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Theatre of the Absurd : Its Themes and Form

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Theatre of the Absurd : Its Themes and Form THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD: ITS THEMES AND FORM by LETITIA SKINNER DACE A. B., Sweet Briar College, 1963 A MASTER'S THESIS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS Department of Speech KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY Manhattan, Kansas 1967 Approved by: c40teA***u7fQU(( rfi" Major Professor il PREFACE Contemporary dramatic literature is often discussed with the aid of descriptive terms ending in "ism." Anthologies frequently arrange plays under such categories as expressionism, surrealism, realism, and naturalism. Critics use these designations to praise and to condemn, to denote style and to suggest content, to describe a consistent tone in an author's entire ouvre and to dissect diverse tendencies within a single play. Such labels should never be pasted to a play or cemented even to a single scene, since they may thus stifle the creative imagi- nation of the director, actor, or designer, discourage thorough analysis by the thoughtful viewer or reader, and distort the complex impact of the work by suppressing whatever subtleties may seem in conflict with the label. At their worst, these terms confine further investigation of a work of art, or even tempt the critic into a ludicrous attempt to squeeze and squash a rounded play into a square pigeon-hole. But, at their best, such terms help to elucidate theme and illuminate style. Recently the theatre public's attention has been called to a group of avant - garde plays whose philosophical propensities and dramatic conventions have been subsumed under the title "theatre of the absurd." This label describes the profoundly pessimistic world view of play- wrights whose work is frequently hilarious theatre, but who appear to despair at the futility and irrationality of life and the inevitability of death. Using the term theatre of the absurd, critics have clarified the content of many a complex avant - garde play. Martin Esslin has written a virtual encyclopedia of the movement. Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd provides the puzzled viewer or reader with sensitive analyses of numerous plays, yet neither Esslin nor the author of any of the subsequent books and articles on this movement has detailed the thematic material which the dramatists of the absurd present. Studies continue to concentrate on individual plays or on a few scattered themes, with the result that the term absurdist is applied indiscriminately to quite a motley crew. Arguments rage as to whether this play or that is absurdist, or, unfortunately, often simply "absurd." Although not usually called absurdism, the designation "theatre of the absurd" is prone to the same kinds of abuses as are encountered in the use of "isms." Without a catalogue of thematic material, the term means anything and therefore nothing. It is too broad. On the other hand, individual critics brand the label on any wriggling, elusive play, oversimplifying it, confining it in a neat dramatic straight- jacket. The term then is too narrow. Subtleties are lost. A catalogue of themes common to the absurdist playwrights may per- mit a judicious use of the label, eliminating certain plays which ob- viously should not be characterized as primarily absurdist, allowing examination of the formal characteristics of the particularly absurdist plays, and suggesting comparisons with various other works of dramatic literature. This study therefore attempts a detailed examination of the content of the theatre of the absurd, contrasts this content with the themes of three other playwrights sometimes associated with the absurd, and provides a briefer discussion of the formal expression of absurdist themes. Certain plays by nine British, continental, and American playwrights will be referred to as absurdist. The selection is somewhat arbitrary and a somewhat different group of plays might have been chosen. The original group considered was larger, but only the plays finally selected seem to have a sufficient degree of thematic and stylistic similarity to warrant inclusion. iqv; TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ii BOOK I: THEMES INTRODUCTION TO PART I 1 PART I: AN ANALYSIS OF ABSURDIST THEMES THE INABILITY TO ACT AND THE FUTILITY OF ACTION 5 THE ABSURD IN THE GUISE OF DEATH 15 THE ABSURD AS UNCERTAINTY 21 Mysterious Menace 21 Anchor in Instability 25 VITIATED VALUES 37 CONFORMITY AND IDENTITY 43 NON- COMMUNICATION AND ISOLATION 52 EMOTIONAL ATROPHY 70 INTRODUCTION TO PART II 80 PART II: THE CONTRAST OF ABSURDIST THEMES WITH THOSE OF THREE PLAYWRIGHTS WRONGLY CALLED ABSURDIST 82 Jean Genet 82 Albert Camus 96 Jean-Paul Sartre 110 PART III: THE DIFFICULTY OF DEFINING ABSURDIST DRAMA SOLELY BY MEANS OF THEMATIC ANALYSIS 117 INTRODUCTION TO BOOK II 126 BOOK II: FORM ON ATTEMPTING TO DEFINE BY MEANS OF PLOT, CHARACTERS, AND DIALOGUE 128 vi ON ATTEMPTING TO DEFINE BY MEANS OF COMIC TECHNIQUE 156 ON ATTEMPTING TO DEFINE BY MEANS OF A FORM WHICH REFLECTS ITS CONTENT 162 THE ABSURDISTS ON THEATRE OF THE ABSURD 190 CONCLUSION 193 BIBLIOGRAPHY 195 APPENDIX 250 BOOK I: THEMES INTRODUCTION TO PART I Useful in abstracting a definition of the theatre of the absurd are the plays of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, N. F. Simpson, Robert Pinget , and Arrabal, as well as certain plays by Arthur Adamov, Arthur Kopit, and Edward Albee. Many critics have discerned in plays by these dramatists a vision of a world which is absurd; that is, not ridicu- lous or ludicrous or laughable, but metaphysically futile, purposeless, meaningless, irrational. As described by Ionesco, "All human behavior tells of absurdity and all history of absolute futility..." The absurd in some guise hounds every absurdist character. Not a one can realistically hope to evade the absurd. Some do try to escape. Ionesco's Jack, for example, found life impossible at birth, but his search for an escape route has encountered only doors that are boarded and stairs that are gone. Men cannot exit to escape, but the absurd can and does enter, in Pinter's A Slight Ache , for instance, invading a wealthy man's life in his own home on a beautiful day, disrupting his marriage, evicting him; there is no escape from the force accompanying that Matchseller. There is no escape, either, in Ionesco's Victims of Duty , from the Detective, who, though he does not believe in the absurd, embodies it. Choubert's mundane life is disrupted, and he awakens to a new vision of the world: lM My Critics and I," Notes and Counter Notes , tr. Donald Watso (New York, 1964), p. 163. Shades waking to life... ...nostalgia, shreds and fragments of a universe...A yawning pit... Resign myself . ..resign myself...The light is dark... the stars are dim. ..I'm suffering from an unknown disease... My face is wet with tears. Where has beauty gone? And goodness? And love? I've lost my memory... My toys... in pieces... My toys are broken... The toys I had as a child... I am old... I am old...^ He is old, and age and subsequent death are one facet of the ab- surd, one means of rendering life hopeless. The Berenger of The Killer remarks that hope is no longer a French word. His hopes die with Dany, the girl he loves. In Beckett's Happy Days , Willie's aspirations are mocked by his age. Twice each he reads from the paper "Opening for smart youth" and "Wanted bright boy." He is, like the hog he describes, "Castrated male swine... Reared for slaughter." (p. 47) This life without hope is also life without meaning. In Pinget's Dead Letter the Clerk gropes for meaning, but the curtain falls on his pathetic "What matters is. ..What matters.. .What matters..." The same dramatist's Clope wishes for the good old days when "you had a glimmer of what it was all about..." There is no longer even a glimmer of 2 Three Plays, tr. Donald Watson (New York, 1958), pp. 141-142. All subsequent quotations from Victims of Duty will be from this edition. 3 (New York, 1961), pp. 16 & 48, 17 & 48. All subsequent quotations from Happy Days will be from this edition. 4 tr. Barbara Bray, Plays: Volume I (London, 1963), p. 131. All subsequent quotations from Dead Letter will be from this edition. Robert Pinget, "Clope," Plays , I, p. 22. All subsequent quota- tions from this play will be from this edition. meaning discernible and Clope's nostalgia is termed reactionary by his friend Flan, who prefers eating to understanding. And Ionesco explains that his plays reflect a world "emptied of meaning. ..Human beings saturated in meaninglessness." Such saturation is perhaps most acute in The Chairs , in which objects, a clutter of chairs, fill the void and a mute voices the meaning of life. Beckett's tramps likewise fill their lives with pointless activity involving objects; they put on shoes, take off hats, pick up bags —which are filled with sand— and assume it all means something because they are waiting for Godot. The three lost souls of Play , immured in urns, com- fort themselves with the thought that they understand their lives and deaths, but each, knowing only a fragment of the picture, arrives at a surmise hopelessly incorrect. Their pasts were aimless, their ends purposeless, and their present lives are a cruel joke, pierced by a probing, inquisitive light which elicits from each unjustified hopes and those ludicrous attempts to make sense of the senseless. Of all Beckett's creations only the bitter participants in Endgame can laugh at the joke that their lives might "mean something." 7 Adamov's and Arrabal's characters grossly distort values in the attempt to impose meaning on the void. Sex, sadism, pedantry and games become ends for these drifters.
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