Samuel Beckett, who was born 100 years ago today, is credited with many things. Preparing the world for reality TV tends not to be one of them, but perhaps it should.
From the uneventful hours whiled away during Godot's no-show to Winnie's chirrupy ramblings in Happy Days as she applies lipstick and unpacks her handbag, Beckett's plays are, of all things, about everyday reality. He tapped into the human fascination with the minor details of other people's lives, and exposed the urge to keep watching, like motorists passing a crash scene, even when those details are steeped in the ordinary. In short, Beckett gave us the concept of the dramatic non-event.
When Waiting for Godot was first performed in English, the critic Vivian Mercier described it in this newspaper as a two-act play in which "nothing happens - twice". Beckett himself recognised the value of inaction, famously telling a friend: "All I want to do is sit on my arse and fart and think of Dante." By celebrating the possibilities tendered by the mundane humdrum of existence, he sketched the prototype for Big Brother, ironically one of television's biggest events.
Like typical Big Brother housemates, his people are stuck, thrown together with others not exactly of their choosing - "Sewer-rat!" "Abortion!" are among Vladimir's and Estragon's exchanges while waiting for Godot - and deprived of vital information: What is going on outside? Where do I fit in the greater scheme of things? From their position as "non-knowers", to borrow a Beckettian term, they focus on the here and now, the petty, and on life's aches: "Why this farce, day after day?" Endgame's weary Clov, who can't sit down, asks the domineering Hamm, who can't stand up. In the process they reveal the human capacities for abuse and, critically, compassion.
Two BB participants lolling in the jacuzzi might have the following conversation: "What do we do now?" "Wait." "Yes, but while waiting." "What about hanging ourselves?" "Hmm. It'd give us an erection." "An erection!" Vladimir and Estragon, who said those lines beside a tree on a country road 50 years ago, were similarly concerned with filling the hours, often making plans that were never followed through. The important thing was to pass the time in a way that helped detract attention from the uncertainties that darken the day.
The difference between Beckett's motley crew and their Big Brother counterparts is simple: one lot aspires to celebrity, seeking desperately to look important in the eyes of the world, to confer deep meaning on everyday tasks such as brushing one's teeth; the other has bypassed delusions of self-grandeur, gracefully acknowledging that we can't be so confident or sure of anything, and that life consists of small details rooted in uncertainty. In an Ireland keen to busy itself accumulating things, where having nothing - or worse, doing nothing - is a frighteningly alien prospect, plays such as Waiting for Godot, Happy Days and Endgame have never been more pertinent.
For Beckett, trivia was the currency of life. His cast of characters struggle with minutiae to get by from day to day, uncomfortably mindful that they can't be sure where it all leads. We share their predicament, unable, despite centuries of philosophy and science, to explain the mystery of life. And yet, like them, we carry on, often revealing flashes of dignity and humanity at those very moments when we are most convinced that neither can exist in a world resistant to logical deciphering.
Beckett was a non-believer. Anticipating paradise - and answers - in another realm was not an option, for himself or his personages. That his characters find grounds for empathy and charity in a universe with no god - and so no prewritten code of conduct - makes them heroes. They might not meet the requirements of heroism as Shakespeare and the ancient Greek playwrights gave us to understand it, but they are heroes nonetheless.
His are lowly people, tramps whose domains are dustbins and ditches, not castles or battlefields, and whose actions could hardly be described as magisterial feats on which kings' lives and nation states depend. Yet, what more heroic deed could there be, in a world bereft of values, than to make up one's own moral code that accommodates responsibility to others? "Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?" Vladimir asks himself, in what might refer to guilt about inaction during the second World War.
In this centenary year, Beckett might be remembered not only for his contribution to high literature but for teaching us to relish life's smaller details and to face apparent triviality and intellectual darkness with humour and stoical grace. There is a tendency to forget, amid all the highbrow discussions currently taking place about his work, that we don't need a degree to enjoy a good yarn.
Beckett himself was well read but admitted that his own intellectualising as a younger man had blocked him as an artist. "I had thought I could rely on knowledge. That I had to equip myself intellectually," he says in Charles Juliet's Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde. "I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I'd been. I began then to write down the things I feel."
Beckett's plays are a clarion call to think less and feel more; if he had an intellectual aim, it was probably to expose unhappiness with a view to sharing it, making the world a little less absurd, a little more liveable.