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COMMENT

Martin Esslin

THE ABSURDITY OF THE ABSURD

A Note on Ward Hooker's essay on "Irony and Absurdity in the Avant- Garde 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 there- fore 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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"absurd" as being synonymous with "very funny" or "grotesquely funny." He goes on to say: "But for the ordinary playgoer it may still be taken to mean the extremely incongruous, 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 Dic- tionary, 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 Larousse defines absurde merely as contraire 2 la raison, 2 sens commun. Here seems to me the source of the confusion of terms. In English absurd can mean ridiculous. In French it means merely contrary to reason.

That is the meaning of the term in the French avant-garde theatre, which has been called a Theatre of the Absurd. Camus' brilliant essay "Le Mythe de Sisyphe" ascribes absurdity not only to "actions and institu- tions" but to the human condition itself. And not because the human condition is funny, but because it is deeply tragic in an age when the loss of belief in God and human progress has eliminated the meaning of existence and has made human existence essentially purposeless and hence plainly opposed to reason.

The "absurdity" of the French avant-garde dramatists thus does not spring from their use of irony. It springs from the subject matter of their plays. In fact it is the subject matter of their plays. Both Ionesco and Beckett are concerned with communicating to their audiences their sense of the absurdity of the human condition. As lonesco puts it in an essay on Kafka: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose . . . Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless. In another essay Ionesco describes his sense of existence from his earliest childhood 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 express evanescence, 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 character- ization completely miss the terms of reference of this kind of avant-garde

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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 mechanically senseless dialogue than do the characters themselves. What is involved is a savage satire (which is by no means the same as irony) on the dissolution and fossilization of the language of polite conversation and on the interchangeability of characters that have lost all individuality, even that of sex. Such characters lead a meaningless, absurd existence. Mr. Hooker rightly observes that the audience nevertheless finds them extremely funny. My contention is that the source of this laughter is not to be found in any irony but in the release within the audience of their own repressed feelings of frustration. By seeing the people on the stage mechanically performing the empty politeness-ritual of daily intercourse, by seeing them reduced to mechanical puppets acting in a complete void, the audience while recognizing itself in this picture can also feel superior to the characters on the stage in being able to apprehend their absurdity- and this produces the wild, liberating release of laughter-laughter based on deep inner anxiety, as Mr. Hooker has observed it in The Lesson. This is analogous to the liberating hysterical hilarity produced by the release of aggression and sadistic impulses in the old silent film comedy by the throwing of custard pies, or in contemporary cartoon films by the hideous cruelties inflicted on the mechanically conceived human and animal char- acters. Such laughter is purgative-but deep down the things laughed about are of the utmost seriousness.

The absurdity of the human condition is also the theme of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The play portrays characters in the act of purposeless waiting. It is indeed a religious allegory; it deals with the elusiveness of meaning in life and the impossibility of ever knowing the divine purpose, if it exists at all.

This is the theme of all of Beckett's published works. And Beckett also uses the term absurdity in the sense of purposelessness-as opposed to 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 master almost as elusive as Godot, Mr. Knott, thus meditates about his situation: ". . . he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity) when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is 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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of hidden fears causes liberating gusts of hilarity. But it is known that Samuel Beckett himself preferred the Paris performance which was taken far more slowly, seriously and 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 meaning of what is going on on the stage than the characters involved, then there is a complete absence of irony in a play in which to the very last moment the audience is kept in complete ignorance of the meaning of the action as a whole. As Mr. Hooker points out, even the parallelism of the two acts is designed to show that things do not change for Vladimir and Estragon. Cunningly the audience is led to hope that subtly the second act will provide a variation on the first which will reveal the meaning of the play and the identity of Godot. But this precisely does 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 possible to establish a continuity in the use of irony and absurdity as between Marivaux, or even Giraudoux and Anouilh, and lonesco, Beckett, Adamov and their ever more numerous followers in England, Germany and Italy. For these dramatists are 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 theatre which will no longer deal with moral problems, social conditions or social conventions but with the human condition itself. In the view of these dramatists the conventional theatre 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 contention is that life in our age has lost any such readily identifiable rationale, that reality itself has become multidimensional 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 communicate between human beings? Is there such a thing as character, personality, individuality? By confronting their audiences with the senselessness of the human condi- tion they are trying to make them aware of the avenues of liberation from 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.