The chance to reinvent ourselves is one of the most compelling in the vast human experience. It is what compelled James Gatz to become Jay Gatsby, and to leave the life of a dirt farm family to own a series of ostensible pharmacies that sold illegal liquor out the back door, all so that he could win the love of Daisy and be everything that she wanted. It is what compels audiences to watch movies that show stories of change and transformation. Change can be complicated because it can end up leading to consequences that we did not expect, particularly if we are not willing to change ourselves fundamentally. In many of the readings for this course, the idea of reinvention is a crucial part of the story, leading the reader into the journey of the protagonist; in many of the secondary readings, critics are drawn to the tales of reinvention and the task of writing about reinvention as a plot device.
Prospero, from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is one of the most famed examples of reinvention in a character. Exiled from the Italian city-state that he used to rule, he went to a distant, mysterious island and somehow developed godlike powers that allow him to hold all of the occupants of the island in his power; it is those powers that create the tempest itself, in which people who (coincidentally enough) came from the city-state that had exiled him. He thought that the transformation into a demigod would make him content, but it did not; it only made him more odious to those who served him. It was only the realization that he could show mercy that brought him solace and redemption (Shakespeare).
In some cases, authors use satire to suggest the possibility of reinvention. In Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” this is the case, as the poem opens with the warning from Ariel that Belinda will go through a disaster of some sort. As happens with many mysterious warnings, though, Belinda ignores it and goes about her way blithely. Rather than having some real tragedy occur, though, Belinda has a lock of her hair stolen by the Baron, who goes through a set of sacrifices and prayers to get success. Pope’s epic follows the heroic cycle (even having the gnome Umbriel go down to the closest thing to the underworld that this satire can provide, the Cave of Spleen), but the point is that at the end Belinda never listens, and she never gets the lock of hair back (which would have been extremely difficult to reattach in any case) (Pope). The purpose of the epic is, on one level, to show the transformation of the hero. The closest thing we get to a hero here is Belinda, but she does not learn a thing. This mock epic serves to show how people turn minor issues into major tragedies and how, in the process of doing so, they miss the opportunity to undergo real change.
Billy Budd, in Herman Melville’s classic tale, cannot reinvent himself because he cannot transcend his own innocence and come to comprehend the evil that Claggart represents. If he had been able to, the whole story might have come about differently. Budd is never able to understand that Claggart has an ethical system diametrically opposed to his own, and so when Claggart accuses him of mutiny, he can do nothing but respond in a violent way (Melville). Budd cannot accurately identify evil in anyone, so he is politically unable to figure out which members of the crew are taking sides against him. One might view this as a life on a higher moral plane, but the fact that he basically snaps and then tries to take on Claggart with violence is the sort of transition that can only lead to tragedy, rather than to some sort of epiphany.
In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for the transformation that the arrival of Godot will bring. In the meantime, Pozzo and Lucky come by multiple times, and they have changed, but Vladimir and Estragon have not. They talk about leaving when the Messenger comes and tells them that Godot is not coming that day, but they never actually depart (Beckett). The purpose of this is to show the absurdity of waiting for an external source of transformation, particularly one that requires faith. The implication is either (depending on one’s interpretation) that waiting for transformation is simply absurd because it will not come, or that transformation and reinvention can only come from within. Either way, Godot is simply not coming.
Many of the secondary critics that have looked at works of literature such as these take a look at the perspectives on reinvention that these works show. Worton argues, in the case of Waiting for Godot, that the idea that meaning can lead to reinvention is “a product of the cultural history that has taught us to seekfor a cause-and-effect logic” (Worton 84). Once one can ditch this expectation, then it becomes possible to deal with existence as it comes, rather than insisting on finding meaning behind every corner.
In some cases, critics take a look at the background of the author when looking at the role that reinvention and transformation play in the works that they produce. In the case of Samuel Beckett, it has been noted that his bilingualism “functioned as a medium for artistic self-renewal, was driven by both aesthetic and personal need, and allowed Beckett, even after his fame was established, a kind of privacy” (Beer, p. 210). Writing between languages, or moving back and forth from one to the other, necessarily requires an elasticity of meaning simply because of the different mores of the cultures that use those languages. Consider the French word and the Greek word for fire: feu is the quick burst of flame that comes from a Frenchman’s lighter, while pur was what blazed forth from the towers of Troy in Homer’s epics. Feu did not make into any other culture’s etymologies, but pur lives on in English as the root for the idea of making clean, purifying. The role that fire plays in the two cultures appears to be somewhat different, but they both translate into English the same way. The point is that there is a lot at work beneath the literal levels in word choice, and simply moving from one language to another makes a significant difference from a cultural perspective.
If it is really true, as Beckett seemed to believe, that “the driving need [in literature] was somehow to find the means of reconstructing the referent” (Murphy 237) then the process of reinvention goes to the very core of reading – and of writing. The implication is that the referents that were already in place in Beckett’s time were, to him, insufficient and incomplete. They did not help in a significant way when it came to providing a meaningful frame of reference for the reader, or perhaps even for the writer. OF course, it may be that this referent has always been flawed, in a way. After all, if Prospero had been able to find what he needed in existence, would he have resorted to driving others into servitude when he encountered the setback of exile? If Billy Budd had entered adulthood prepared to meet the evil that is part of the world, rather than growing up steeped in naivete, would he not have been better set to take on the challenge of Claggart? How ludicrous was Belinda’s affective matrix if a snip at her hair could qualify as the tragedy that Ariel foretold? The fact remains that Godot has always been an elusive figure, even back when he was Yahweh, or when he was Elohim, or when he was Nature, or when Nietzsche declared him to be dead. If Godot is whom we consider to be our inventor, then we have to figure out our connection with him (whatever form he takes) before we can reinvent ourselves, before we can become. It is this inner narrative that ultimately makes any story compelling, whether it is that of a shipwreck in the night on a mysterious island or the story of our own lives.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. n.d. Web. 10 May 2016.
Beer, Anna. “Beckett and Bilingualism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Beckett,
John Pilling, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 209-221.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd. n.d. Web. 10 May 2016.
Murphy, P.J. “Beckett and the Philosophers.” In The Cambridge Companion to
Beckett, John Pilling, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 222-240.
Pope, Alexander. “The Rape of the Lock.” n.d. Web. 10 May 2016.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. n.d. Web. 10 May 2016.
Worton, Michael. “Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theater as Text.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Beckett, John Pilling, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 67-87.
