ABSTRACT
Absurd The theatre of the absurd was a term, derived from Camus and popularized by Martin Esslin’s book The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), applied to a group of dramatists whose work emerged during the early 1950s (though Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna were actually written in the late 1940s). In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus defined the absurd as the tension which emerges from the individual’s determination to discover purpose and order in a world which steadfastly refuses to evidence either. To writers like Ionesco and Beckett this paradox leaves human actions, aspirations and emotions merely ironical. The redeeming message no longer comes from God but is delivered by a deaf mute to a collection of empty chairs (The Chairs, 1952); human qualities, such as perseverance and courage, no longer function except as derisory comments on the individual’s impotence (Happy Days, 1961); basic instincts and responses, the motor forces of the individual, become the source of misery (Act Without Words, 1957). Camus himself could see a limited transcendence in the ability to recognize and even exalt in the absurd (The Outsider, 1942) or in the minimal consolation of stoicism (Cross Purpose, 1944). But he came to feel that absurdity implied a world which appeared to sanction Nazi brutality as easily as it did individual acts of violence. From an examination of the nature of absurdity, therefore, he moved towards liberal humanism: ‘The end of the movement of absurdity, of rebellion, etc. . . . is compassion . . . that is to say, in the last analysis, love’. For writers like Beckett
and Ionesco such a dialectical shift was simply faith. For to the ‘absurd’ dramatist it is axiomatic that humans live in an entropic world in which communication is impossible and illusion preferred to reality. The individual has no genuine scope for action (Hamm sits lame and blind in Endgame, 1958; Winnie is buried to the neck in sand in Happy Days; the protagonist of Ionesco’s The New Tenant (written 1953, produced 1957) is submerged beneath proliferating furniture); individuals are the victims of their metaphysical situation. Logically, the plays abandon linear plot, plausible character development and rational language. In contrast to Camus’s work their style directly reflects their subject.
