much worthwhile. I also find, with some regularity, myself asking, How could someone so talented be so
blind, so arrogant, so bigoted? The answer is, I don’t know. The more time I spend with him, the more
I’m astonished by his capacity for folly. It’s unfortunate that genius was harnessed to someone who may
not have worn it well. I find the Cantos, for all its brilliance, a very flawed masterpiece; flawed for
reasons otherp. 234than the anti-Semitism, but certainly more flawed because of it. It remains one of the
half dozen or so most important works in my field of specialization, however, so I can’t turn my back on
it even if I want to. I’ve been telling you earlier in this chapter that you generally want to adopt the
worldview the work requests of its audience. Sometimes, though, as in the case of Pound and his
Cantos, the work asks too much.
Now here is where I envy you. If you are a professor, you have to deal with some pretty unsavory
characters and some questionable works. If you only want to read like one, you can walk away
whenever you want to.
26 – Is He Serious? And Other Ironies
p. 235NOW HEAR THIS: irony trumps everything.
Consider roads. Journey, quest, self-knowledge. But what if the road doesn’t lead anywhere, or, rather,
if the traveler chooses not to take the road. We know that roads (and oceans and rivers and paths) exist
in literature only so that someone can travel. Chaucer says so, as do John Bunyan, Mark Twain, Herman
Melville, Robert Frost, Jack Kerouac, Tom Robbins, Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise. If you show us a
thoroughfare, you better put your hero on it. But then there’s Samuel Beckett. Known as the poet of
stasis, he puts one of his heroes, literally, in an ash can. The great actress Billie Whitelaw, who was in
virtually every Beckett play that called for a woman, said his work repeatedly put her in the hospital,
sometimes by demandp. 236ing too much strenuous activity, but just as often by not letting her move at
all. In his masterpiece Waiting for Godot, he creates two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, and plants
them beside a road they never take. Every day they return to the same spot, hoping the unseen Godot
will show up, but he never does, they never take the road, and the road never brings anything interesting
their way. In some places writing something like that will get you a fifteen-yard penalty for improper use
of a symbol. Of course, we catch on pretty fast and soon understand that the road exists for Didi and
Gogo to take, and that their inability to do so indicates a colossal failure to engage life. Without our
ingrained expectations about roads, however, none of this works: our hapless duo become nothing more
than two guys stranded in desolate country. But they’re not merely in desolate country but in desolate
country beside an avenue of escape they fail to take. And that makes all the difference.
Irony? Yes, on a variety of levels. First, the entire play exists in what the late literary theorist Northrop
Frye calls the “ironic mode.” That is, we watch characters who possess a lower degree of autonomy,
self-determination, or free will than ourselves. Whereas normally in literary works we watch characters
who are our equals or even superiors, in an ironic work we watch characters struggle futilely with forces
we might be able to overcome. Second, the specific situation of the road offers another level of irony.
Here are two men, Didi and Gogo, who wish to find possibilities for change or improvement, yet they can
only understand the road they wait beside passively, in terms of what it brings to them. We in the
audience can see the implication that eludes them (this is where our expectations concerning roads enter
the equation), so much so that we may want to scream at them to walk up the road to a new life. But of
course they never do.
Or take rain. Of course, we already know that it has nearlyp. 237limitless cultural associations, but even
those won’t cover the literary possibilities once irony kicks in. If you read a scene in which new life was
coming into being, the rain outside would almost inevitably lead you (based on your previous reading) to