in for "God" -- and then, of course, the tree for the Cross, and so on. It's a reading that Becket rejected (although, hey, he's dead, so what matter?), but in any case, it's hardly the only way to see it. We have all waited -- in lines at state offices, for our lives to turn 'round, for babies to be born and old folks to die. What of it? There is something in the mere flow of language, the putting of one word -- any word -- after another -- that speaks to the bare essence of our human condition.

Streams of Consciousness

 Dorothy Richardson began working on what became Pointed Roofs -- the first of what would eventually be the thirteen volumes of her Pilgrimage -- in 1911.  James Joyce was still struggling to find a publisher for Dubliners, and was at work on revising his early novel Stephen Hero into Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, which would not appear until 1914; his Ulysses -- which many assume to have been the first novel to make use of "stream of consciousness" -- came out in 1922, by which time Richardson was on her sixth volume.  The very term was coined by May Sinclair, in her review of Richardson's novels, which appeared in The Egoist in 1918.  And yet today, when it comes up, it's nearly always associated with Joyce.

Richardson herself was not fond of the term; she preferred "interior monologue."  And to be sure, her version of this approach was not overtly experimental; it did not do away with punctuation, nor did it frame itself in terms of the random jumble of thoughts that mark the mental pathways of Joyce's Leopold Bloom.  No, it was a much more centered, clear, and thoughtful interior -- indeed, it was based upon Richardson's own life, with a delay of about five years from lived experience to novelization.  Of course Joyce's characters, too, were plainly autobiographical, although Stephen Dedalus eventually evolved into a less central character -- but somehow, when a man, even today, draws from his own life in his fiction, it's fine -- but if a woman does it, it makes it somehow less "serious," as the British novelist Jeanette Winterson recently noted in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Two other writers, of course, inevitably come to mind when we consider these streams -- Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Ulysses still looms largest, in part because Joyce had, by the time it appeared, been a sort of one-man-band of its forthcoming. It first appeared in parts in The Little Review in its March 1918 issue, with the full novel following on Joyce's birthday in 1922. There were all sorts of issues with the text, not the least of which was Joyce's habit of penning in many corrections per page on the proofs, and the fact that the French printers charged with its publication spoke almost no English! All that said, its impact has been profound and lasting; have a look at part I ("Telemachus) and the final part, "Penelope," narrated in the most fluid version of consciousness's stream by Leopold Bloom's wife.

Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) is no less a monument to the power of language to find unexpected ways to frame time and space; like the arrival of Godot some years later, the trip to the lighthouse is almost indefinitely postponed; one of the novel's key challenges is the second "Time Passes" section, which must set its gossamers across the chasm of a decade, one in which the entire First World War begins and ends. Have a look at the beginning, and feel free to dip in here and there; you'll see that Woolf's version of stream-of-consciousness is its own very distinct thing, neither Richardson's nor Joyce's.

Yeats

 One of the little ironies of twentieth-century 'British' literature is that most of the best of it was written by people who were born outside of Britain, in places like Bombay, Dublin, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Ogidi, Abeokuta, Berdychiv, and even (in the case of adopted Brit T.S. Eliot) St. Louis Missouri. And the first harbinger of this shift from the purported center of Anglophone writing was, without doubt, the 'Irish Literary Renaissance' that had its origins in Dublin in the 1880's and 1890's. Ironically, the first wave of this movement sought to restore Irish Gaelic language and culture; its leaders, such as Douglas Hyde and his Gaelic League, scorned English as the tongue of the oppressor. At the same time, however, a small and loosely affiliated group of writers in Dublin were starting to establish a national literature and theatre in English; among their numbers were the poet George William Russell (known as Æ), the playwright John Millington Synge, along with James Stephens, Ella Young, Lady Gregory, and George Moore. 

Yeats, a brash young poet, was among the first to gain wider recognition, and in fact after a relatively brief period when he was active in Dublin's Abbey Theatre, spent most of the rest of his life in London. His early poems were steeped in the old Irish tradition, beginning in 1889 with The Wanderings of Oisin (a sort of Irish 'Ancient Mariner') and evocations of traditional ballads ("The Song of the Wandering Aengus")  In his middle years, he dabbled in occultism, joining the somewhat infamous Order of the Golden Dawn (which counted Aleister Crowley and S.L. MacGregor Mathers among its members) and becoming enamored of Wyndam Lewis and the "Vorticist" movement. He captured the spirit of Irish resentment ("An Irish Airman Foresees his Death") and memorialized the Irish rebellion with "Easter 1916." His poetry continued to evolve throughout his career, culminating in the rich, dark, ironic modernism of "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Second Coming," and "The Circus Animals' Desertion." By the end of his life, Yeats could be seen to represent a new efflorescence of lyricism, something not known in English since the Romantics, and not -- alas -- heard much since.

Hard Times Contexts

 As we finish Hard Times, I thought it might be a good occasion to offer some cultural contexts to our main text. Some of them are specific to particular characters or scenes, while others are more general, having to do with the broad issues of industrialization, education, and the stratified class society of Britain at the time.

Doorway at Georgiaville Mill

Bounderby of course is a comic exaggeration, but also representative of his class. Builders and owners of factories were, in the nineteenth century, fast rising to the top of a class system in which wealth had previously been determined by property ownership. Think of any Austen novel and the idea of £10,000 a year -- these thousands came not from industry or labor, but from rents on land, much of which had been in family hands for generations. Now, the Bounderbys of the world could command no less an income, and perhaps even more, though they were still exploiters of those who generated their wealth (bear in mind that Marx and Engels first came up with their theories of this while living in England). Here in Rhode Island, of course, our own local Bounderbys have left their names on their mills and thus the landscape -- Christopher Olney gave his to Olneyville, Zachariah Allen to Allendale, and so forth. Allen also owned the Georgiaville Mill in Smithfield; although now converted to condominiums, the entrance still bears his initials: ZA and the date 1853 -- while his stately home in Providence is now the Brown Faculty Club.

As to the circus and "trick" riders, this was another aspect of cultural life enormously popular at the time. The best-known establishment of this kind was Astley's Ampitheatre, which Dickens himself visited on my occasions. One of its stars around this time was Pablo Fanque, later to be immortalized by John Lennon in "Mr. Kite" (Lennon took most of his lyrics from an old theatrical poster he'd bought at a junk shop):

The Hendersons will all be there

Late of Pablo Fanque's Fair, what a scene

Tom's use of a "blackface" disguise also brings up another uncomfortable history, that of blackface minstrel shows. Dickens, in fact, was partly responsible for the spread of this form of entertainment to Britain; while touring the United States he penned an account of his journey, published in 1842 as American Notes. In it, he described seeing a talented young African-American dancer known as "Juba"; in 1848 Juba himself arrived in London, and was billed as "Boz's Juba" (Boz being Dickens's nickname); the enormous success of his appearance there paved the way for touring American "minstrel" shows, which then became lastingly popular in Britain -- so much so that a television show in blackface, the Black and White Minstrel Show, ran on the BBC from 1958 to 1978(!) Charities, police associations, and even cub scouts often sponsored their own minstrel shows as fundraisers; some of these continue to this day (having switched to clown makeup) and are known as "Gang Shows."

Lastly, we'd be remiss if we didn't consider the very large class of persons -- of which Mrs. Sparsit is a shining example. The BBC estimates that, as of 1901 (the peak of the profession), no fewer than 1.5 million people were employed as domestic servants. The wealthy of course employed a large and specialized force, with lady's maids, housemaids, butlers, and gardeners -- but even a moderately well-off middle class household probably employed at least one or two. Life in service could be perilous -- if one were dismissed from one's position with prejudice, it was almost impossible to obtain further employment -- and of course, servants were often the witting or unwitting witnesses of all manner of domestic jars.

Hard Times

 

Thomas Gradgrind (looking well-squared)

Consider this a sort of open letter to the American education system. It's been twenty years since the passing of the "No Child Left Behind" law, and in my college classes, I now have students who've experienced its effects for much, if not all, of their primary and secondary educations. The neo-utilitarians have had their day, and here are the results: a generation of students who have absorbed the real lesson of the new regime: hunker down, follow instructions, and learn whatever is going to be on the test. Fiction is out; nonfiction is in; reading for pleasure is out; reading for content is in. After all, the only skills that matter are the ones that can be measured.

This approach forces students to discard their interests and passions, and instead think strategically about how to focus their efforts on measurable things. They inevitably develop a habit of scanning syllabi and readings to see what will be tested, but this makes for poor readers; when they encounter an ambiguity, or a difficult reading, they tense up in anticipation of being taken to task for some vague failure. My endeavor has always been to share my love of literature, to (I hope) instill in students an excitement, an interest, a sense of something personally significant for themselves, in everything they read -- but it's getting trickier each semester. Their curiosity has been hammered; their personal experience belittled, their idiosyncrasies ironed out. As a result, it sometimes seems that the pleasure of discovery of something new has gradually given way to an anxiety about the unfamiliar.

Are they better prepared for the wonderful world of employment? Perhaps, so long as the employment they find demands repetitive goal-oriented work, with little room for innovation and frequent employee evaluations. They may, so long as they've had the prerequisites, do well in science, technology, engineering, and math -- though only at a rudimentary level. Curiosity seems to have been largely amputated, and in its place our brave new Benthamites have instilled a simple wish for nothing more than a clear set of instructions and evaluative rules. Learn, do, demonstrate. Wash, rinse repeat.

And this regime clearly has its roots in the Victorian era. Dickens parodied it in multiple ways, from Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby to Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend. Indeed, it seems he had no more bitter foe than the soul-killing utilitarian "education" of his day. How sad, indeed, that his greatest fight has been almost forgotten -- and that we today are blindly marching into these same self-dug trenches. And, interestingly, we are here now considering these histories at an institution which began its existence in the very same year Hard Times was published -- 1854 --with a course of instruction for teachers quite similar to the one that the freshly-minted Mr. M'Choakumchild had completed (you can read the whole history of the Normal School, now RIC, here).