Away in the manger —Part Two

Last week I quoted a speech from one of Samuel Beckett’s novels, which is often said to represent Existential philosophy in a nutshell. Here it is again: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Both Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose nativity play I shall eventually get around to—did go on: they believed in commitment, even when commitment seemed unbearable or absurd. Both took part in the struggle against the Nazis; indeed, Sartre was captured and dumped into an internment camp, where he wrote, yes, a nativity play. Sartre was an ardent opponent of the French colonial occupation of Algeria, as was another leading writer, Albert Camus, who was born in that country (Camus came to be uncomfortable with the application of the term “existentialist” to his own work, preferring the term “absurdist”). Camus’ work is fiercely provocative. I love a moment in his play Caligula, about one of the cruellest and most depraved of the Roman emperors. This occurs when leading citizens of Rome realise they are all to blame for the degeneration that Caligula is spearheading, because they have allowed it to happen. Camus’ novels The Fall and The Outsider are classic Existentialist / absurdist texts, but I’m more drawn to his final novel, The Plague, which is set in Algeria; drawn to it, despite an uncomfortable—even traumatic—moment when the novel came to life for me. In 1983 I went to work at the university in Benghazi, Libya. On my second or third day there, in my hotel room, I divided my time between wondering why on earth I had left Nigeria, and reading for the first time Camus’ The Plague, set in another coastal North African city, albeit not in Libya but in Algeria. The novel centres around an outbreak of bubonic plague, which, as I’m sure you all know, is transmitted by rats. At a point I pulled up the window-blind and leant out to gaze at the street below. It was a desolate scene: shuttered shops (for the Gaddafi regime had banned private commerce), not a pedestrian or vehicle in sight. And lying in the middle of the road, two dead rats. “That’s all I need,” I thought. I want to make it clear I have a lot of time for Existentialist thought and for the literature it has inspired, but it does lend itself to parody, even to mockery. The best-known literary movement with which it is associated is the Theatre of the Absurd, and probably the best-known work from that movement is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. This is in two acts and has to do with two elderly tramps waiting for something to happen. Since its appearance in the early 1950s it has been very successful internationally, being taken up, for example, by the great South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. But it hasn’t impressed everyone. When it was first produced in New York, one acidly satirical reviewer dismissed it in just nine words: “This is a play in which nothing happens. Twice.” Before I get back to the serious stuff, a bit more satire. Years ago the British humourist Paul Jennings produced a parody of Existentialism called “Resistentialism.” The guiding principle of this mock-philosophy is “Les choses sont contre nous”—that is, “Things are against us / resist us.” I remember this every time I try to change the battery in my mobile phone or to unscrew the plastic cap on a milk bottle and, because the damned things resist me, I have to ask a housemate to help. Paul Jennings’ take on Waiting for Godot is a short play in which two old men sit at the bottom of a dried-up well (how they got there is never explained). They have tried shouting for help, but now have hoarse throats. They have a brick and try throwing it up and out of the well, in the hope that someone will notice and rescue them. Every time, the brick nearly reaches the top of the well, but then falls back and lands on them. Enough, now, of tomfoolery, and back to the serious business. Like Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote plays, including one (Huis Clos) set in a waiting-room next to hell, and an adaptation of the ancient Greek dramatist Euripedes’ Trojan Women, which he used as an opportunity to savage the French colonial occupation of Algeria. Arguably his finest play is Les mains sales (Dirty Hands), which reverts to one of his favourite themes, the communal responsibility that is incurred when we stand by and allow evil things to happen. And in 1940, having enlisted in the army to fight the Nazis, Sartre found himself imprisoned in an internment camp in Trier, Germany (best known as the birthplace of Karl Marx and as the site of spectacular Roman ruins), where he wrote the nativity play I shall finally get around to talking about next week. To be concluded Chris Dunton