What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A modernist masterpiece,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Curiously, the book that I am sending you this early March, a play, only the second dramatic work I’ve sent you, is one that I don’t actually like. It has always irked me. Which is not to say that it is not a good play, indeed, a great play. In fact, that it continues to irk me confirms its greatness in a way, because if I said to you confidently, “This is a masterpiece,” that would imply I had a settled view of it, a fixed understanding, and that the play stood for me like a statue on a pedestal: lofty, staid and undisturbing. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is none of these.

To further confirm that I’m wrong in my view of Godot, I’ll say that despite being written in the late 1940s, the play will not feel dated when you read it. This is a significant achievement. Plays, to state the obvious, are made up of dialogue. There is no surrounding prose to supply context. You might think the setting of a play would be the equivalent of the description in a novel that sets up the story, but that is not the case. Many historical plays and operas are restaged in settings that their playwrights and composers would never have imagined, and no meaning is lost. Shakespeare’s Macbeth does not need a castle in the background to make sense to theatregoers. The meaning and development of a play is entirely carried on the shoulders of its dialogue. But the way we speak changes over time, and quickly words and expressions that were current to the playwright sound old-fashioned to us today.

Moreover, plays are exclusively concerned with relationships, with the feelings between characters, revealed in what they say to each other and how they behave, and some relationships have also changed over the course of history. Lastly, plays are precisely, literally situated, the actors wearing costumes and moving about settings that we actually see, as opposed to imagining them in prose. How these last two points make most plays a more perishable product than most prose will be made clear if you think back to old television shows. Do you remember the 1970s American television series Bewitched, Mr. Harper, about a witch named Samantha who lives in suburbia with her husband Darrin and their daughter Tabitha? I lapped it up when I was a kid. A few years ago I happened to see an episode again—and I was appalled. The sexism struck me as egregious, what with Darrin always trying to prevent Samantha from using her magic and Samantha, being the good, docile housewife, always trying to comply. And the way they dressed and their hairdos—that at least was innocently laughable. You get my point. What was fresh and funny then is now old and embarrassing. Women are now more free to use their magic, and we dress differently. By capturing so exactly a time, a place and a lingo, many plays are as fleeting as newspapers.

It is a mighty playwright who manages to speak to his or her time and also to ours. Shakespeare does it, toweringly. That a student doesn’t know what a “thane” is, that kings don’t rule in 2008 the way they ruled in 1608 in no way affects the power and meaning of the Scottish play today. Waiting for Godot has also managed to speak to all times, so far. Despite premiering in 1953, the antics, musings and worries of Vladimir and Estragon will likely strike you as funny, puzzling, insightful, maddening and still current.

The play is about the human condition, which in Beckett’s pared-down vision of it means that the play is mostly about nothing. Two men, the ones just mentioned, Didi and Gogo familiarly, wait around because they believe they have an appointment with a certain Godot. They wait around and talk and despair, are twice interrupted by two crazies by the name of Pozzo and Lucky, and then they go back to waiting around, talking and despairing. That’s pretty well it. No plot, no real development, no final point. The setting is also mostly nothing: just a single, solitary tree along an empty country road. The only props of note are boots, bowler hats and a rope.

Essentially, two hours of nothing that’s good and deep, pessimistic and funny. Beckett meant to strip away at the vanities of our existence and look at the elemental. Therein lies what makes Waiting for Godot both great and eye-rolling as far as I’m concerned. There is this line, for example, said by I can’t remember which character: “We give birth astride a grave.” I suppose that’s true. Death interrupting life, what value can life have? If we must eventually let go of everything, why take hold of anything to start with? This sort of pessimism is the burden of those who have witnessed terrible times (Beckett lived in France during the German occupation) and the delight of undergraduates in the throes of youthful angst. I realize that my life is no more durable than a leaf’s, but between when I’m fresh and gloriously atop a tree and when I’ll be yellow and raked away by Time, there are some good moments to be had.

Samuel Beckett was with the same woman, Suzanne Beckett, née Deschevaux-Dumesnil, for over fifty years. And he was apparently an avid fan and player of tennis. In these two attachments, I see a contradiction between what the man wrote and how he lived. If he had the joy and energy to whack a bouncy yellow ball over a net, if he had the joy and comfort of knowing that someone was there for him at the end of each day, what was he so desperate about? A wife and tennis—how much more did he expect from life? And this is aside from exploring the ideas of those who dismiss death as a mere threshold, just a gap you have to mind between the train of life and the platform of the eternal.

Still, I know Waiting for Godot is a great play. You’ll see that when you read it. It’s a masterpiece. It does what no play did before it.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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