The Absurd as a Term:
The Second World War had painfully affected people on social, economic and cultural levels. It had its great impact on all fields of life. Europe suffered a great deal as a natural outcome of this ruinous war. It witnessed in the mid of the twentieth century a series of creative experiments in literature. The emergence of the Theatre of the Absurd was represented by the Irish Samuel Beckett, the Romanian Eugene lonesco, the French Jean Genet, and the English Harold Pinter. They made a drastic change in the form and content of playwriting.
The second movement is The Angry Young Men. This movement is announced by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). The representatives of this movement are John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and John Arden. They brought about new themes and new ideas. They are called ‘Angry Generation’, because of the bad conditions in Britain postwar. Most of their members are of working — class or of lower middle — class origin. The Angry Young Men were acknowledged as the dominant literary force of the decade besides The Theatre of the Absurd.
In America, the case is different. Here, there is a great stagnation in art. The playwrights at that time used some inherited themes and forms, as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; but later “the New American Theater” came into existence by Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959) and Edward Albee’ s The Zoo Story and The American Dream. The Absurd movement appeared in America as a reaction to the Theatre of the Absurd and the dissatisfaction with the old playwrights. (Kostelanetz:1965, 50) They said that the individual is surrounded by the unpleasant realities of the human condition and they wanted to protect the individual.
The name of the Absurd was first coined by a contemporary critic Martin Esslin to refer to a group of dramatists or dramatic works which erupted mainly in France and were allied to existential thought.(Vaughn:1978,196) The philosophical term in drama belongs to Esslin in his book The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) from that particular time it became a successful catchphrase in the English reading public.(Hinchliffe:1969, 2)
Absurdity in drama is the depiction of meaninglessness, purposelessness and randomness of life. The absurdists are mainly concerned with the irrationality of human experience. The term “Absurd” may basically drive its root from the Latin word “Absurdum” which means “discordant” or “contradictory”. (McGraw-Hill:1970,283) The Absurdists, who have been concerned with the irrationality of human experience, often use chaotic structure, seriocomic and ironic effects and irrational language.
The term absurd may mean senseless, illogical contrary to common sense. It also means “unreasonable” not sensible, foolish in a funny way. But the lexical meaning of the term “Absurd” is foolish or ridiculous. Such meanings are presented in Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), in which the human situation is defined as essentially absurd. Then the term “Absurd” is applied to the work of the certain European and American playwrights of the 1950s and 1960s who have borrowed the idea from Carnus. In “The Myth of Sisyphus”, Camus shows a sort of divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity. The Absurd is neither in man nor in the world, if they are regarded separately; but the essential characteristic of man is being in the world, the absurd is finally the same as the human condition.(Cohn: 1969, 19)
Thus, the theatre of the Absurd depicts the dramatists’ sense of absurdity as a subject matter. The Absurd Theatre does not explain any thesis or discuss any ideology. It is not a theatre of events, but is a theatre of situations in sequence, the action in the absurd drama, or, in other words, the plot itself does not tell a story in the usual sense of cause and effect patterns, but instead it presents a pattern of images designed to show the perplexity and anxiety that springs from the recognition that man is surrounded by indecipherable cosmos. (Gassner:1973,843) Instead of being provided with an answer, the spectator must formulate questions that will unfold the meaning of the play.
The main idea of the playwright is that human life, being without ‘meaning’ or coherence, is essentially chaotic; that consequently, human beings have no channel of ‘meaningful’ communication; and that plays aiming to give a genuine reflection of life must do so through a medium which suggests the full range of absurdity “meaninglessness, nonsense, non communication”. The idea advocated that plays should be wordless, allowing the ‘absurdity’ to be conveyed by gesture and physical antics; (Ward:1970, 522) and even sometimes with pantomime to show the inability of the language to convey ideas and communicate people.
The interaction of ‘Surrealism’ and ‘Existentialism’ is a dominant force in the theatre of the Absurd. It seams that the playwrights have moved surrealism in the theatre from the relation of private incommunicability back to the context of ordinary life. Surrealism in Art may be defined as a reaction against realism in the arts, including the drama that flourished in 1920s and 193 Os, principally in Europe. In drama the surrealist movement, inspired by the works of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and Guillaume Appollonaire (1880-19 18) is issued “a manifesto” in 1924. It defined the form as “pure psychic” automatism, by which is intended to express, verbally in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and out side all esthetic or moral preoccupation. Thus, Surrealism drew upon the subconscious mind and dream-like psychic state.
The best example of a surrealist drama is Appollonaire, The Breasts of Tiresias (1903) revised for production in 1917, which involves a fantastic transformation of a woman into a man when her breasts float away, balloon-like. She / he then becomes the parent through sheer willpower, of over forty thousand offspring. (Vaugh:1977, 668) Such transformation is neither accepted nor expected in the real life.
The other influence was ‘Dadaism’. Dadaism can by defined as a brief but extreme revolt against realism in the arts that erupted between 1916 — 1920, partly as a manifestation of the horror and frustration caused by World War I. Dadaism is essentially anti — art in that it rejected all order and meaning. Although the movement produced many programs of lectures, readings, and short plays, no major drama emerged from the movement. Its chief historical importance is as a precursor of Surrealism. The founder of this school is Tristan Tzara (1896— 1963).
The other important influence was the French poet and dramatist Alfred Jarry, he is one of the most extraordinary and eccentric figures, he sees life in a different point of view.(Esslin:1961,364) Throughout his poetry we can see characters turn their own personalities into grotesque characters of their own creation that disappear when they perish. Jarry offered himself as a victim to the derision and to the absurdity of the world. His life is a sort of humour and ironic epic which is carried to the point of voluntary, farcical and through destruction of the self. Jarry’s teaching could be summarized thus, everyman is capable of showing his contempt for cruelty of stupidity of the universe by making his own life a poem of incoherence and absurdity. (Hinchliffe, 47) In this sense, the confusion and disorder of the world and society played a remarkable role in shaping his own mentality.
In 1896, he wrote Ubu Roi in which a typical fairy- tale turned sour. At the beginning of the play, Ubu, a grotesque fat, dirty, cruel person is being urged by his wife to kill the king of Poland and usurp the throne. Ubu had formerly been the king of Aragon, but is now captain of the king’s dragoons. The next day, Ubu butchers the king and all the royal family (except the heir and his mother who escape). He rules by killing anyone who has money so that he can have it all himself Thus we see a long procession of noblemen, judges and financiers fall into his ‘disembraining’ machine. When he has a massed all the money in the realm, he sets off to fight the Czar of Russia who has sworn to avenge the death of his cousin. Ubu is defeated and sails with his wife to France. In the play, Jarry rebels against everything in life whether physical or metaphysical.(Hinchliffe, 48)
Another important factor is Artaud and his The Theatre and Its Double (1938). He was born in 1896, he died of cancer in Paris in 1948. Throughout this book, Artaud says that ‘True Theatre’ is not Occidental but Oriental — words therefore, are not important, mime, gesture and scenery are important.(Hinchliffe,51) And all those things mentioned previously are the main techniques and elements used by the Absurdists. Artaud insists that theatre must express total cries beyond which lies only death or purification. Artaud’s theatre does not depend on words, but on images, gestures and sensation. (Block:1969, 8)
In the case of Beckett and Ionesco , they give no importance to narrative or characterization what matters is the eternal situation of humanity revealed through ironic commentary , elegiac lament and pathetic or grotesque farce. The role of the theatre is to define and illustrate this absurdity, often through highly original stances and situations which constitutes metaphors or parables of the human condition.(Block,8) This reflects the gloomy image of life in which man is living and suffering at the same time. Playwrights such as lonesco and Beckett had moved the concern of drama from the area of sociology to that of metaphysics. Older dramatists, such as Shaw were concerned with social problems but his attempts to solve these problems do not seem to be absurd.
The assumption is that man must assume responsibility for the solutions for the problems are worthy. In the Absurd Theatre the problem is much more ultimate one. Man is the absurd creature, and his attempts to impose rational forms upon the world in which he lives are equally absurd. Thus, the real problem for the dramatists of the Absurd drama is the problem of being itself, the problem of man and his position in the universe. In this sense the area of concern moves from the sociological to the metaphysical.
The answer to this new problem can be only understood against the background of ‘Existentialism’. Existential philosophy shows a great dislike and antipathy towards formal schemes of thought. In Existential thought the individual being is more important than reason itself, for reason takes man from tile centre of concern and elevates the importance of object, in this case objects of thought. Tins explains Sartre’s conclusion that existence precedes essence.(Barnet:1969,65) Thus, the existence is more important than essence according to Sartre’s classification,
Most existentialists think that future is undetermined and that man is free. But man also has neither fixed potentialities nor fixed values to guide him. We make our own characters and assert our own actions. In Sartre’s terminology ‘existence precedes essence’ and man makes himself that is, man has existence before he has any defined character, and he must himself form his character. (Barnet, 65)
Thus, the emphasis in Existentialism is upon existence, which is concrete and individual. Where this state is present, there is truly being. ‘To be’ means, according to the theologian Paul Tillich, to have space. Space has two important aspects. It involves physical location — the body itself and the place where the body is located — and also social location — a vocation, social relationships and a meaningful environmental of values. Where space in this sense is absent, there is non -being.(Esslin: 1965, 133)
Moreover, social space is completely absent in the Theatre of the Absurd. As far as outside society is concerned, most of their plays take place in a vacuum. In addition, social relationships in any meaningful sense are lacking.
Sartre describes this state as being ‘anguish’, whereas Kier Kegaard presents it as ‘dread’ and the theologian Tillich called it ‘anxiety’. This experience, according to Existentialism, must be differentiated from the ordinary experience of fear. Fear occurs when man is afraid of objects, such as physical danger or pain, or an enemy who threatens him. But anxiety is a more fundamental response. It occurs as a result of man’s freedom. Having freed himself from traditional ‘prop’, having shouldered bravely the responsibility of individual, concrete being, man is faced continually by that which is unpredictable by the threat of non — being. (Esslin:1965, 150) Thus, anxiety is a necessary corollary of man’s freedom, if he possesses true consciousness of being.
Absurd drama is like an existential revolt against life. The absurdists examine the metaphysical life of man and protest against it. Existence becomes a source of his rebellion; it is a cry of anguish over the insufferable state of being human. Camus calls it as “a metaphysical rebellion, the movement by which man protests against the whole creation”, it embodies a kind of discontent with the basic structure of life. The atmosphere of this existential drama is despairing with subhuman characters. It is a revolt against the fatigue and hopelessness after the disintegration of idealist energies. (Brustein: 1965, 27)
This kind of plays have been given all sorts of labels: ‘kitchen – sink drama’, ‘neo-realist’, ‘drama of non-communication’, and ‘Absurd drama’. This type of drama springs from disillusionment and loss of certitudes characteristics of our times and reflected in the work like “the Myth of Sisyphus”. The dramatists of the Absurd use some devices of circus, mimes, clowning verbal nonsense and literature of dream and fantasy which often has strong allegorical components. (Hinchliffe, 2-10)These devices however, can be regarded as the cornerstone of the Absurd Theatre.
This kind of drama tends to defy traditional, theatrical and dramatic conventions which carry in fact a nihilistic point of view. Esslin’s definition gives the sense of that the certitudes and shakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away. Jonesco defines the term ‘Absurd’ as a term which is devoid of purpose, cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots; accordingly man is lost, all his actions become senseless, absurd, and useless.(Blair: 1974,276)
The absurdists mingle the qualities of farce and tragedy, making us laugh at that which hurts us most, making us weep at which is not foolish in our nature. They have taken every conceivable and symbolic device employed in allegory and dramatic expressionism. Furthermore, several of them have discarded psychological as a control of action. The action of these plays is intended to demonstrate symbolically the idea of the playwrights and to create the dramatic temperature necessary to maintain the interest of the audience. At first glance some of their plays appear to be utterly illogical until we realize logic of the author’s thought is not directly expressed but rather symbolically stated in ‘action’. (Bogard, 6-7) These ‘actions’ are definitely apprehended as far as the spectators are concerned. They may understand what lies behind any of these ‘actions’, in other words, they should delve in the symbolic significance of these actions.
To Camus, the absurd is an absence of correspondence between mind’s need for unity and the chaos of the world the mind experiences, and the obvious response is either suicide or in the opposite direction, a leap of faith. (Hinchliffe, 36)To Camus, the main response is revolt. Since in an absurd world all things are equal , this revolt can recommend neither virtue nor crime.
In 1938, Camus published Noces in which four basic themes emerge: the hopelessness of life , the need to refuse this world without renouncing it, the purity of the heart, and happiness. “The Myth of Sisyphus” is an intellectual investigation of the attitudes to life lyrically in Noces but Camus still wishes to describe the feeling of absurdity. This feeling comes generally in one of four ways: first, the mechanical nature of many people’s lives lead them to question of value and purpose of their existence; this is an intimation of absurdity. Second, an acute sense of time passing or the recognition that time is a destructive force. Third, a sense of being left in an alien world. Camus suggests that a world which can be explained even with bad reason is a familiar world. Fourth, a sense of isolation from other beings. (Hinchliffe,37)
The role of the absurd lies in two points: first, it is satirical, it criticizes society that is petty and dishonest. Second, it is shown when it faces up to the absurdity in plays when man is “stripped of accidental circumstances of social position or historical context, confronted with basic choices , the basic situation of his existence. It challenges the audience to make sense of nonsense to face the situation consciously rather than feel it vaguely, and perceive, with laughter, the fundamental absurdity. Such a theatre presents us with anxiety and despair, a sense of loss at the disappearance of solutions, illusions and purposefulness. Facing up to this means that we face up to reality itself. It confronts man with his own being, it lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions and to laugh at it.
The Theatre of the Absurd has some roots in the previous centuries. However, the Absurd Theatre was the product of the late nineteenth century. It was the age of science and discoveries, it witnessed the great conflict between science and religion which created suspicions and doubts in man s mind concerning tile purpose of life Many scientific ideas appeared to prove man’s extinction, and then man realizes the absurdity of such futile life.
The Absurd Theatre comes as a reflection of the thoughts of the age. The idea of nihilism spread all over Europe since Nietzsche’s contribution in his Zarathustra His ideas became the slogan of everybody that “God is dead”! After the II World War, the Absurd Theatre was developed; the recurrent deaths and destruction helped in making the concept of the absurd valid Man’s life became of a less value and his bewilderment increased more and more. In short, the II World War was instrumental towards a serious re-evaluation of man’s role, not only a social animal, but also as the inhabitant of a universe whose meaning and structure were rapidly disintegrating. (Gassner, 843) Thus, his existence in this universe became absurd as well. Everything in life seems disintegrating even the human beings themselves.
In the United States, there is a great stagnation in literature. The American playwrights used inherited themes. The New American Theatre came into existence only by Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959) and Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (1959). Albee had a great contribution in the development of the Absurd Theatre in the United States in The American Dream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? besides The Zoo Story. He shows the unpleasant realities of the human condition. He takes the traditional elements of the American dream and shows them in a ridiculous and distorted form. (Gassner, 844) This shows the contrast between what man wants and he really gets. In order to achieve his dreams he needs to defend some values and since there are no values in his life every thing becomes absurd even life itself
It appeared in the United States as a reaction to the Theatre of the Absurd in Europe and the dissatisfaction with the old playwrights. The delay of the coming of the Absurd Theatre in America is attributed to two main factors. First, America did not suffer from the war physically or spiritually like what happened in Europe. Second, there had been a strong element of idealism and optimism in America, thinking which runs back as far as the old original hope of establishing a new Eden there.(Blair, 276) But these dreams went on the rocks to see a nightmare before them.
As a movement the Theatre of the Absurd seems to have died a quiet death. With the exception of Harold Pinter (1930 – ) who is now labeled neo-absurd. Most of the absurdists found it difficult to sustain their world view throughout a frill — length play. Nevertheless, as a liberating force on conventional drama, the effects of the theatre of the absurd are still being felt and will undoubtedly continue to be for some time.
The Major Characteristics of the Absurd Theatre
The Absurd Theatre has become a catchphrase, much used and much abused. There is no organized movement , no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. When Beckett’s and lonesco’s plays first appeared on the stage, they puzzled and outraged most critics and audiences as well, And no wonder, these plays flout all the standards by which drama has been judged for many centuries; they must, therefore, appear as provocative to the people who have come into the theatre, expecting to find what they would recognize as a well — made play. A well — made play is expected to present characters that are well observed and convincingly motivated, these plays often contain hardly any recognizable human beings and present completely unmotivated actions, A well — made play is expected to entertain by the ding — dong of witty and logically built up dialogue. In some of these plays dialogue seems to have distinguished into a meaningless babble. A well — made play is expected to have a beginning, a middle and a neatly tied — up ending. These plays often start at an arbitrary point and seem to end just as arbitrarily. By all the traditional standards of critical appreciation of the drama; nobly bad, they do not even “deserve the name drama”. (Esslin:1965, 7) It seems that this idea was taken account by people who kept in mind the picture of a well — made play and how this theatre violated the traditional theatre.
The Theatre of the Absurd expresses the absence of any general accepted cosmic system of values. It is not preoccupied with showing the way to man for God, it only presents the idea with derision or anxiety, the realities as man sees them and experiences them. The subject matter for the playwright is to show the sense of being itself.
This theatre is not concerned with carrying information or representing problems of characters that exist outside the author’s inner world. It does not give a thesis nor it expounds any ideological propositions, it is not concerned with the representation or the narration of the fate or adventures of characters, but instead with the representatives of the basic situation of the individual, it is a theatre of situations.
The Absurd Theatre uses a language based on patterns of concrete images rather represent a sense of being, it can neither investigate nor solve problems of conduct or morals. (Esslin:1961,392) Plot in the Absurd Theatre is circular, there is no plot to speak about in the real sense of the word. But instead, it has a circular structure, ending exactly where it begins. It abandons a linear plot, of cause and effect pattern, to adopt a circular one. The absurdists create and use ant-climax, in other words, there are no cause and effect, no climax and no dénoument.(Bernard:1987,185)
A plot in drama can be defined as a plan or scheme to accomplish and achieve a purpose. In literature, plot refers to the arrangement of events to achieve an intended effect. It goes through stages of rising action, falling action, climax and dénournent.(Shaw: 1972,289) Plot in the Absurd Theatre is not intending to tell a story but to communicate a pattern of images. These plays do not constitute a plot or story, but instead they expound the writer’s intuition — that nothing really ever happens in man’s existence. These ideas are interwoven like the themes of a musical composition, not, as in most well — made plays, but to make in the spectator’s mind a total complex impression of a basic and a static situation. In this sense, the theatre is like a Symbolist or Imagist poem which also presents a pattern of images and associations in a mutually interdependent structure.
The recurring motifs are some situations which can be found in more than one work which have a strong relation to the main theme of the play. These situations are suggestive, significant, and symbolic as well. There are some images which are repeated in more than one work which reflect the theme of the play or show the degrading condition of man in the universe and his anger and contempt of being a human.
Since it projects the author’s personal world, the absurd play lacks objectively valid characters, it cannot show the class of opposing temperaments or study human passions locked in conflict because these conflicts do not appear on the part of the characters, on the contrary, they appear in the spectators’ mind to inquire about the existence of the human beings.
Conventional playwrights from the old times preferred verse as a medium of writing plays. The language used must be elegant and special language. Language can be defined as a means to an end. The absurdists seem to devalue language, language for them is no longer regarded as a means of communication any more, on the contrary, the language is futile and prevents communication. There are often breakdowns in communication between the characters who always misunderstand one another on one hand, and the characters and the audience on the other hand. The discomforting effect of the play of the Absurd is language. Speech to the absurdists is something futile. It represents sometimes the bathos of misunderstanding and non— communication. (Bernard,185)
Finally, decor is reduced to minimum with no naturalistic setting, no details are given for any particular time or place. The setting is gloomy and awful, sometimes it represents a ditch, other times a road or a bare landscape which shows loneliness and alienation of man in the world. The setting of the Absurd Theatre is rather suggestive and symbolic.
The Major Playwrights of the Absurd Theatre
Martin Esslin mentioned in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) four main figures as the outstanding and representatives of the Absurd Theatre. The four playwrights are the Irish Samuel Beckett, the Rumanian Eugene lonesco, the Russian Arthur Adamov, and the French Jean Genet. All of them wrote in French , but only Genet was native to French.
Arthur Adamov was born in Russia (1908). He settled in Paris during the Surrealist Movement in the 1920s, living largely by translation, he turned to drama under the influence of Strindberg’ s Dream Play which seemed to provide a form for his private feelings. Though Esslin claims that Adamov is a metaphysical absurdist, yet he is one of the great figures among the Absurdists.
Adamov wrote Ping- Pong (1954) and followed by Paolo Paoli (1955), In Ping- Pong the protagonists waste their lives, obsessed by pin ball machines, a symbol for a mechanical capitalist society. Adarnov reduces life to the haphazard illogic of a pinball game, the image quite expresses the dramatist’s absurdist view that human endeavour is essentially futile . His efforts to make his situation better is futile as well.
To Adamov, the subject of man’s solitude and the impossibility of communication between men are the main themes. Meaning of tragedy lies in the fact that, although the world does have a meaning that man must search for this meaning, this meaning is an accessible to man. In this sense, Adarnov’s world is a ‘parody’ of man’s search for meaning.(Gassner,2)
Eugene lonesco was born in 1912. He is considered the first absurdist in his The Bald Soprano (1950). It was written in 1948 and performed in 1950 under the label “anti — play”. The dialogue consists of nonsense phrases, puns and cliché, all these things are uttered by the four main characters in the play, Mr. And Mrs. Martin and Mr. And Mrs. Smith.
Jonesco’s comment on the play is that:
If it is a criticism of anything, it must be of all societies, of language of clichés a parody of the human behaviour and therefore a parody of the theatre too. If man is not tragic, he is ridiculous and painful, ‘comic’, in fact, and revealing his own absurdity one can achieve a sort of tragedy.
(Encyclopedia of World Drama,283)
Ionesco discovered that repeating common automatic phrases reveals the mechanical process of thoughtlessness. He goes on repeating the same sentences until they sound nonsense.(Gassner, 843) He creates a nightmare world energized by ferocious parody and resting on two basic tenets of avant — garde art: the fundamental isolation of man, and the breakdown of language. For him, the failure of communication is related to man’s alienation as a result of the claims and forms of social organization, from what is most distinctively human in himself. The alienation of man is also seen in terms of the sterility of his moral and emotional life, a sterility Ionesco often conveys by using meaningless action. (Daiches:1969,391) Ionesco recalls Artaud’s theories and his theatre, the Theatre of Violence, in which the psychological study of character will be replaced by metaphorical themes. He intentionally calls his plays ‘comic dramas’ or ‘tragic farces’, because the elements of the comic and tragic are not fused. To lonesco, they coexist and each stands as a criticism of the other.
lonesco deals in his plays with a philosophical anguish over the fate of man, which is to be an isolated spirit condemned to die while the heavy and the opaque material world that surrounds and assails him remains. Derision is his main means of projecting this anguish.
Jean Genet was born in 1910. He is a French novelist, playwright and a poet. He is concerned in his plays and novels with the type of man who is alienated from society, who accepts a role outside the social structure, although he can discover no justification for his role. Sartre, in his critical work on Genet, finds the writings of Genet examples of a gratuitous and absurd existence. He wrote The Balcony (1956), The Maids and Deathwatch.(Gassner,3) Genet had come to the attention of Jean Paul Sartre and this is due to his own writings. Sartre, in his lengthy biographical — critical — philosophical study of Genet, Saint Genet: Actor and Martre (1952) gives a good psychological and existential justification of Genet’s life and work as well, lie calls him to prototype of the existentialist man whose distinction between good and evil is the result of personal choice and decision.
Samuel Beckett, Irish French poet, critic, novelist and dramatist, was borne near Dublin, on April 13, 1906, of middle — class Protestant. He attended Trinity College where he took his B.A in 1927. A short time later he taught in Belfast, in 1928, he received a fellowship in Paris. In Paris, he met James Joyce who had a great influence on him. He returned then to Trinity College to have his M.A and taught in France until 1952. In 1953, he contributed to the world drama in his masterpiece Waiting for Godot (1953). In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. (Caster:1977, 7) Beckett occupies the second place among the Absurdists after Eugene lonesco who is regarded as the representative of the school.
Once Beckett wrote “I’m working with impotence, ignorance, I don’t think impotence has been exploited in the past …. My little exploitation is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable — as something by definition incompatible with art.”(Daiches: 1971,39) Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was written at the same time of writing lonesco’s The Bald Soprano. Waiting for Godot opened in Paris in 1953. Beckett presents to the audience with the image of a barren, hopeless and desperate world over which man has lost control. The two tramps in the play are locked in paralysis and incapable of doing a simple action. They talk endlessly and indecisively, and in the end the situation is the same as they began. The only suffering is in waiting, but who and what they are waiting for is never known or explained. In one of Beckett’s interviews with Alan Scimeider, a contemporary critic, when he is asked who and what was meant by Godot, he received the answer, ‘If I knew, I would have said so in the play.(Esslin:1961,43)
The play sounds strange, a play with no play, no apparent sense, no female role — waiting explores a static situation. The subject is not Godot, but waiting. Godot represents the object of the act of waiting, a person, a thing, an event or even death. Waiting is to experience the action of time which is constant change . And yet, as nothing really happens, that change is itself an illusion.
Edward Albee, the only American playwright whose works have got a great renown with Absurdity in his one — act plays. The Zoo Story (1959) and The American Dream (1961). The Zoo Story was first produced in Berlin in 1959, because the American producers are like the French ones in their hostile attitudes towards the new drama. In this play, Albee focuses on the insurmountable problems that two people face in trying to communicate with one another. The situation ends in violence. When one of the two characters forces the second one to kill him.
In The American Dream , Albee takes the traditional elements of the American dream and tackles them in a ridiculous and distorted form they have assumed; the dream has become a nightmare. Albee’s other contribution is made in a very successful Broadway debut with his first three – act play , Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Harold Pinter was born in 1930. He is regarded as one of the major exponents of the Absurd Theatre. “Comedy of Menace” is the best word to describe Pinter’s early works. Since the source of the menace is often not explicit, the effect is a strong sense of floating anxiety. People are in an enclosed area, usually one room, the plays imply that the world outside the room, for example, is threatening; the circumstances seem ordinaiy, but there is a generalized and unspecified horror beneath the action. Mystery and horror are frequently created in the form of unanswerable accusations. In Pinter’s plays, he creates an air of mystery and uncertainty. The menace comes from outside, from the intruder whose arrival unsettles the warm and comfortable world bounded by the four walls, and any intrusion can be menacing because the elements of uncertainty and unpredictability the intruder brings with him is in itself menacing.
The Room is a poetic image of a small area of light and warmth that our consciousness, the fact that we exist, opens up in the vast ocean of nothingness from which we gradually emerge after birth and into which we sink again when we die. Pinter wants to liken the room with a womb in which there are warmth and passion and outside there are evil and unknown world.
To Pinter, there is no contradiction between the desire for realism and the basic absurdity of the situations that inspire him. Like lonesco, he regards life in its absurdity and basically funny. It seems to him that everything is funny even the tragedy.
Finally, Pinter’s later works border on the psychological, but they still retain his poetic aura of the absurd. Pinter is now labeled neo — absurdists. Pinter’s plays are very different in feel, the settings in most of his plays are realistic enough. He makes a sort of poetry out of the repetitions.
References
Extracted & adapted paper from an M.A thesis The Theatre of the Absurd: A Study in Technique by Ahmed Hashim and supervised by me.
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