The Absurdity of the Absurd Author(s): Martin Esslin Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 22, No.

4 (Autumn, 1960), pp. 670-673 Published by: Kenyon College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4334078 . Accessed: 18/05/2013 22:48
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COMMENT
Martin Esslin THE ABSURDITYOF THE ABSURD
A Note on Ward Hooker's essay on "Irony and Absurdity in the AvantGarde Theatre." (Kenvon Review, Summer, 1960.)
MR. WARD HOOKER'S ESSAY CONTAINS SOME PENETRATING OBSERVATIONS ON

the comic element in the French theatre from Marivaux to Beckett. His exegesis of Waiting for Godot in particular is an illuminating piece of criticism. Yet I should like to take issue with him on his use of the terms irony and absurditv'. I do not want to suggest that he uses these terms wrongly. In fact he follows common usage. My point however is that common usage is different from the meaning given to these terms by the practitioners of the French avant-garde theatre themselves. There is therefore a considerable danger of confusion here between the meaning of these terms as generally understood in English-speaking countries and the sense in which they are used by writers like Beckett and Ionesco. And surely in critical writings about these authors it is dangerous to use the key term of their theatre in a sense widely differing from their own understanding of it. Mr. Hooker says: "Dramatic irony is usually defined as speech or action which is more fully understood, or differently understood, by the audience than by the speaker." He quotes the example of Malvolio. Another example would be Schiller's Wallenstein, of whom the audience knows that he is about to be murdered, and who retires to bed with the words, "I intend to have a long sleep." Dramatic irony can thus be meant to be funny as well as deeply tragic. Yet in the course of his essay Mr. Hooker tends to use the term "ironical" as generally synonymous with "funny." He regards the meaning of absurd as an intensification, a superlative of "ironical." "If [the difference in understanding] is great enough, the resulting phenomenon may be called 'absurdity.'" Mr. Hooker is aware of the fact that this use of the term is at variance with its use by the French avant-garde. He says, "This term has acquired a new connotation since Albert Camus has taught us to find absurdity in actions and institutions that had been taken seriously before." (My italics.) From the juxtaposition of absurdity and seriousness it is clear that Mr. Hooker understands

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671 "absurd" as being synonymouswith "very funny" or "grotesquelyfunny." He goes on to say: "But for the ordinaryplaygoerit may still be taken to mean the extremelyincongruous,inadequate,or irrelevant." As I have already said, Mr. Hooker's definition is fully justified by common usage in the English-speaking countries.The New English Dictionary, after mentioning the origin of the term from its use in music, where it means "inharmonious," defines it as follows: "Out of harmony

with reason or propriety;incongruous,unreasonable, illogical. In modern use especially plainly opposed to reason and hence ridiculous, silly." In French, however, the meaning of ridiculous does not arise. The Petit Laroussedefines absurdemerely as contraire2 la raison, 2 sens commun. Here seems to me the sourceof the confusion of terms. In English absurd can mean ridiculous.In French it means merely contraryto reason. That is the meaning of the term in the French avant-gardetheatre, which has been called a Theatre of the Absurd. Camus' brilliant essay "Le Mythe de Sisyphe"ascribesabsurditynot only to "actionsand institutions" but to the human condition itself. And not because the human condition is funny, but becauseit is deeply tragic in an age when the loss of belief in God and human progress has eliminated the meaning of existenceand has made human existenceessentiallypurposelessand hence plainly opposedto reason. The "absurdity" of the French avant-gardedramatiststhus does not spring from their use of irony. It springs from the subjectmatterof their plays. In fact it is the subject matter of their plays. Both Ionesco and Beckett are concernedwith communicatingto their audiences their sense of the absurdityof the human condition. As lonesco puts it in an essay on Kafka: "Absurdis that which is devoid of purpose . . . Cut off from his religious, metaphysicaland transcendentalroots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless,absurd, useless. In another essay Ionesco describeshis sense of existencefrom his earliestchildhood as one of vertigo at the thought of the transitoriness of the world: "I have known no other images of the world apart from those which expressevanescence, hardness,
vanity, rage, nothingness and hideous, useless hatred. That is how existence

has appeared to me ever since . . . " That is why the picture of the human condition in a play like The Bald Primadonna is cruel and absurd (in the sense of devoid of meaning). In a world that has no purpose and ultimate reality the polite exchanges of middle-class society become the mechanical, senseless antics of brainless puppets. Individuality and character, which are related to a conception of the ultimate validity of every human soul, have lost their relevance (hence as Mr. Hooker rightly points out, Professor Grossvogel's criticisms of these plays as lacking individuality in characterization completely miss the terms of reference of this kind of avant-garde

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672

COMMENT

theatre). Nor can I see any irony in the example quoted from The Bald Primadonna.The audience knows no more about the mcaning of the mechanicallysenseless dialogue than do the charactersthemselves.What is involved is a savage satire (which is by no means the same as irony) on the dissolutionand fossilizationof the language of polite conversation of characters that have lost all individuality, and on the interchangeability even that of sex. Such characterslead a meaningless, absurd existence. Mr. Hooker rightly observes that the audience neverthelessfinds them extremelyfunny. My contentionis that the source of this laughter is not to be found in any irony but in the release within the audience of their own repressedfeelings of frustration.By seeing the people on the stage of daily intercourse, mechanicallyperforming the empty politeness-ritual by seeing them reducedto mechanicalpuppets acting in a completevoid, the audience while recognizing itself in this picture can also feel superior on the stage in being able to apprehendtheir absurdityto the characters and this producesthe wild, liberatingrelease of laughter-laughter based on deep inner anxiety, as Mr. Hooker has observed it in The Lesson. hilarityproducedby the release This is analogousto the liberatinghysterical of aggressionand sadistic impulses in the old silent film comedy by the cartoonfilms by the hideous throwing of custardpies, or in contemporary cruelties inflictedon the mechanicallyconceived human and animal characters.Such laughteris purgative-but deep down the things laughedabout are of the utmostseriousness. The absurdityof the human condition is also the theme of Beckett's in the act of purposeless Waiting for Godot. The play portrayscharacters waiting. It is indeed a religious allegory; it deals with the elusivenessof meaning in life and the impossibilityof ever knowing the divine purpose, if it exists at all. This is the theme of all of Beckett'spublished works. And Beckett also uses the term absurdityin the sense of purposelessness-asopposedto necessity.He does so even in those of his works which were originally written in English. In Watt for example, the chief character,who serves a masteralmost as elusive as Godot, Mr. Knott, thus meditatesabout his situation: ". . . he had hardly felt the absurdityof those things, on the one hand, and the necessityof those others,on the other (for it is rarethat is not followedby the feeling of necessity)when he the feeling of absurdity felt the absurdityof those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessityis not followed by the feeling of absurdity)." In the London performance(and I believe even more so in the New York production) of Waiting for Godot the play was as far as possible acted for laughs-with great success,for as with lonesco, the recognition

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MARTIN ESSLIN

673

of hidden fears causes liberating gusts of hilarity. But it is known that Samuel Beckett himself preferredthe Paris performancewhich was taken far more slowly, seriouslyand solemnly. There can be no doubt that for Beckett the absurdity (i.e., the senselessness)of the human condition is anything but funny. Nor, by Mr. Hooker's own definition, can I see any irony at all in
Waiting for Godot. If irony implies that the audience knows more about

the meaningof what is going on on the stage than the characters involved, then there is a complete absenceof irony in a play in which to the very last moment the audienceis kept in complete ignoranceof the meaning of the action as a whole. As Mr. Hooker points out, even the parallelismof the two acts is designed to show that things do not change for Vladimir and Estragon.Cunninglythe audienceis led to hope that subtlythe second act will provide a variationon the first which will reveal the meaning of the play and the identity of Godot. But this preciselydoes not happen. If there is any irony involved it is at the expense of the audience, which is put into the position of Malvolio who is led to expect things which do not happen. I do not think that it is possibleto establisha continuityin the use of irony and absurdityas betweenMarivaux,or even Giraudouxand Anouilh, and lonesco, Beckett,Adamov and their ever more numerousfollowers in England, Germany and Italy. For these dramatistsare a real avant-garde in the sense that they are trying to evolve a new kind of theatre,to establish a new theatrical convention,a theatrewhich will no longer deal with moral problems, social conditions or social conventions but with the human condition itself. In the view of these dramatiststhe conventionaltheatre has lost contact with reality by being too rigidly rational in insisting that every conflict is fully motivated in the first act and neatly solved in the final scene according to a fixed scale of values of one kind or another. Their contentionis that life in our age has lost any such readilyidentifiable rationale,that realityitself has becomemultidimensional and problematical. What, they ask in fact, is reality?What is verifiable?What is the meaning of existence? Can language itself be still used to communicatebetween human beings? Is there such a thing as character, personality, individuality? By confrontingtheir audienceswith the senselessness of the human condition they are trying to make them awareof the avenuesof liberationfrom the narrowness of their lives and perceptions. That is why the avant-garde theatre of our time is concerned with the Absurd-the Absurd in its metaphysical sense.

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