Pacheco 1 Politics in the Absurdist Theatre of Samuel Beckett, Václav Havel and Eugène Ionesco by Danielle Pacheco 11106670 Master’s thesis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA Literary Studies - Literature and Culture - Comparative Literature University of Amsterdam - Graduate School of Humanities Supervisor: Dr. Matthijs Engelberts Second reader: Dr. Noa Roei 15 June 2016 Pacheco 2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 3 1.1 The Theatre of the Absurd ....................................................................................... 4 1.2 Committed Literature in the Twentieth Century ...................................................... 9 2. Samuel Beckett: The politics in En attendant Godot ............................................... 12 2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 12 2.2 Beckett’s politics .................................................................................................... 13 2.3 En attendant Godot: Don’t mention the war ......................................................... 17 2.4 Guilt: The Vichy government and other reasons for not mentioning the war ....... 19 2.5 Language ................................................................................................................ 23 Cryptic messages ............................................................................................. 23 Rhetoric ............................................................................................................ 25 2.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 28 3. Václav Havel: Soviet Poster Child.............................................................................. 30 3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 30 3.2 Czechoslovakia in the 1960’s ................................................................................ 31 3.3 Writing style........................................................................................................... 32 Nonsensical speech .......................................................................................... 35 Repetition ......................................................................................................... 40 3.4 Reading Havel ........................................................................................................ 42 Domestic reactions ........................................................................................... 42 Politics and translation: bringing Czech theatre across the border .................. 44 Havel on Havel ................................................................................................ 46 3.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 48 4. Eugène Ionesco: The Development of a New Theatre .............................................. 50 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 50 4.2 Politics The Iron Guard ................................................................................................. 51 Rhinocéros ....................................................................................................... 52 Neither left nor right ........................................................................................ 54 Liberalism ........................................................................................................ 57 On committed writing ...................................................................................... 57 4.2 Language, aesthetics and style ............................................................................... 60 Communication ................................................................................................ 61 Proliferation ..................................................................................................... 63 4.3 Influences on the Theatre of the Absurd: Ionesco and Esslin ................................ 65 4.4 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 67 5. Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 69 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 71 Pacheco 3 Introduction Martin Esslin coined the term “Theatre of the Absurd” in his 1961 book of the same name to describe a group of emerging playwrights whose theatre1 broke radically from tradition. A retroactively-applied term with which the playwrights themselves did not necessarily identify, the term itself has met with contention in the years since Esslin’s book. However, there is no doubt that the playwrights Esslin grouped together do share many common traits - murky character background, strange plot development and incoherent dialogue - and although the term has been much criticized, I will examine the plays in the context of their label as “absurdist theatre.” Critical reactions to absurdist plays have ranged from psychoanalytic to philosophical, and given the emergence of the genre during the Cold War and immediately after World War II, many absurdist plays have been retroactively politically interpreted. Yet while some absurdist playwrights were manifestly political in their aims, others, while they may have been influenced by the political turmoil of their era, were less obviously so in their writing. Václav Havel’s Garden Party (1963) and Memorandum (1965) have been understood as a pointed remark on the poisonous effects of bureaucratic rhetoric under communist rule; in contrast, works such as Beckett’s En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot; 1952) are more universal in their targets, and vague in their politics. Eugène Ionesco straddles both the political and non-political arenas; his first absurdist play, La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano; 1950), appears to be generic social commentary; but the much later Rhinocéros (Rhinoceros; 1959) is a clear condemnation of fascism. In my thesis, I will analyze the evolution of the Theatre of the Absurd, from Ionesco and Beckett, two of its pioneers, to Havel, who best represents absurdist theatre in the Soviet bloc, to show that although these absurdist playwrights often claimed their plays were not 1 Analyzing theatre for a Master’s thesis in literature is slightly contentious, as theatre involves a performance in addition to its written script. In my thesis, I will discuss only the written versions of the plays, which best represent the politics of the authors, and will refrain from any analysis of their performances. Pacheco 4 political, the absurdist style in theatre was inextricably linked to the political climate of post- WWII Europe. The Theatre of the Absurd With the Paris productions of La cantatrice chauve in 1950 and En attendant Godot in 1953 (written in 1948), Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett unwittingly became the founding fathers of a movement in theatre that would see a complete upheaval of the way people understood drama, starting in Paris and soon spreading to London, Germany and the rest of the European and North American world. This new “anti-theatre” was soon defined by Martin Esslin as the “Theatre of the Absurd.” Although Esslin cites “social criticism, [the] pillorying of an inauthentic, petty society” (Esslin 401, 1980 version) as one of the main messages of the Theatre of the Absurd, the genre’s “most essential” message, for Esslin, is philosophical: The Theatre of the Absurd is facing up to a deeper layer of absurdity - the absurdity of the human condition itself… In the analysis of the dramatists of the Absurd in this book, we have always seen man stripped of the accidental circumstances of social position or historical context, confronted with the basic choices, the basic situations of his existence… Concerned as it is with the ultimate realities of the human condition, the relatively few fundamental problems of life and death, isolation and communication, the Theatre of the Absurd, however grotesque, frivolous, and irreverent it may appear, represents a return to the original, religious function of the theatre - the confrontation of man with the spheres of myth and religious reality. Like ancient Greek tragedy and the medieval mystery plays and baroque allegories, the Theatre of the Absurd is intent on making its audience aware of man’s precarious and mysterious position in the universe” (402). Pacheco 5 Esslin’s focus on the existentialist aspects of the Theatre of the Absurd was a strategic manoeuvre, with the goal of explaining the genre’s mysterious and incomprehensible style to audiences who had lambasted it for not being “real theatre.” He succeeded in establishing the plays of Beckett, Ionesco and their peers as works of art that were worthy of serious academic criticism, but with the consequence that the field remained more or less anchored in a universalizing, philosophical turn for most of the 1950’s and 1960’s Although the literary world was shocked with the premières of La cantatrice chauve and En