THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Martin Esslin was born in Hungary and grew up in Vienna. He majored in English and philosophy at the University of Vienna and attended the Bernhardt (Theatrical) Seminar, where he studied to be a director. Just as he was on the point of starting his theatrical career, in 1938, the Nazis moved into Vienna and he was forced to leave. He spent a year in Brussels, and then came to England, where he became a script-writer and producer for the B.B.C. He has written for the B.B.C. a large number of radio features on political, social and literary subjects and is at present head of its radio drama department. He is the author of Brecht: The Man and His Work (A 245). The Anchor Books edition is the first publication of The Theatre of the Absurd. mme mahtin: Quelle est la morale? le pompier; (Test a vous de la trouver. Anchor Books edition: 1961 Ionesco, La Cantatrice Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 61-13814 Copyright © 1961 by Martin Esslin All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS preface Xi introduction: the absurdity of the absurd xv chapter one: samuel beckett! the search for the self 1 chapter two: arthur adamov. the curable and the incurable 47 chapter three! eugene ionesc01 theatre and anti-theatre 79 chapter four: jean genet: a hall of mirrors 140 chapter five! parallels and proselytes 168 Jean Tardieu 168 Boris Vian 176 Dino Buzzati 179 Ezio d'Errico 180 Manuel de Pedrolo 182 Fernando Arrabal 186 Amos Kenan 190 Max Frisch 191 Wolfgang Hildesheimer 194 Günter Grass 195 Robert Pinget 196 contents Harold Pinter Norman Frederick Simpson Edward Albee chapter six! the tradition of the absurd^ chapter seven: the significance of the absurd 198 217 225 229 290 notes bibliography index 317 335 357 PREFACE This is a book on a development in the contemporary theatre: the type of drama associated with the names of Samuel Beckett. Eugene Ionesco. Arthur Adamoy., Jean. Genet, and a number of other avant-garde writers in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. Books on theatre subjects have a tendency to be ephemeral; in most bookshops, the shelves with the autobiographies of star actors and collections of last year's hits have a tired look. I should never have written this book had I not been convinced that its subject had an importance transcending the somewhat confined world of theatre literature. For the theatre, in spite of its apparent eclipse through the rise of the mass media, remains of immense and, if anything, growing significance—precisely because of the spread of the cinema and television. These mass media are too ponderous and costly to indulge in much experiment and innovation. So, however restricted the theatre and its audience may be, it is on the living stage that the actors and playwrights of the mass media are trained and gain their experience and the material of the mass media is tested. The avant-garde of the theatre today is, more likely than not, the main influence on the mass media of tomorrow. And the mass media, in turn, shape a great deal of the thought and feeling of people throughout the Western world. Thus the type of theatre discussed in this hook is by no means of concern only to a narrow circle of intellectuals. It may provide a new language, new ideas, new approaches, and the theatre of the absurd a new, vitalized philosophy to transform the modes of thought and feeling of the public at large in a not too distant future. Moreover, an understanding of this land of theatre, which is still misunderstood by some of the critics, s^gtd^J^believe, also cast light on current tendencies..of thought in other fields?" or at least showTiowa hew1 conventionof this sort^ejeelsj^ J&aflge^^^seieneer^y^ho^ that have been taking place in the last half century. The dieatre, an art more broadly based than poetry or abstract painting without being, like the mass media, the collective product of corporations, is the point of intersection where the deeper trends of changing thought first reach a larger public. There has been some comment on the fact that the Theatre of the Absurd represents trends that have been apparent in the more esoteric kinds of literature since the nineteen-twenties (Joyce, Surrealism, Kafka) or in painting since the first decade of this century (Cubism, abstract painting). This is certainly true. But the theatre could not put these innovations before its wider public until these trends had had time to filter into a wider consciousness. And, as this book hopes to show, the theatre can make its own very original contribution to this new type of art. vW^s^ W*k This book is an attempt to define the convention that has come to be called the Theafrel^rthe^^^ worfe of some or its major exponente-jmd^pmyide^an analysis and elucidation oyge^^ of their ^^fapBfS^BJgjg'ž to4ntroduce a number of lesser-K^™ vmtíďs 'wčflang in the same**oTlimilar conventió^T^sSíw that thjjLÄead, sometimes decried as a search for novelty at all cost, cotabJnej_a_jaj^^ and highly rc- iEšEtólfe traditional modes of htergriigand theatre;" and, fľ-nally, to explain ite^gnrhcajjae^a^Mi^^p^esi^n-^nd one of the most representative ones-o^^^jigs^nt situation of West It has been rightly said that what a critic wants to understand he must, at one time, have deeply loved, even if only for a fleeting moment. This book is written from the point of view of a critic who has derived some memorable experiences from watching and reading the work of the dramatists of the Preface xrii Absurd; who is convinced that as a trend the Theatre of the Absurd is important, significant, and has produced some of the finest dramatic achievements of our time. On the other hand, if the concentration here on this one type of theatre gives the impression that its author is a partisan exclusively of its particular convention and cannot derive pleasure from any other type of theatre, this is due simply to his deliberate limitation to one subject for this one book. The rise of_ thjs_new, original, and valuable dramatic convention certainly does not, IrTtFeopTni^^ or invalidate the work of important dramatists, past, present, and to come, in other theatrical forms. It is still too early to see clearly whether the Theatre of the Absurd will develop into a separate type of drama, or whether some of its formal and linguistic discoveries will eventually merge with a wider tradition, enriching the vocabulary and means of expression of the theatre at large. In either case, it deserves the most serious attention. In writing this book I have been greatly helped by some of the authors discussed in it. The meetings I have had with thBse^^chamaggts have been e'xh^arattDg^experiences thaV*by themselves, have already richly rewarded me for writing it. I have been deeply touched by their kindness and am sincerely grateful to them, notably to Mr. Samuel Beckett; M. Arthur Adamov; M. and Mme, Eugene Ionesco; Sefior Fernando Arrabal; Senor Manuel de Pedrolo; Mr. N. F. Simpson; and Mr. Harold Pinter. I am also greatly indebted to Mr. Eric Bentley, who combines great scholarship with an mspiring enthusiasm for the theatre, and without whose encouragement and help this book might not have been written; to Dr. Herbert Blau, of the Actors' Workshop in San Francisco; Mr. Edward Gold-berger; Mr. Christopher Holme; Sefior F. M. Lorda; and Mr. David Tutaev for drawing my attention to writers and plays that fall within the purview of this book and for the loan of valuable books and manuscripts. My thanks are also due to Signora Connie Martellini Ricono, Mr. Charles Ricono, Miss Margery Withers, Mr. David Schendler, Mrs. Cecilia Gillie, and Mr. Robin Scott for helping me gain access to valuable xiv the theatre of the absurd material and information, and to Miss Nancy Twist and Messrs. Grant and Cutler for bibliographical assistance. My wife helped me greatly by providing constructive criti- , cism and encouragement. Maetin Esslin^— London, March^Q6i^^ INTRODUCTION: THE ABSURDITY OF.THE ABSURD On November ig, 1957, a group of worried actors were preparing to face their audience. The actors were members of the company of the San Francisco Actors' Workshop. The audience consisted of fourteen hundred convicts at the San Quentin penitentiary. No live play had been performed at San Quentin since Sarah Bernhardt appeared there in 1913. Now, forty-four years later, the play that had been chosen, largely because no woman appeared in it, was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. No wonder the actors and Herbert Blau, the director, were apprehensive. How were they to face one of the toughest audiences in the world with a highly obscure, intellectual play that had produced near riots among a good many highly sophisticated audiences in Western Europe? Herbert Blau decided to prepare the San Quentin audience for what was to come. He stepped onto the stage and addressed the packed, darkened North Dining Hall—a sea of flickering matches that the convicts tossed over their shoulders after lighting their cigarettes. Blau compared the play to a piece of jazz music "to which one must listen for whatever one may find in it." In the same way, he hoped, there would be some meaning, some personal significance for each member of the audience hi Waiting for Godot. The curtain parted. The play began. And what had bewildered the sophisticated audiences of Paris, London, and New York was immediately grasped by an audience of convicts. As the writer of "Memos of a First-Nighter' put it in ;the columns of the prison paper, the. San Quentin News: xvi the theatre of the abschd The trio of muscle-men, biceps overflowing, who parked all 642 lbs on the aisle and waited for the girls and funny-stuff. When this didn't appear they audibly fumed and audibly decided to wait until the house lights dimmed before escaping. They made one error. They listened and looked two minutes too long—and stayed. Left at the end. All shook . . -1 Or as the writer of the lead story of the same paper reported, under the headline, "San Francisco Group Leaves S.Q. Audience Waiting for Godot"; From the moment Robin Wagner's thoughtful arid Iim-bolike set was dressed with light, until the last futile and expectant handclasp was hesitantly activated between the two searching vagrants, the San Francisco company had its audience of captives in its collective hand. . . . Those that had felt a less controversial vehicle should be attempted as a first play here had their fears allayed a short five minutes after the Samuel Beckett piece began to unfold.2 A reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle who was present noted that the convicts did not find it difficult to understand the play. One prisoner told him, "Godot is society." Said another: "He's the outside."3 A teacher at the prison was quoted as saying, "They know what is meant by waiting ... and they knew if Godot finally came, he would only be a disappointment."4 The leading article of the prison paper showed how clearly the writer had understood the meaning of the play; It was an expression, symbolic in order to avoid all personal error, by an author who expected each member of his audience to draw his own conclusions, make his own errors. It asked nothing in point, it forced no dramatized moral on the viewer, it held out no specific hope. ... We re still waiting for Godot, and shall continue to wait. When the scenery gets too drab and the action too slow, we'll call each other names and swear to part forever—but then, there's no place to go!^ ^ It is said that Godot himself, as well as turns of phrase and Introduction: The Absurdity of the Absurd xvn I is characters from the play, have since become a permanent part of the private language, the institutional mythology of San Quentin. Why did a play of the supposedly esoteric avant-garde make so immediate and so deep an impact on an audience of convicts? Because it confronted them with a situation in some ways analogous to their own? Perhaps, Or perhaps because they were unsophisticated enough to come to the theatre without any preconceived notions and ready-made expectations, . so that they avoided the mistake that trapped so many established critics who condemned the play for its lack of plot, development, characterization, suspense, or plain common sense. Certainly the prisoners of San Quentin could not be suspected of the sin of intellectual snobbery, for which a sizable proportion of the audiences of Waiting for Godot have often been reproached; of pretending to like a play they did not even begin to understand, just to appear in the know. The reception of: Waiting .for Godot at San Quentin, and the wide acclaim plays by Ionesco, Adamov, Pinter, and others have received, testify that these plays, which are so often superciliously dismissed as nonsense or mystification, havesome-thing tosay and can be understood. Most of the incomprehension with which plays of this type are still being received by critics and theatrical reviewers, most of the bewilderment they have caused and to which they still give rise, come from the fact that they are part of a new, and still developing, stage convention that has not yet been generally understood and has hardly ever been defined. Inevitably, plays written in this new convention will, when judged by the standards and criteria of another, be regarded as impertinent and outrageous impostures. If a good play must have a cleverly constructed story, these have no story^_plotto speak.of; if a good play is judged by subtlety of characterization and motivation, these are often without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost inechanical puppets; if a good play has to have a fully explained theme, which is neatly exposed and finally solved, these often have ndther_a^ejrinn^ if a good play is to hold the mirror up to nature and portray the manners and mannerisms of the age in finely observed sketches, xviu THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD these" seem, often to be reflections of dreams and nightmares; if a good play relies on witty repartee and pointed dialogue, ,these often consist of incoherent babblings. . "But the plays-we are concerned with here pursue ends quite i/differantTErom those of the conventional play and therefore use quite different methods. They can be judged only by4±Le_~ standards of the Theatre of the Absurd, which it is the purpose tsf this book to define and clarify. It must be stressed, however, that the dramatists whose work is here presented and discussed under the generic heading of the Theatre of the Absurd do not form part..of-any self-proclaimed or self-conscious school or movement.. On the contrary, each of the writers in question is an individual who regards himself as a "lone outsider, cut off and isolated in his private world. Each has his own personal approach to both subject matter and form; his own roots, sources, and background. If they also, very clearly and in spite of themselves, have a good deal in common, it is because their work most sensitively mirrors and reflects the preoccupations and arixie-J&es, the emotions and thinking of an important segment 6f. ■ their contemporaries in the Western world. This is not to say that their works are representative of mass attitudes, It is an oyersimphfication to assume that anyjage presents a homogeneous pattern. Ours being,_more-than,mo,st others, an age of transition, it displays a bewilderingly strati-BeiLpicture: medieval beliefs still .held and overlaid~;'Dy eighteenth-century rationalism and mid-nineteenth-century Marxism, rocked by sudden volcanic eruptions of prehistoric fanaticisms and primitive tribal cults. Each of these components of the cultural pattern of the age finds its characteristic artistic expression. The Theatre of the Absurd, however, can be seen as the reflection of what seems.the attitude most gen* uinely representative of our own time's contribution. . The hallmark of this attitude is its. sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, 'that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat child^ ish illusions. The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitute religions' of faith.in progress, nationalism, .and various totalitarian fal- Introduction: The Absurdity of the Absurd xix laeies. All this was shattered by the war. By 1942, Albert Camus wAs calmly putting the question why, since life had lostTall meaning, man should not seek escape in suicide. In one of the great, seminal heart-searcbings of our time, The Myth of Sisyphus,'Camus tried to diagnose the human situation in a world of shattered beliefs:. 1 A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe tliat is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is"a£ irremediable exile, because he is, deprived of memories '■ of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, 'the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.6 - ■ - . :'::■■■■ ■;.........■ *■ : ^Absurd" originally means "out of harmony," in a musical-context. Hence'its dictionary definition: "out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical." In common usage in the English-speaking world, "absurd".may simply mean "ridiculous." But this is not the sense in which Camus uses the word, and in which.it is used when we speak of the Theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco i 'defined his understanding of the term as follows: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose. ... Cut oflMrom his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless^ apsurtl, psjefesg,"* .\ ■ .'■ This sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition is, broadly speaking, the theme of the plays of Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Genet, and the other writers discussed in this book. But it is not merely the subject matter that defines what is here called the Theatre of the. Absurd. A similar sense of the senselessness of life, of the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose, is also the theme of much of the work of dramatists like Giraudoux, Anouilh, Salacrou, Sartre, and Camus himself. Yet these writers differ from the dramatists of the Absurd in an important respect: They present their sense of the irrationality of the human condition in the form of^ highly lucid and logically constructed reasoning, while the Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness .of the human condition and the xx the theatre of the absurd inadequacy-of..:the' rations-approach by the open abandori- ■ m^t^,ratipnal>^de^iee6'^id discursive thought.. :WMe'Sartre or Camus.-express the new content in the old convention, the Theatre of the Absurd goes a step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in .which these are expressed. In some senses, the theatre of Sartre and Camus is less adequate as an expression of the philosophy of Sartre and Camus—in artistic, as distinct from philosophic, terms—than the Theatre of the Absurd. ••" • • - If Camus argues that in our disillusioned age the world has ceased to make sense, he does so in the elegantly rationalistic and discursive style of an eighteenth-century moralist, iri ■well-constructed and polished plays. If Sartre argues that existence ' comes before essence and that human personality can be reduced to pure potentiality and the freedom to choose itself anew at any moment, he presents his ideas in plays based on brilliantly drawn characters who remain wholly consistent and thus reflect the old convention that each human being has a core of immutable, unchanging essence—in fact, an immortal soul. And the beautiful phrasing and argumentative brilliance of both Sartre and Camus in their relentless probing still, by -implication, proclaim a tacit conviction that logical discourse . can offer valid solutions, that the analysis of language will lead to the uncovering of basic concepts—Platonic ideas. • v. This is an inner contradiction that the dramatists of the Absurd are trying, by mstihct and intuition rather than''by conscious-effort, to overcome and resolve. The Theatre of the Absurd .has renounced arguing, about the absurdity -oTthe'hu-man condition; it merely presents it in being—that is, in terms of concrete stage images of the absurdity of existence. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the worksof Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart—the difference between theory and experience. ( It is this striving for an integration between the subject mafc-: ter and the form in which it is .expressed that separates" tEe^ -theatre of-the Absurd from the Existentialist theatre.. '. ■The Theatre of the Absurd mtist also be distinguished from ■ " Introduction: The Absurdity of the Absurd xxi "another important, arid parallel, trend .in the contemporary : iFreach theatre, which is equally preoccupied with the absurd-, ity and. micertainty of the. human condition: the "poetic avant--"garjik? theatre of .dramatists like Michel de Ghelderode, ' Jacques. AudiheM, Georges Neveux, and, in the younger generation, Ceorges Sehehade, Henri Pichette, and Jean Vauthier, to name only, some of its most important exponents. This is An even more difficult dividing line to draw, for the two ap-; proaches-overlap a good deal. The "poetic avant-garde" relies - ori-fantasy and dream reality as much, as the Theatre of, the Absurd does; it also disregards such'traditional axioms as that -of the basic unity and consistency of each character or the 'need for a plot. Yet basically the "poetic avant-garde" repre-^ scnts a different mood; it is morejyrical, and far less violent and- grotesque. Even more important is its different attitude :- toward language: the "poetic avant-garde" relies to a far ' greater extent on consciously "poetic" speech; it aspires to ■ v 'plays'thatare m effect poems, images composed of a rich web of.verbal associations. , The Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, tends to-ward a radical devaluation of language, toward a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the stage-itself. The element of language still plays an important, - yet subordinate, part in this .conception, but what happens " on r the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words ' spoken by the characters. In Ionesco's The Chairs, for ex-■ ample," the poetic content of a powerfully poetic play does not lie in the banal words that are uttered but in the fact that they arc spoken to an ever-growing number of empty chairs; » - The Theatre of the Absurd is thus part of the "anti-literary" movement of our time, which has found 'its expression in ab-• stract painting, with its rejection of "literary" elements in pictures; Or in the "new novel" in France, with its reliance on the description of objects and its rejection of empathy and anthropomorphism. It is no coincidence that, like all these movements and so many of the efforts to create new forms of expression in all the arts, the Theatre of the Absurd should be centered in Paris. ' - ' ~" This does not mean that the Theatre of the Absurd is essentially French. It is broadly based on ancient strands of the the theatre of the absurd Western tradition and has its exponents in Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States as well as in France. Moreover, its leading practitioners who live in Paris and write in French are not themselves Frenchmen. As a powerhouse of the modern movement, ^axh^^^^m.-tematjonal rather than a merely French egnter: it acts as "a magnet attracting artists of all nationalities who' are in search of freedom to work and to live nonconformist lives unhampered by the need to look over their shoulder to see whether their neighbors are shocked. That is the secret of Paris as the capital of the world's individuahsts: Here, in a world of cafes and small hotels, it is possible to live easily and unmolested. That is why a cosmopolitan of uncertain origin like Apol-linaire; Spaniards like Picasso or Juan Gris; Russians like Kan-dinsky and Chagall; Rumanians like Tzara and Brancusi; Americans like Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and E, E. Cum-mings; an Irishman like Joyce; and many others from the four corners of the world could come together in Paris and shape the modern movement in the arts and literature. The Theatre of the Absurd springs from the same tradition and is nourished from the same roots: An Irishman, Samuel Beckett; a Rumanian, Eugene Ionesco; a Russian of Armenian origin, Arthur Adamov, not only found in Paris the atmosphere that allowed them to experiment in freedom, they also found there the opportunities to get their work produced in theatres. The standards of staging and production in the smaller theatres of Paris are often criticized as slapdash and perfunctory; that may indeed sometimes be the case; yet the fact remains that there is no other place in the world where so many first-rate men of the theatre can be found who are adventurous and intelligent enough to champion the experimental work of new playwrights and to help them acquire a mastery of stage technique—from Lugne-Poe, Copeaii, and Dullin, to Jean-Louis Barrault, Jean Vilar, Roger Blin, Nicolas Bataille, Jacques Mauclair, Sylvain Dhomme, Jean-Marie Serreau, and a host of others whose names are indissolubly linked with the rise of much that is best in the contemporary theatre. Equally important, Paris also has a highly intelligent the-atregoing public, which is receptive, thoughtful, and as able ' as it is eager to absorb new ideas. Which does not mean that Introduction: The Absurdity of the Absurd xxiii the first productions of some of the more startling manifestations of the Theatre of the Absurd did not provoke hostile demonstrations or, at first, play to empty houses. What matters is that these scandals were the expression of passionate concern and interest, and that even the emptiest houses contained enthusiasts articulate enough to proclaim loudly and effectively the merits of the original experiments they had witnessed. Yet in spite of these favorable circumstances, inherent in the fertile cultural climate of Paris, t^su^cfisJ^Lthe.,!^ the Absurd, achieved within a short span^^^e^emams^ one of Sie most ^taffifrmg aspects of this' astonishing phenomenon of our age. That plays so strange and puzzling, so clearly devoid of the traditional attractions of the well-made drama, should within less tlmn _a decade have reached the stages of the world from^m^ndtojapan, from Norway to the Argentine, and that they should have stimulated a large body of work in a similar convention, are in themselves powerful and entirely empirical tests of the importance of the Theatre of the Absurd. The study of this phenomenon as literature, as stage technique, and as a manifestation of the thinking of its age must proceed from the examination of the works themselves. Only then can they be seen as part of an old tradition that may at times have been submerged but one that can be traced back to antiquity, and only after the movement of today has been placed within its historical context can an attempt be made to assess its significance and to establish its importance and the part it has to play within the pattern of contemporary thought. A public conditioned to an accepted convention tends to receive the impact of artistic experiences through a filter of critical standards, of predetermined expectations and terms of reference; which is the natural result of the schooling of its taste and faculty of perception. This framework of values, admirably efficient in itself, produces only bewildering results when it is faced with a completely new and revolutionary convention—a tug-of war ensues between impressions that have undoubtedly been received and critical preconceptions that clearly exclude the possibility that any such impressions could xxiv the theatbe of the absurd have been felt. Hence the storms of frustration and indignation always caused by works in a new convention. It is the purpose of this book to provide a framework of reference that will show the works of the Theatre of the Absurd within their own convention so that their relevance and force can emerge as clearly to the reader as Waiting for Godot did to the convicts of San Quentin. THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Chapter One SAMUEL BECKETT: THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF In his last will and testament, Murphy, the hero of Samuel Beckett's early novel of that name^"enjoins his heirs and execuTSrsTo "place Kis^asEes in a paper bag and take them to "the Abbey Theatre, Lr. Abbey Street,- Dublin . . . into what the great and good Lord Chesterfield calls the necessary house, where their happiest hours have been spent, on the right as one goes down into the pit ... and that the chain be there pulled upon them, if possible during the performance of a piece."1 This is a symbolic act in the true irreverent spirit of the anti-theatre, but one that also reveals where thejawtbor ofJVs#tog_fof_G^do^ received his first impressions of the type ofdrarria against which he reacted in his ^^Q^^L^h^hS-has called "the grotesque fallacy of realistic art—'that misera- T»'|M»ill .Mill .......'if if---" '. "' ."' ' ' . "t**r)----»H«»|H.........I lltf . , ble statement of line and surface and the permy-a-iine vulgarity bf a literature-of notations."2 Samuel Beckett was born,in„Dnblin in lgpjj,. the son of a quantity surveyor. Like Shaw, Wilde, and Yeats, he carnejrom the Protes.tant Ir.ish .middle, plas$..and was, though he later K§t "JS&Jlft&t brought up "almost a Quaker," as he himself once put it.3 It has been suggested that Beckett's preoccupation with the problems of being and the identity of the self might have sprung from the Anglo-Irishman's inevitable and perpetual concern with finding his own answer to the question "Who am IP" But while there may well be a grain of truth in this, it is surely far from providing a complete explanation for the deep existential anguish that is the keynote of Beckett's work and that clearly originates in levels of his personality far deeper than its social surface. At the age of fourteen, Beckett was sent tq oiie of the Anglo- 2 THE THEATHE OF 'run ABSURD %% Irishman's traditional boarding schools, Portora Royal School I at Ennisldllen, County Fermanagh, founded by King James f I, where Oscar Wilde had also been a pupil. It is characteristic | of Beckett that he, whose writing Reveals him as one of the | most tormented and sensitive of human beings, ancTof whom f it lias been reported that MeverTmce~hisTMrtHTie had retained | a terrible memory of his mother's womb"4 not only became | ^»E2EuJaX^lMfeL^^but excelled at games, | batting left-handed and bowling right at cricket, and playing | scrum half at Rugger. 1 In 1923, Beckett left Portora and entered Trinity College, | Dublin, where he read French and Italian, receTvingTEs^acri- f dor^^ofArts degree in 1927. Such was his academic distinction j that he was nominated by his university as its representative j in a traditional exchange of lecturere with the famous Ecole 3 Normale Supeneure, in Paris. Accordingly, after a brief spell I of teaching in Belfast, he went to Paris for a two years' stint § as a lecteur d'anglais at the Ecole Normale in the autumn of 1 1928. I Thus began his lifelong association with Paris, fc^arigj}©. I contnFuting, at the age of twenty-thres^ the brilliant opening 1 essay of that stran|e^^k*^rrtraeTT5w Examination round I his Factiflcatkm for Incamination of Work in Progress, a col- | lection of twelve articles by twelve apostles, as a defense and * exegesis of their master's as yet unnamed magnum opus. Beck- | ett's contribution, headed "Dante . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce," 1 culminates in a spirited assertion of the artist's duty to express the totality and complexity of his experience regardless of the S public's lazy demand for easy comprehensibility: "Here is direct expression—pages and pages of it. And if you don't under- f stand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too deca- j dent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless jprnL&jso strictly f djvorced from conf&crt^^ • most without bothering to read the ojflier. This rapid skimming ! and abs6rptiM°b^thg^6anf cream of sense is made possible { by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phe- j nomenon can fulfill no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling com- \ Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 3 prehension."6 These are the articles of his faith that Beckett has put into practice in his own life's work as a writer, with an uncompromising consistency almost terrifying in its purity. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated May 28, 1929,° Joyce speaks of his intention of having Beckett's essay published in an Italian review. In the same letter he mentions a country picnic planned by Adrienne Monnier to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bloomsday. This was the DSjeuner Ulysses held on June 27, 1929, at the Hotel Leopold at Les Vaux-de-Cernay, near Versailles. From Richard Eflmann's biography of Joyce, we learn that Beckett was one of the guests, who included Paul Valery, Jules Romains, Leon-Paul Fargue, Philippe Soupault, and many other distinguished names, and that on the return journey Beckett aroused the wrath of Paul Valery and Adrienne Monnier by repeatedly prevailing upon Joyce to have the bus stopped so that they might have yet another drink at some wayside cafe. During his first stay in Paris, Beckett also made his mark as a poet by winning a literary prize—ten pounds, for the best poem on the subject of time, in a competition inspired by Nancy Ciinard and judged by her and Richard Aldington. Beckett's poem, provocatively entitled "Whoroscope," presents the philosopher Descartes meditating on time, hens' eggs, and evanescence. The little booklet, published in Paris by the Hours Press in an edition of a hundred signed copies at five shillings, and two hundred unsigned ones at a shilling, has become a collector's piece, with the little slip pasted on it that informs the reader of the award of the prize and that this is "Mr. Samuel Beckett's first separately published work." For his newly found friend James Joyce, Beckett also embarked on a daring attempt at rendering the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" passage from Work in Progress into French. But this undertaking, in which he was assisted by Alfred Peron, had to be abandoned (and was carried to completion by Joyce, Soupault, and a number of others) in the course of 1930, when Beckett returned to Dublin to take the post of assistant to the professor of Romance languages at Trinity College. Thus, ajtjJie^age.^QfJwM^^ launched onji^s^ "He^obtained his Master "of Arts degree. His study of Proust, 4 the theatre of the absurd commissioned by a London publisher and written while he was still in Paris, appeared in 1931. It is a penetrating interpretation of Proust's work as an exploration of time, but it also foreshadows many of Beckett's themes in the works he was still to write—the impossibility of possession in love, and the illusion of friendship: "... if love , , . is a function of man's sadness, friendship is a function of his cowardice; and if neither can be realised because of the impenetrability (isolation) of all that is not 'cfcsa mentale,' at least the failure to possess may have the nobility of that which is tragic, whereas the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible is merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the madness that holds a conversation with the furniture."7 For an artist therefore, "the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication."8 Although these ideas are expositions of Proust's thought, and although today he stresses that he wrote the little book on order, not out of any deep affinity with Proust, Beckett clearly put many of his personal feelings and views into.it. To one who felt that habit and routine was the cancer of time, social intercourse a mere illusion, and the artist's life of necessity a. life-of solitude, the daily grind of a university lecturer's work must have appeared unbearable. After only four, terms at Trinity College, he had had enough. He threw., lip his career and cut himself loose from all routine and social duties. Like Belacqua, the herb of his volume of short stories More Pricks Than Kicks, who, though indolent by nature, "enlivened the last phase of his solipsism . . . with the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move, constantly from place to place,"9 Beckett embarked on a period of Wander-jalire. Writing poems and stories, doing odd jobs, he moved from Dublin to London to Paris, traveled through France and Germany. It is surely no coincidence that so many of Beckett's later; characters are tramps and wanderers, and that all are lonely. . . More Pricks Than Kicks is set in Dublin; the next volume, a slim collection of poems, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), widens its references to landmarks from Dublin Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self g (Guiness's barges by O'Connell Bridge) to Paris (the American Bar in the Rue Mouffetard) and London (the "grand old British Museum," Ken Wood and Tower Bridge). Beckett's stay in London also left its mark on his first novel, MigsfgL. (1938): the "World's End" on the fringes of 'Chelsea; the area around the Caledonian market and Pentonville; Gower Street. Whenever he passed through Paris, Beckett went to. see Joyce. In Richard EDmann's words, "Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce; they engaged in conversations which consisted often in silences directed towards each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself. Joyce sat in his habitual posture, legs crossed, toe of the upper leg under the instep of the lower; Beckett, also tall and slender, fell into the same gesture. Joyce suddenly asked some such question as 'How could the idealist Hume write a history?' Beckett replied, 'Ahistory of representations.'"10 Beckett read Joyce passages from the works of Fritz Mauthner, whose Critique of Language was one of the first works to point to the fallibility o£ language as a medium for the discovery and communication of metaphysical truths. But "though he liked having Beckett with him, Joyce at the same time kept him at.a distance. Once he said directly: 'I don't love anyone except my family' in a tone which suggested, 1 don't like anyone except my family either.' "10 Once or twice Joyce, whose sight had long been failing, dictated passages from Finnegans Wake to Beckett. This may be the origin of the oft-repeated, assertion that Beckett was at one time Joyce's private secretary. He never held such a position. If anyone ever acted as Joyce's secretary it was Paul Leon. Richard Ellmann also tells the story of the infatua^p^of J^^^jffibj^J^h^^ Beckett some- times took Lucia, already high-strung and neurotic, to restaurants and theatres. "As her self-control began to leave her, she made less effort to conceal the passion she felt for him, and at last her feelings became so overt that Beckett told her bluntly he came to the Joyce flat primarily to see her father. He felt he had been cruel and later told Peggy Guggenheim that he was dead and had no feelings that were human; hence he had not been able to fall in love with Lucia."11 6 the theatbe of the absurd Samuel.Beckett; The Search for the Self 7 Peggy Ga^etiheim, patron of the arts and a famous col-3g£tor^f_m^ernjBafflg^5j was herself, as she reports in her memoirs, "terribly'in love" wi& Beckett a few years later. She describes him as Oascinating young man, but afflicted with anjigathy that sometimes kept him in bed till midafternoom with-whom it was difficult to. converse, as "he was never very animated and it took hours and lots of drink to warm him up before he finally unravelled himself."12 Like Belacqua, who sometimes wanted "to be back in the caul on my back in the dark forever,"13 Beckett, according to Peggy Guggenheim, "had retained a terrible memory of life in his mother's womb.: He was constantly suffering from this and had awful crises, when he felt he was suffocating. He always said our life would be all right one day, but if I ever pressed him to make a decision it was fatal and he took back everything he had pre-vipusJY sajd."12 [Mu*^%,| published in 1938 with the help and support of Herbert Read, is to. some extent concerned with an analogous situation between the hero and his giri friend Celia, who vainly tries to make him take up regular employment so they can get married, but has to see him elude her again and again. Becketft_firrt,.play (written in French shor^y^aftgrthe war, but so far unpublished and unperformed), &eutheric^ is also concerned with a young man's efforts to cut hlrnselfloose from his family and social obligations. Eleutheria is in three acts; the stage is divided in the middle.'/ On the right the hero lies in his bed, apathetic and passive. On the left his family and friends discuss his case without ever directly addressing him. Gradually, the action shifts from left to right, and eventually the hero summons up the energy to free himself from his shackles and cut himself loose from society. M.oUoy and Eleutheria mirror Beckett's search for freedom and the right to live his, own life. In fact he found himself a permanent home: in Paris. In 1937 he acquired his apartment, on the top floor of a block of flats iri outer Montparnasse, which was to become his base throughout the war and postwar years. About this time an episode occurred that "might have come straight out of Beckett's own writings; he was stabbed in a Paris street by an underworld character who had accosted him for money, and had to be taken to a hospital with a perforated lung. Later, when his wound had healed, Beckett went to see his assailant in prison. He asked the apache why he had stabbed him, and received the answer, "l&jk§._s<&j>^:Mon*. sieur." It might well be the voice of this man that we hear in Waiting for Godot and Mqlloy. ' When,wjuv came, in September, 1939, Beckett was in Ireland, visiting his widowed mother. He immediately returned to Paris. He had long been a decided opponent of the National Socialist regime in Germany, appalled by its brutality and anti-Semitism! Now that war had broken out, he argued with Joyce, who regarded the war as useless and futile. Beckett. firmly maintained that its objectives were indeed justified. Being a citizen of Eire, and thus a neutral, he was able to stay in Paris even after the city had been occupied by the Germans. He joined a Resistance group, and led the dangerous and precarious life of a member of the underground movement.. ~ One day in August, 1942, he returned to his apartment and found a message informing him that some of the members of his Resistance group had been arrested. He left his home immediately and made his way into the unoccupied; zone, where lie found'shelter and work as an agricultural laborer in■■ a peasant's house in the Vaucluse, near Avignon. (Tlie Vaucluse is mentioned in the French version of Waiting for Godot, when Vladimir argues that Estragon must know the Vaucluse country, while Estragon hotly denies ever having beeri anywhere except where he is at that moment; in the Merdecluse. In the English version, the Vaucluse has become "the Macon country," the Merdecluse the "Cackpn country.") To keep his hand in as a writer while working on the farm in the Vaucluse, Beckett began to write a novel, Watt. It deals with a lonely and eccentric individual who finds refuge as a servant in a house in the country ruled by a mysterious, capricious, and unapproachable master, Mr. Knott, who has some of the attributes later ascribed to the equally mysterious Mr. Godot. After the liberation of Paris in 1945, Beckett returned there briefly before making his way.to Ireland, where he volunteered for a Red."Cross unit. He came back to France in the autumn of 1945 ahd- spent some time as an interpreter and storekeeper in a field.hospital at Saint-Ld, Later that winter, 8 THE THEATRE OF . THE ABSURD Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 9 he finally returned to Paris, to his old apartment, which he round "intact and waiting lor him. This homecoming marked the beginning of the most, productiveperiodin Beckett's life. Seized by a powerful and sustained creative impulse, he wrote in the five years that followed a succession of important works: the plays Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame; the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and the unpublished Mercier et Cornier, as well as the short stories and fragments of prose published, under the title NouveUes et Textes pour Bien. All these works, some of which have become the foundation of Beclcefi'rrepu^ -tation as one of the major literary forces and influences of his time, were written in French; This is a curious phenomenon. There have been many writers who have risen to fame with works written in a language other than their own, but usually they are compelled by circumstances to write in a foreign language: the necessities of exile; a. desire to break the connection with their country of origin for political or ideological reasons; or the wish to reach a world audience, which might induce the citizen of a small language community, a Rumanian or a Dutchman, to write in French or English. But Beckett was certainly not an exile, in that sense, and his mother tongue is the accepted lingua franca of the twentieth century. He chose to write his masterpieces in.JJrenplj because he felt that he needed the discipline that the use of an acquired language would impose upon him. As he told a student writing a thesis on his work who asked him why he used French, "farce qu'en frangais e'est plus facile d'ecrire sans style."1* In other words, while in his own language a writer may be tempted to indulge in virtuosity of style for its own sake, the use of another language may force him to divert the ingenuity that might be expended on mere embellishments of style in his own idiom to the ut-most clarity and economy of expression. When the American director Herbert Blau suggested to Beckett that by writing in French he might be «8vadmg,s.pjne part, of himself, "he said yes, there were some things about himseTFrTe^iBn't like, that French had the right Veakening'. effect. It was a weakness he had chosen, as Melville's Bartleby ** 'preferred not to' live. . . ."1B Possibly, too, Beckett wanted to avoid the tendency of English toward allusion and evocation. Yet the fact that in his own translations the English language ■perfectly renders his meaning and intention shows that . it is not just a surface quality that he prefers in French, but the; challenge and discipline it presents to his powers of expression. Works like Beckett's, which spring from the deepest strata * of the mind and probe the darkest wells of anxiety, would be destroyed- by the slightest suggestion of glibness or facility; they must be the outcome of a pairiful struggle with the medium of their expression. As Claude Mauriac has pointed out in his essay on Beckett, anyone "who speaks is carried along by the logic of language and its articulations. Thus the writer who pits himself against the unsayable must use all his cunning ; so as not to say what the words make him say against his will, but to express instead what by their very nature they are designed to cover up: the uncertain, the contradictory, the unthinkable."16 ■The danger of being carried along by the logic) of language is clearly greater in one's mother tongue> with its unconsciously accepted meanings and associations. By writing in a foreign language, Beckett insures that his writing remains a constant struggle, a painful wrestling with the spirit of lan-J v guage itself. That is why he considers the radio plays and occasional pieces he has since written in English as a relaxation, a rest from this hard struggle with meaning and language. But accordingly he also attaches less importance to these works. They came too easily. The French translation of Murphy, which appeared in 1947, attracted little attention, but when IjMoilotfi was published in lQjji, it created a stir. Beckett's r^yrmm^h, however, came wherT^^»fJJigijjF^]^a^..,which had appeared in.book form Theatre tie Babylone (now defunct), on the Boulevard Ras-pail. Roger Blin, always at the forefront of the avant-garde in the French theatre, directed, and himself played the part of Pozzo. And against all expectations, the strange tragic farce, in which nothing happens- and which had been scorned as un-dramatic by a number of managements, became oj^^Jhe, greatest successes of the postwar theatre. It ran for four hun- lO THE THEATHE OF THE ABSUBD dred performances at the Theatre de Babylone and was later transferred to another Parisian theatre. It has been translated into more than twenty languages and been performed in < Sweden^ "SwiteěrIana",TFinland, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Hol- J land, Spain, Belgium, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Mexico, the Argentine, Israel, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Japan, Western Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and even in Dublin, being seen in the first five years after its original production in Paris by more than a million spectators—a truly astonishing reception for a play so enigmatic, so exasperating, so complex, and so uncompromising in its refusal to conform to any of the accepted ideas of dramatic construction. This is not the place to trace in detail the strange stage history of Waiting for Godot. Suffice it to say that the play found thjj^pip^l^of_accepted dramatists as diverse as Jean Anouilh (who described the productíoiTat the Theatre de Babylone as equal in importance to the first performance of a Pirandello play in Paris by Pitóeff, in 1923), Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and William Saroyan (who said, "it will make it easier for me and everyone else to write freely in the theatre"); ■; that it reached London in August, 1955, in a production that met with Becketfs"disapproval but was so successful that it was transferred from the Arts Theatre Club to the West End and ran for a long time; that it reached the shores of the i United States at the Miami>Playhouse on January 3, 1956, where, with Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell in the parts of the tramps, it was billed as "the laugh hit of two continents" and bitterly disappointed its audience's expectations, but finally reached Broadway with Bert Lahr but without Tom Ewell, and was acclaimed by the critics. Beckett's second play, ^Endgamei originally in two acts but later reduced to one, waiTto~lEave had its world premiere in French under the direction of Roger Blin in Paris, but when it met with some hesitation by the management and lost its Paris venue, the Royal Court Theatre, inJLondon, hospitably offered its stage, so that London witnessed the rare occasion of ar\yi)rld preiniěre_,iiii,1FrÉnch (April 3, ^gg^). It later found another theatre in Paris and ran for a considerable time at the Studio i des Champs Elysées. Productions in English in London (again 1 Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self n at the Royal Court), in New York (at the Cherry Lane . Theatre, off Broadway), and in San Francisco (by the Actors' Workshop) have also been notably successful. In its original production in French, Endgame was coupled with the mimepla^AcFW!?)^ by Deryk Mendel and with music Tiy^BetJkettYcousin, John Beckett. At , the performance in English. Endgame shared tbe bill with the short play|Kragjo's Last Tap^(October 28, 1958), which was written by Beckett in English and has since been performed in Paris, in Beckett's own translation, and in New York. Krapp's Last Tape was directed by Donald McWbinnie, the distinguished radio producer who was instrumental in getting Beckett to write two plays especMy^ fw ifo B.B,C,*g Thbd_ Programmej;„A# That'Fall (first broadcast on January 13, 1957) and Embers (October 28, 1959). And so tenuous is the dividing line between Beckett's dramatic works and his later novels, which are all cast in the form of dramatic monologues, that extracts from these have also been performed on the B.B.C.'s Third Programme: Molloy (December 10,1957); the fragment From an Abandoned Work (December 14, 1957); Malone Dies (June 18, 1958); and The Vnnamable (January 19.1959)- v Samuel Beckett's rise to fame is an astonishing story of modesty and single-minded devotion to the austerest principles, rewarded by acclaim and success. Tall, slender, and yjutbiut in Jus, .fifties. Beckett remains shy, gentle, and unassuming,' completely untouched by the mannerisms of self-conscious greatness. And—what is most surprising in the author of works so filled with anguish, torment, and the deranged fantasies of human beings driven to tbe limits of suffering—he him-s self is the qjgsjjyjjbuified^^ He has married, \ and divides his time between a small house in the country and Paris. He avoids literary coteries and is more at home among A painters. He continues his exploration of the human condition, / MlLW&SLj&r .th$ answer to_,such basic questions as "Who ain Jffi^KhalJ^ ^v vmfing> now more slowly and with greater difficulty than at the timeof his great, creative outburst. His latest novel, ^^Wi^^^^^ appeared in January, 1961. 12 THE THEATKE OF THE ABSURD 6 r j"" When Alan Schneider, who was to direct the first American ( production of Waiting for Godot, asked Beckett who or what was meant by Godot, he received the answer, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play."1T This is a salutary warning to anyone who approaches Beckett's plays! with the intention of Sscovermg,*^e key to their understandings of demonstrating in exact and definite terms what they mean. Such aii undertaking might perhaps be justi-*fied in taclding the works of an author who had started from a clear-cut philosophical or moral conception, and had then proceeded to translate it into concrete terms of plot and character. But even in such a case the chances are that the final product, if it turned put a genuine work of the creative imagination, would transcend the author's original intentions and present itself as far richer, more complex, and open to a multitude of additional interpretations. For, as^ejsiej^hiBjsftlf.h|w_ ppinted^oufc«in his essay on Joyce's Work in Progress,Jh&fonn, structure, and mood of an artistic statement cannot be sepa-if rated from its meaning, its conceptual content; simply'Because if the work ofart jisjawholeM its meaning, umat isjsaid in it is. ^ ln3is^ in whTcTTlt is said, and. SfflUQ^be^said ..in any 9jher_wav. Libraries have been filled with attempts to reduce the meaning of a play like Hamlet to a few short and simple lines, yet the play itself remains the clearest and most concise statement of its meaning and message, precisely because its uncertainties and irreducible ambiguities are an essential element of its total impact. These considerations apply, in varying degrees, to all works of creative literature, but they apply with particular force to works that are essentially concerned with conveying their t author's sense of mystery, bewilderment, and anxiety when coSranteHwitir^ unable tolSSraWS^^^C^^^^w^In^S^gtfi^^/oyTrBSS^I ' thefeehng^gf^uncertain^jt^prflshices, the ebb and IcW'oftrSf' uncertainty—from th^jiojse of discovering the identity of Godot to its repeated sdisapr^in^ent—are diemselyes Ae^ewenoejrf^ /JthjiUite- A^^eniew!mtJxi,M^^,M^ clear and certain inter-' • jn-etation by estabh^hing the identity of 15odbFtSoug^'cntical analysis would be as foolish as trying to discover the clear out- Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 13 lines hidden behind the chiaroscuro of a painting by Rembrandt by scraping away the paint. Yet it is only natural that plays written in so unusual and baffling a convention should be felt to be in special need of an explanation that, as it were, would uncover their hidden meaning and translate it into everyday language. The source of this fallacy lies in the misconception that somehow these plays must be reducible to the conventions of the "normal" theatre, with plots that can be summarized in the form of a narrative. If only one could discover some hidden clue, it is felt, these difficult plays could be forced to yield their secret and reveal the plot of the conventional play that is hidden within them. Such attempts are doomed to failure. Beckett's plays lack pkft *» even more ■completely than other worklTor the ^Theatre pf .the. • ^^^3^nste^aT6r~a' linear deveKpSaent, they present their] authors intuition of the human condition by a method that is : essentially polyphonic; they confront their auaSenceTwith an j organized structure of statements and images that interpenetrate each other and that must be apprehended in their totality^ rather like the different themes in a symphony, which gain meaning by their simultaneous interaction. But if we have to be cautious in our approach to Beckett's plays, to avoid the pitfall of trying to provide an oversimphfied explanation of their meaning, this does not imply that we cannot subject them to careful scnitiny by isolating sets of images and themes and by attempting to discern their structural groundwork. The results of such an examination should make it easier to follow the author's intention and to see, if not the answers to his questions, at least what the questions are that he is asking. Waiting for Godot does not tell a story: it explores a static situation. "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's a'wful.''*8 On a country road, by a tree, two old tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting. That is the opening situation at the beginning of Act I. At the end of Act I, they are informed that Mr. Godot, with whom they believe they have an appointment, cannot come, but that he will surely come tomorrow. Act II repeats precisely the same pattern. The same boy arrives and delivers the same message. Act I ends: 14 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD estragón: Well, shall we go? vladimih: Yes, let's go. • (They do not move.) Act II ends with the same lines of dialogue, but spoken by the same characters in reversed order. The sequence, o;Levents„ .anď the., dialogue,.Jn,, each apt are dflKfrent. Each time the two tramps encounter another pair of characters, Pozzo and Lucky, master and slave, under differing circumstances; in each act Vladimir and Estragón attempt suicide: and fail, for differing reasons; but these variations merely serve to emphasize the essential sameness ofthe. situa-tion—phs gachange, plus c'est la méme chose. Vladimir and Estragón—who call each other Didi and Gogo, although Vladimir is addressed by the boy messenger as Mr. Albert, and Estragón, when asked his name, replies without hesitation, CatuHus-^are clearly derived from the pairs of^cross-talk comedian^ofjnusic,^ has the peculiar repetitive quality of the cross-talk comedians' patter; estragón: So long^ one knows. Vladimir^ One can bide one's time. estragón: One knows what to expect. : vladimir: No further need to worry.19 ; And the parallel to the music hall and the circus is even ex-^ plicitly stated: ■ VLAprMiR: Charming evening we're having. estragón: Unforgettable. Vladimir: And it's not over. estragón: Apparently not. Vladimir: .Iťs only the beginning, estragón: It's awful. Vladimir: It's worse than being at the theatre. estragón: The circus. vladimir: The music hall. , estragón: The circus.20 In accordance with the traditions of the music hall or the circus, there is an element of crudely physical humor: Estragón loses his trousers, there is a protracted gag involving three hats Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self ■ 15 i r' that are put on and off and handed on in a sequence of seem-i ingly unending confusion, and there is an abundance of prat-I falls—the writer of a penetrating thesis on Beckett, Niklaus v| ' Gessner, lists no fewer,than forty-five stage directions indicat-! ing that one of the characters leaves the upright position, v which symbolizes the dignity of man.21 As the members of a cross-talk act, Vladimir and Estragon have complementary personalities. VJadimir is the more p'rac-. fical of the two, and Estragon claim's to have been a poet. In p, eating his carrot, Estragon finds that the more he eats of it the * less he likes it, while Vladimir reacts the opposite way—he likes things as he gets used to them. Estragon is volatile, Vladimir persistent. Estragon dreams, Vladimir cannot stand hearing about dreams. Vladimir has stinking breath, Estragon has 5 j, ■ ^ ' stinking feet. Vladimir remembers past events, Estragon tends to forget them as soon as they have happened. Estragon likes telling funny stories, Vladimir is upset by them. It is mainly^ Vkdimir who voices the hope that Godot will come and that hlTcbming will change their situation, while Estragon remains , skeptical throughout and at times even forgets the name of Godot, It is Vladimir who conducts the conversation with the '; boy who is Godot's messenger and to whom the boy's messages _ are addressed. Estragon is the weaker of the two; he is beaten ■ . v up by mysterious strangers every night. Vladimir at times acts , as, his protector, sings him to sleep with % lullaby, and covers ' him with his coat. The opposition of thejr temperaments isJhe cause of endless bickering between them and often leads to the suggestion that they should part. Yet, being complementary natures, they also are dependent on each other and have to stay together. Pozzo and Lucky are equally complementary in their na-' hires, but their relationship is on a more primitive level: Pozzo is the sadistic master, Lucky the submissive slave. In the first act, Pozzojs rich, powerful, and certain of himself; he represents worldly man in all his facile and shortsighted optimism and illusory feeling of power and permanence. Lucky not only carries his heavy luggage, and even the whip with which Pozzo ; • beats him, he also dances and thinks for him, or did so in his prime. In fact, Lucky taught Pozzo all the higher values of -i life: ^"beauty, grace, truth of the first water."22 Pozzo_jmcT__ i6 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Lucky represent the ^»^^BrbfltWfffi? -.fcradyMiBadjIKK^v*^ material and the spintual sides of man, with the injelject sub-, ordinate to the'appetites' of the body. NavPB^ttjat^s'paivf-ers are "failing, Pozzo complains that they cause him untold suffering. He wants to get rid of Lucky and sell him at the fair. But in the second act, when they appear again, they are still tied together. Pozzo has gone blind, Lucky has become dumb. While Pozzo drives Lucky on a journey without an apparent goal, Wadimir has prevailed upon Estragon to waiifpr , Godot. A good deal of ingenuity has been expended in trying to establish^jJeMt^ri^^iolÖgy for Godows name, which would point to Beckett's conscious or subconscious intention in mat ing him the objective of Vladimir's and Estragon's quest. It has been suggested that Godot is a weakened form of the word ^Güä," a dirninutive formed on the analogy of Pierre-Pierrot, Charles-Chariot, with the added association of the Charlie Chaplin character of the little man, who is called Chariot in France, and whose bowler hat is worn by all four main characters in the play. It has also been noted that the title En Attendant Godot seems to contain an allusion to Simone Weil's book Attente de Dieu, which would furnish a further indication that Godot stands for God. Yet the name Godot may also be an even more recondite literary allusion. As Eric Beirtley has pointed out, there is a character in a play by Balzac, a char.acte,c much talked about but, never seen, and called JGffiSO&Sp Tne'play in question is Balzac's comedy he Fai-seWyWder known as Mercadet. Mercadet is a Stock Exchange speculator who is in the habit of attributing his financial difficulties to his former partner Godeau, who, years before, absconded with their joint capital: "Je porte le poids du crime de Godeau!" On the other hand, the hope of Godeau's eventual return and the repayment of the embezzled funds is constantly dangled by Mercadet before the eyes of his numerous creditors. "Tout le monde a son Godeau, un faux Christophe Cohmbl Apres tout Godeau , . . je crois quil m'a de"jä rap-porte plus d'argent qu'U ne m'en a pris!" The plot of Mercadet turns on a last, desperate speculation based on the appearance of a spurious Godeau. But the fraud is discovered. Mercadet *t seems ruined. At this moment the real Godeau is announced; Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self \j - he has returned from India with a huge fortune. The play ends with Mercadet exclaiming, "J'aí montré tant de fois Godeau que fat bienle droit de le voir. AUons voir Godeauľ2i The parallels are too striking to make it probable that this is a mere coincidence: Ij3^&ctet^j3lay,jis_jr^^ arrival of Godot is the eagerly awaited^ventj^j^anirac^ läEíSŠf^ Joyce of subtle and recon3ife literary allusions. Yet whether Godot is meant to suggest the interventions of a supernatural agency, or whether he stands for a mythical ' human being whose arrival is expected to change the situation, or both of these possibilities combined, his exact nature js;jof ^Sgndar^imjportence. Thejsubject of the play is not Godot butjwajrmjglrie act of waiting as an^ssentiat^^and^haracteristJQ ^^^^^^JaHiK^J lives we al- ways wait for something, ancľOodot simply represents the objective of our waiting—an event, a thing, a person, death. Moreover, it is in the act of waiting that we experience the flow of ín íg'jpfrpwŕ, most evident form. If we are active, we tend to forget the passage of time™ we pass the time, but if we are merely passively waiting, we are confronted with the action of time itself. As Beckett points out in his analysis of Proust, "There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. . . . Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday."25 The flow of time confronts us with th^&äejjrpjjkm^^ self, which, being subjéctto constant changeTn time,jisjýti, constant flux and therefore évér"ot£fšide our" grasp. 'Tersonal-ity, whose'permanent reality can ôiily bé apprehended as a retrospective hypothesis. The indi\idual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours."26 ■ Bemg subject to this process of time flowing through us and i8 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD changing us in doing S0j we are, at_no single moment in our fiyes^idenfic^wiith ours^^^Hence "we are disappointed at & the nullity of whafweare pleased to call attainment. But what is attainment? The identification of the subject with the object of his desire. The subject has died—and perhaps many times— on the way."27 If Godot is the object of Vladimir's and Es-tragon's desire, he seems "naturally ever beyond their reach. It is significant that the boy who acts as go-between fails to recognize the pair from day to day. The French version explicitly states that the boy who appears in the second act is the same boy as the one in the first act, yet the boy denies that he has ever seen the two tramps before and insists that this is the first time he has acted as Godot's messenger. As the boy leaves, Vladimir tries to impress it upon him: "You're sure you saw me, eh, you won't come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me before?" The boy does not reply> and we know that he will again fail to recognize thenL Can we everjbe sure that the human beings we meet are the'"same> jtodajj asTEey "were' yjgerday?" When Pozzo and""Lucky first appear, neither VkdMiir nor Estragon-seems to recognize them; Estragon even takes Pozzo for Godot. But after they have gone, Vladimir comments that they have changed since their last appearance. Estragon insists that he didn't know them. vladimir: Yes you do know them. estragon: No I don t know. them. vladimir: We know them, I tell you. You forget everything. (Pause. To himself) Unless they're not the same. . , . estragon: Why didn't they recognize us, then? vladimir: That means nothing. I too pretended not to recognize them. And then nobody ever^reoognizesvus.2? In the second act, when Pozzo and Lucky reappear, cruelly deformed by the action of time, Vladimir and Estragon again have their doubts whether they are the same people they met on the previous day. Nor does Pozzo remember them: "I don't remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow I won't remember having met anyone today."29 Waiting is to exaerieTijx thpfaptiVn of, timpj whJA Jlxcn- ^ sto^change. And yet, as nothing real ever happens, that Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 19 jchanjje is .in itself^an.illusion. The ceaseless activity of time iTself-defeating, purposeless, and therefore null and void. The, more things change, the more they are the same. That is the "terrible stability of the world. "The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops."30 One day is like another, and when we die, we might never have existed. As Pozzo exclaims in his great final outburst, "Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? . . . One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day well die, the same day, the same second. . . . They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. "31 And Vladimir, shortly afterward, agrees: "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, hngeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps."83 Still Vladimir and Estragon five in hope: they wait for Godot, whose coming will bring the flow of^timejojstop^ ^om'ght perhaps we shall sleep m bis place, in the warmth, dry, our bellies full, on the straw. It is worth waiting for that, is it not?"^3 This passage, omitted in the English version, clearly suggests the peace, the rest from waiting, the sense of having arrived in a haven, that Godot represents to the two tramps. They "are^TiopTmg to be saved from the evanescence and in-stability of the illusion of time, andjgjiadj^ge^ nence outside it. Then they will no longer be tramps, homeless wanderers, but will have arrived home. Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot although their appointment with him is by no means certain. Estragon does not remember it at all. Vlaa'imir is not quite sure what they asked Godot to do for them. It was "nothing very definite ... a kind of prayer . . . a vague supplication." And what had Godot promised them? "That he'd see . . . that he would think it over. . . ."M , When Beckett is asked about the theme of Watting for Godot, he sometimes refers to a passage in the writings of St. Augustine: "There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine. I SO THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD wish I could remember the Latin. It is even finer in Latin than\ in English. 'Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved, j Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned.'" And 5 Beckett sometimes adds, "I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. . . . That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters."35 The theme nf the two thieves on the cross, the theme of the uncertainty of the hope of salvation and the fôlŕtuifôusness ŕóf the bestowäŤof^gŕäé^db^ the whole-play. Vkdimir states it right at the beginning: "One of the thieves was saved. . , , Ifs a reasonable percentage."86 Later he enlarges on the subject: "Two thieves .... One is supposed to have been saved and the other . . . damned. . , . And yet how is it that of the four evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved? The four of them were there or thereabouts, and only one speaks of a thief being saved. ... Of the other three two don't mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him."37 There is a fifty-fifty chance, but as only one out of four witnesses reports it, the odds are considerably reduced. But, as Vladimir points out, it is a curious fact that everybody seems to believe that one witness: "It is the only version they know." Estragón, whose attitude has been one of skepticism throughout, merely comments, "People are bloody ignorant apes."38 It is the shape of the idea that fascinated Beckett; Out of all the malefactors, out of all the millions and millions of criminals that have been executed in the course of history, two, only two, had the chance of receiving absolution in the hour of their death in so uniquely effective a manner. One happened to make a hostile remark; he was damned. One happened to con-f tradičt that hostile remark; he was saved. How easily could the roles have been reversed. These, after all, were not well-considered judgments, but chance exclamations uttered at a moment of supreme suffering and stress. As Pozzo says about Lucky, "Remark that I might easily have been in his shoes and he in mine. If chance had not willed it otherwise. To each one his due."38 And then our shoes might fit us one day and not the next: Estragon's boots torment him in the first act; in Act II they fit him rniraculously. Godot himself is unpredictable in bestowing kindness and Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 21 punishment. The boy who is his messenger minds the goats, and Godot treats him well. But the boy's brother, who minds the sheep, is beaten by Godot. "Andjwhy doesn't he beat you?" asks Vladimir. "I don't know, sir"—"Je ne says jias, Monsieur" —the boy replies, using the words "of the apache who Sad stabbed Beckett. The parallel to Cain and Abel is evident: There too the Lord's grace fell onT^5n¥*S^^than on the other without any rational explanation—only that Godot beats the minder of the sheep and cherishes the minder of the goats. Here Godot also acts contrary to the Son of Man at the Last Judgment: "And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left." But if Godot's kindness is bestowed fortuitously, his coming is not a source of pure joy; it can also mean damnation. When Estragon, in the second act, believes Godot to be approaching, his first thought is, "I'm accursed." And as Vladimir triumphantly exclaims, "It's Godotl At last! Let's go and meet him," Estragon runs away, shouting, "I'm in hem**" The fortuitau&^bestowal.....of grace, which passes human understanding, divides marJrind mtO; those tfaakwjlli^ jaayed and those that .w^^'Aainned. When, in Act II, Pozzo and TJucKy"return, and the two tramps try to identify them, Estragon calls out, "Abel! Abel!" Pozzo immediately responds. x But when Estragon calls out, "Cain! Cain!" Pozzo responds again. "He's all mankind," concludes Estragon.41 There is even a suggestion that Pozzo's activity is concerned with his frantic attempt to draw that fifty-fifty chance of salvation upon himself. In the first act, Pozzo is on his way to sell Lucky "at the fair." The French version, however, specifies that it is the "marcM de Saint-Sauveur"--ths Market of the holy Saviour—to which he is taking Lucky. Is Pozzo trying to sell Lucky to redeem himself? Is he trying to divert the fifty-fifty chance of redemption from Lucky (in whose shoes he might easily have been himself) to PozzoPJHe. cextajnty-jcomplains-tiiatJLuc^ that _hejs,,kmmg.hta,m mere presence rearindsJ&m)Jh&t ft mfoht be~!Cucky who will |]jj&deemed? When Lucky gives his famous demonstration of his thinking, what is the thin thread of sense that seems to underlie the opening passage of his wild, schizophrenic "word 22 the theatre of the absurd salad?" Again it seems to be concerned with the fortuitousness of salvation: "Given the existence . . • of a personal God . . . outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown . , . and suffers . . . with those who for reasons unknown are plunged in torment. . J"42 Here again we have the personal God, with his divine [ apathy, his speechlessness (aphasia), and his lack of the capacity for terror or amazement (athambia), who loves us dearly—with some exceptions, who will be plunged info the torments of hell. In other words, God, who does not communicate with us, cannot feel for us, and condemns us for reasons unknown. When Pozzo and Lucky reappear the next day, Pozzo blind and Lucky dumb, no more is heard of the fair, jjgzza. thus influence the action of grace has been, made evident in concrete physical form. That Waiting for Godot is concerned with the hope of sal-1 vation through the workings of grace seems clearly established I both from Beckett's own evidence and from the text itselfj Does this, however, mean that it is a Christian, or even that it is a religious, play? There have been a number of very ingenious interpretations in this sense. Vladimir's and Estragon's waiting is explained as signifying their steadfast faith and hope, while Vladimir's kindness to. his friend, and the two tramps' mutual interdependence, are seen as symbols of Christian charity. But these jjejigiousjrr^^ number of essential Jeatures of the play—its constant stress on 1me„,.uncerteni1jr of the appjonitinent with Godo^^Godot's un-rejiajbihty^l ^^^^ (Tndoi--ia,Bhnwn-fl.-is \ linked by a rektionsEip of roiS5r^^^gefflfeacej wjttjtjng^ tojga^eiteh^^^ ; oh each other. "Nec tecum, nec sine te" This is a frequent 32 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSUHD Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 33 situation among people—married couples, for example—but it is also an image of the interrelatedness, of the elements within a single personality, particularly if the personality is in conflict with itself. In Beckett's first play, Eleutheria, the basic situation was, superficially, analogous to the relationship between Clov and Hamm. The young hero of that play wanted to leave his family; in the end he succeeded in getting away. In Endgame, however, that situation has been deepened into truly universal significance; it has been concentrated and immeasurably enriched precisely by having been freed from all elements of a naturalistic social setting and external plot. The process of: eon-traction, which Beckett described as the essence of the artistic tendency in his essay on Proust, has here been carried out triumphantly. Instead of merely exploring a surface, a play like Endgame has become a shaft driven deep down into the core of being; that is why it exists on a multitude of levels, revealing new ones as it is more closely studied. What at first might have appeared as obscurity or lack of definition is later recognized as the very hallmark of the density of texture, the'' tremendous concentration of a work that springs from a truly creative imagination, as distinct from a merely imitative one. The force of these considerations is brought out with particular clarity when we are confronted by an attempt to mterprgt <" a play like Endgame as a.me^^^v^r£^^^6j^jirjf^ 'oor^mous /aiatoBiq^^T^V In.ari extremely ingenious essay71 Lionel Abel has" worked out the thesis that in the characters of Hamm and Pozzo, Beckett may have portrayed his literary master, James Joyce, while Lucky and Clov stand for Beckett himself. Endgame then becomes an allegory of the relationship between the domineering, nearly blind Joyce and his adoring disciple, who felt himself crushed by his master's overpowering literary influence. Superficially the parallels are striking: Hamm is presented as being at work on an interminable story, Lucky is being made to perform a set piece of thinking, which, Mr. Abel argues, is in fact a parody of Joyce's style. Yet on closer reflection this theory surely becomes untenable; not because there may not be a certain amount of truth in it (every writer is bound to use elements of his own experience of life in his work) but because, far from illuminatihg the full content of a play like Endgame, such an interpretation reduces it to a trivial level. If Endgame really were nothing but a thinly disguised account of the literary, or even the human, relationship between two particular individuals, it could not possibly produce the impact it has had on audiences utterly ignorant of these particular, very private circumstances. Yet Endgame undoubtedly has a very deep and direct impact, which can spring only from its touching a chord in the minds of a very large number of human beings. The problems of the relationship between a literary master and his pupil would be very unlikely to elicit such a response; very few people in the audience would feel directly involved. Admittedly, a play that presented the conflict between Joyce and Beckett openly, or thinly disguised, might arouse the curiosity of audiences who are always eager for autobiographical revelations. But this is just what Endgame does not do. If it nevertheless arouses profound emotion in its audience, this can be due only to the fact that it is felt to deal with a conflict of a far more universal nature. Once tEatis seen, it becomes clear that wnile it is fascinating to argue about the aptness of such autobiographical elements, such a discussion leaves the central problem of understanding the play and exploring its many-layered meanings still to be tackled. As a matter of fact, the parallels are by no means so close: Lucky's speech in Waiting for GocUrt, for example, is anything but a parody of Joyce's style. It is, if anything, a parody of philosophical jargon and scientific double-talk—the very opposite of what either Joyce or Beckett ever wanted to achieve in their writing. Pozzo, on the other hand, who would stand for Joyce, is utterly inartistic in his first persona, and becomes reflective in a melancholy vein only after he has gone blind. And if Pozzo is Joyce, what would be the significance of Lucky's dumbness, which comes at the same time as Pozzo's blindness? The novel that Hamm composes in Endgame is characterized by its attempt at scientific exactitude, and there is a clear suggestion that it is not a work of art at all, but a thinly disguised vehicle for the expression of Hamm's sense of guilt about his behavior at the time of the great mysterious calamity, when he refused to save his neighbors. Clov, on the other hand, is shown as totally uninterested in Hamm's "Work 34 the theatre of the absurd in Progress," so that Hamm has to bribe his senile father to listen to it—surely a situation as unlike that of Joyce and Beckett as can be imagined. . The experience expressed in Beckett's plays is of a far more profound and fundamental nature than mere autobiography. They reveal his experience of temporality; and evanescence; his sense of the tragic difficulty p£ hwomm^ avmre of on^sjjwn self in ffie mertiuesB^prbeess of.renovatfoioBe^ife?-.. ^struction that oecx^v^:^^S^BnSrBmei of the difficulty.' of oojmrmmcationThetween human beings; of The unending quest for reality m~a world in which everything is uncertain and the borderline between dream and reality is ever shifting; of the (ragicjiaturejafja^^ j tion of friendship (of which Bedkett speaks in the essay on - .Prousf)", anff'stTon. In Endgame we are also certainly con-■> fronted with a very powerful expression of the sense of dead-ness, of leaden heaviness and "h^^lessnes?,* that is experienced in states of deep depression: the world outside goes dead for« ■fme victini~of such state^"1$uf inside his mind there is ceaseless J argument between parts of his personality that have become : autonomous entities. This is not to say that Beckett gives a clinical description of psychopathological states. His creative intuition explores the elements of experience and shows to what extent all human beings carry the seeds of such depression and disintegration within the deeper layers of thejr personality. If the prisoners of San Quentin responded to Waiting for Godot, it was because they were confronted with their own experience of time, waiting, hope, and despair; because they recognized the truth about their own human relationships in the sadomasochistic interdependence of Pozzo and Lucky and in the bickering hate-love between Vladimir and Estragon, This is also the key to the wide success of Beckett's plays: to be confronted with concrete projections of the deepest fears and anxieties, which have been only vaguely experienced at a half-conscious level, constitutes a process of catharsis and liberation analogous to the therapeutic effect in psychoanalysis of confronting the subconscious contents of the mind. This is the moment of release from deadening habit, through facing up to the suffering of *i the reality of being, that Vladimir almost attains in Waiting Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 35 for Godot. This also, probably, is the release that could occur if Clov had the courage to break his bondage to Hamm and venture out into the world, which may not, after all, be so dead as it appeared from within the claustrophobic confines of Hamm's realm. This, in fact, seems to be hinted at by the strange episode of the little boy whom Clov observes in the last stages of Endgame. Is this boy a symbol of life outside the closed circuit of withdrawal from reality? It is significant that in the original French version, this episode is dealt with in greater detail than in the later, English one. Again Beckett seems to have felt that he had been too explicit. And from an artistic point of view he is surely right; in his type of theatre the half-light of suggestion is more powerful than the overtly symbolical. But the comparison between, the two versions is illuminating nevertheless. In the English version, Clov, after expressing surprise at what he has discovered, merely says: clov (dismayed): Looks like a small boy! \ hamm (sarcastic): A small . . . boyl clov: I'll go and see. (He gets down, drops the telescope, goes towards the door, turns.) I'll take the gaff. (He looks for the gaff, sees it, picks it up, hastens towards the door.) hamm: NoI (Clov halts.) clov: No? A potential procreator? hamm; If he exists hell die there or he'll come here. And if he doesn't . . . (Pause.)72 In the original, French version, Hamm shows far greater interest in the boy, and his attitude changes from open hostility to resignation. clov: There is someone there! Someone! hamm: Well, go and exterminate him! (Clov gets down from the stool.) Somebody! (With trembling voice) Do your duty! (Clov rushes to the door.) No, don't bother, (Clov stops.) What distance? (Clov climbs back on the stool, looks through the telescope.) clov: Seventy . , . four meters. hamm: Approaching? Receding? 36 the theatre of the absurd clov (continues to look): Stationary. hamm: Sex? clov: What does it matter? (He opens the window, leans out. Pause. He straightens, lowers the telescope, turns to Hamm, frightened.) Looks like a little boy. hamm: Occupied with? CLovrWhat? hamm (violently): What is he doing? clov (also): I don't know what he's doing. What little: boys used to do. (He looks through the telescope. Pause. Puts it down, turns to Hamm.) He seems to be sitting on the ground, with his back against something. : hamm: The lifted stone. (Pause.) Your eyesight is getting better. (Pause,) No doubt he is looking at the house with the eyes of Moses dying. clov: No. hamm: What is he looking at? clov (violently); I don't know what he is looking at. (He raises the telescope. Pause. Lowers the telescope, turns to Hamm.) His navel. Or thereabouts. (Pause.) Why this cross-examination? - . ' hamm: Perhaps he is dead.73 ' After this, the French text and the English version again coincide: Clov wants to tackle the newcomer with his gaff, Hamm stops him, and, after a brief moment of doubt as" to whether Clov has told him the truth, realizes that the turning point has come: ' "It's the end, Clov, we've come to the end. I don't need you any more."74 The longer, more elaborate version of this opisode clearly reveals the .religious or quSSi-religijous symboh|ra^of'*ther' little, boy? the references to Moses and the lifted stone .seisin to hint thaj: the first"human being, the first )ngh>of life discovered in , the outside world since the great calamity when the earth went dead, is not, like Moses, dying within sight of the promised land, but, like Christ the moment after the resurrection, has, been newly born into a new life, leaning,-a babe, *t against the lifted stone. Moreover, like the Buddha, the little Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 37 boy contemplates his navel. And his appearance convinces Hamm that the moment of parting, the final stage of the endgame, has come. It may well be that the sighting of this little boy—undoubtedly a climactic event in the play—stands for redemption from the illusion and evanescence of time through the recognition, and acceptance, of a higher reality: the little boy contemplates his own navel; that is, he fixes his attention on the great emptiness of nirvana, nothingness, of which Democritus the Abderite has said, in one of Beckett's favorite quotations, "Nothing is more real than nothing."75 There is a moment of illumination, shortly before he himself dies, in which Murphy, having played a game of chess, experiences a strange sensation: ". . . and Murphy began to see nothing* that colorlessness which is such a rare post-natal treat, being the absence . . . not of percipere but of percvpi. His other senses also found themselves at peace, an unexpected pleasure. Not the numb peace of their own suspension, but the positive peace that comes when the somethings give way, or perhaps simply add up, to the Nothing, than which in the guffaw of the Abderite naught is more real. Time did not cease, that would be asking too much, but the wheels of rounds and pauses did, as Murphy with his head among the armies [i.e., of the chessmen] continued to' suck in, through all the posterns of his withered soul; the accidentless One-and-Only, conveniently called Nothing."7? Does Hamm, who has shut himself off from the world and killed die rest of mankind by holding on to his material possessions—Hamm, blind, sensual, egocentric—then die when Clov, the rational part of the self, perceives the true reality of the illusoriness of the material world, the redemption and resurrection, the Hberation from,the wheels of time that lies in. union with the "accidentless One-and-Ohly, conveniently called Nothing"? Oris the discovery of the little boymerely a. symbol of the ebming of death—union with nothingness in a different, more concrete sense? Or does the reappearance of life in the outside .world indicate that the period of loss of contact with the world has come to an end, that the crisis has passed and that a disintegrating personality is about to find the way back to integration, "the solemn change towards merciless 38 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD reality in Hamm and ruthless acceptance of freedom in Clov," as the Jungian analyst Dr. Metman puts it?77 There is no need to try to pursue these alternatives any further; to decide in favor of one would only impair the stimulating coexistence of these and other possible implications. There is, however, an illuminating commentary on Beckett's views about the interrelation between material wants and A^e^ling of j^ejtíjsjne^and^fo^ play Act WUinout Words, whicíTwas performed with Endgame ^úriň^lS^r^t ru^TEe scene is a desert onto which a man*is ' "flung backwards." Mysterious whistles draw his attention in various directions. A number of more or less desirable objeqts,' notably a carafe of water, are dangled before hint He tries to get the water. It hangs too high. A number of cubes, obviously designed to make it easier for him to reaGh the water, descend from the flies. But however ingeniously he piles them on top of one another, the water always slides just outside his reach. In the end he sinks into complete immobility. The whistle sounds—but he no longer heeds it. The water is dangled in front of his face—but he does not move. Even the palm tree in the shade of which he has been sitting is whisked off into the flies. He remains immobile, looking at. his hands.78 Here again we find man flung onto the stage of life, jtt first objfyinj*Jjhe call of a number of impulses, having his attention drawn totrKTpuršm^^ by whistles from the wings, butyfoding peace only when he has learned his lesson and refuses any of ríie mSŕiällsatislactions diSgleaHDiS-'fore him: The pursuit of objectives that fórever'recedéWťh'et* " are attained—inevitably so" through the action of time, which changes us in the process of reaching what we crave—can find release only in the recognition of that nothingness which is the only reality. The whistle: that sounds from the wings resembles the whistle with which Hamm summons Clov to minister to his material needs. And the final, immobile position of the man in Act Without Words recalls the posture of the little boy in the original version of Endgame. The activity of Fozzo and Lucky, the driver and the driven, always on the way from place to place; the waiting of Estragón and Vladimir, whose attention is always focused on the prom- >, ise of a coming; the defensive position of Hamm, who has Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 39 - built himself a shelter from the world to hold on to his possessions j are all aspects of the same futile preoccupation with o\^a^^^^SSwa^ ^oata. An mois^enf is~duora?r. As Clov says, "I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust."re ■ Waiting for Godot and Endgame, the plays Beckett wrote| in French, are dramatic statements (^d^humjmsitoatim^ J self. They kcj^^^^^S^^r^a'nd^plo^,in the conventional I sense because they tackle their subject matter at a level where I neither characters nor plot exist. Characters presuppose that; human nature, the diversity of personality and individuality, is j v real and matters; plot can exist only on the assumption thatjj events in time are significant. JTJbesg^a^preciseJly^fhe j^sumn-t^gng ,ntjaat.,|ihe).^tygQ jojayj? mifr-ftfr, .jEgpstJon.' Hamm and Clov, Pozzo and Lucky, Vladimir and Estragon, Nagg and Nell are not cliara^er^^ rather like the personified virtues and vices in medieval mystery plays or Spanish autos sacramentales. And what passes tki these plays are not events with a defjrntej^um^ definite -end, but types ofjB^#K»i that^wjUJpreyer repeat 'i^^l^^T^3tW^y iae'pattern'OT Act I of Waiting for GodbTisieg^sd with yariationTnTAct II; that is why we do not see Clov actually leave Hamm at the close of Endgame but leave the two frozen in a position of stalemate. Both plays repeat the pattern of the old German students' song Vladimir sings at the beginning of Act II of Waiting for Godot, about the dog that came into a kitchen and stole some bread and was killed by the cook and buried by its fellow dogs who put a tombstone on its grave which told the story of the dog that came into the kitchen and stole some bread—and so on ad infinitum. In Endgame and Waiting for Godot, Beckett is concerned with probing downJtQ-a-depth in which*m5mojiialflx and.definite events no.Ionger apjiear.^and only basic patterns emerge^, , "~~ " ' In the pJgVjS. he has written for the stage and for radio 4g^ :^^^SJB^^oS^S&^S^s&^> both in-~ dividual characters and individualized plots do appear, reflecting the same patterns but reflecting them in the lives of 40 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD particular human beings. ^rfip^lLWizX&S^ dejiJsL, 3yjtA_.tfae flow of time and the mstebilityof the self, All That Fall and Em$ers"wim waithig^~guilt, and the" futility of pinning one's hope on things or human beings. iAH Th&~Faff'{thG title is taken from Psalm 145: "The Lord <| upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed : down") shows an old Irishwoman, Maddy Rooney, very fat, very ill, hardly able to move, on her way to the railway station of Boghill to fetch her blind husband, Dan Rooney, who is due to arrive on the twelve-thirty train. Her progress is slow as in a nightmare. She meets a number of people with whom she wants to establish contact but fails. "I estrange them all."80 Mrs. Rooney has lost a daughter, Minnie, more than forty years ago. When she reaches the railway station, the train is J mysteriously delayed. When it arrives, it is said to have stopped for a long while on the open track. Dan and Maddy I, Rooney set outior home. As children jeer at them, Dan Rooney asks, "Did you ever wish to kill a child? . . . Nip some young I doom in the bud?"81 and he admits that often in winter he is tempted to attack the boy who leads him home from the sta- | tion. When they are almost home, the same little boy runs | after them; he is returning an object Mr. Rooney is believed | to have left in his compartment on the train. It is a child's i ball. The boy also knows why the train had to stop on the line: a child had fallen out of the train and been killed on the tracks. Did Dan Rooney push a child out of the train? Did his ; impulse to destroy young 'lives overcome him during the I journey? And has his hatred of children something to do with ■■! Madd/s chfldlessnessKiMadJy, Rooney; stands for thejforces of ' Jfe^JLPJSea^^. Dynjfer the death-wish that sees a young 'I vdEadjord^ .t Does the Biblical quotation of the" title support Ban Koone/s j point of view? "The Lord upholdeth all that fall. . . Wa§ the child who was killed and redeemed from existence saved i 'i|£frouM^^ 3 WEdn'ue^text^nSaTfhe psalm is mentioned as the"suBject of t next Sunday's sermon, both Maddy and Dan Rooney break out in "wild laughter."82 AH That Fall touches many of the -$ chords^hat^^ »\ \ —but in a somewhat lighter aridje^s^earchin^_manner. , | Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 41 M\Krapps l^-l^apej-^ one-act play that has been per-formed_withľ^eaFsuccess on the stage in Paris, London, and New York, Beckett makes use of the tape recorder to demonstrate the elusiveness of hum^TpersonaEty. Krapp is j|_mrý oídman who throughout his adult life has annually recorded an account of the past year's impressions and events onto magnetic tape. We see him, old, decrepit, and a failure (he is a writer, but only seventeen copies of his book have been sold in the current year, "eleven at trade price to free cfrculating libraries beyond the seas"), bstening to his own voice recorded thirty years earlier. Butiug_ypice has become the yoioe_ of a stranger to him, yfe even has to get a dictionary to look up one of the more elaborate words used by his former self. When the tape reaches the description of the great moment of insight that then seemed a miracle to be-treasured "against the day when my work will be done," he cannot be bothered to listen to it and winds the tape on. The only description that visibly arouses his attention is one of lovemaking in a punt on a lake. Having heard his earlier self's report on his thirty-ninth year, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp proceeds to record the current year's balance sheet. "Nothing to say, not a squeak." His only moment of happiness: "Revelled in the word spool. (With relish) Spoooll Happiest moment in the past half mfl-^ lion."83 There are memories of lovemaking with an old hag.* But then Krapp returns to the old tape. Again the voice of his former self is heard describing the love scene on the lake. The old tape ends with a summing up: ["Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No,| I wouldn't want them back."84fľhe curtain falls on old Krapp' staring motionless before him, with the tape running on in silence. Through the brilliant device of the autobiographical library of annual recordedsfatemeirts, Beckett has fojind a graphic ^cpress^^^^^^^b^^^^^e ever-chan^n^jdentity^f^e^ self, which he had already described in his essay on Proust. £1Ŕrapp's Last Tape, the self at one moment in time is confronted with its earlier incarnation only to' find it utterly strange. What, then, is the identity between Krapp now and Krapp then? In what sense are they the same? And if this 42 THE THEATBE OF THE ABSUHD is a problem with an interval of thirty years, it is surely only a difference in degree if the interval is reduced to one year, one month, one hour. Beckett at one time planned to write a long play of three Krapps: Krapp with his wife, Krapp with his wife and child, Krapp alone—further variations on the theme of the identity of the self. But he has now abandoned this project. _____ TJiej-adiopls^Embers] resembles Krapp''s Last Tape in that its hercTis "also an old man musing on the past. Against-the background of the roar of the sea, Henry remembers his youth, his father who was drowned in the sea at this very spot, his father who was a sporty man and despised his son as a washout. It seems as if Henry wanted to establish contact with his dead father, but "he doesn't answer any more."85 Henry's wife, Ada, although probably dead too, does respond. They remember Iovemaldng by the sea, their daughter's riding and music lessons, but then Ada recedes, and Henry is left alone with his thoughts, whieh revolve around a scene he seems to have witnessed as a child between two men at night, Bolton and Holloway, Holloway being a doctor, their family doctor, whom Bolton (Henry's father?) implored for some medical help the nature of which remains unclear. With the winter . night outside and the fire dying—no more flames, only the embers glowing—Henry remains alone with his thoughts of his loneliness: "Saturday . . . nothing. Sunday . . . Sunday ... nothing all day. . . . Nothing, all day nothing . . . Not a sound."88 ">■'■■ Henry resembles the heroes of Beckett's later novels in his recall of memories in the form of "stories" and in his compulsive need to talk. As his wife, or the memory of his wife, tells him, "You should see a doctor about your talking, it's worse, what must it be like for Addie? . . . Do you know what she said to me once, when she was quite small, she said, Mummy, why does Daddy keep on talking all the time? She heard you in the lavatory, I didn't know what to answer." To which Henry replies, "I told you to tell her I was praying. Roaring prayers at God and his saints."87 In the two radio plays, Embers and All That Fall, this com_ pulsion to talk that is so characteristic._»f—alLof Beckett's char-S acters (for even the incessant writing of the crrppledTTep^* Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 43 paralyzed heroes of his novels is a form of talk—a monologue interieur) blends into a background of natural sound—the sound of the sea in Embers, the sounds of the road in AU That Fall. And articulate sound, language, is somehow equated with the inarticulate sounds^ojFjaatare. In a world that—has lost its meaning, language also becomes a meaningless buzzing. As Molloy says at one point, ". . . the words I heard, and heard distinctly, having quite a sensitive ear, were heard a first time, then a second, and often even a third, as pure sounds, free of all meaiiing, and this is probably one of the reasons why conversation was unspeakably painful to me. And the words I uttered myself, and which must nearly always have gone with an effort of the intefligence, were often to me as the buzzing of an insect. And this is perhaps one of the^. reasons I was so untalkative, I mean this trou]ilel had in tin- derstan ding not only whatothers said to_me,.butSIso what 1 said to them. lJls~^-S^at~mÜie end, by dint of patience, we made ourselves understood; but understood with regard' to what, I ask of you, and to what purpose? And to the noises" of nature too, and of the works of men, I reacted I think in my own way and without desire of enlightenment.1'88 When we hear Beckett's characters (and hence Beckett himself) using language, we often feel like Celia when she was talking to Murphy: . . spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.''88 And in fact the jj ^dialogue in Beckett's plays is often built on the prinripIejEaT^ ~each line obliterates what was said In the previous fine. In his thesis~on ueckett, Die Unzulänglichkeit der Sprache^The Inadequacy of Language—Niklaus Gessner has drawn up a whole list of passages from Waiting for Godot in which assertions made by one of the characters are gradually qualified, weakened, and hedged in with reservations until they are completely taken back. In a meaningless universe, it is always jfoo___dyj^o_jnajce.a pjjsi__e____gment. "Not to want to Tay, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of 44 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD 1 composition,"90 as Mofloy puts it, summing up the attitude of most of Beckett's characters. _ B? Beckett's plays are concerned with expressing the difficulty of finding meaning in a world subject to incessant change, his use of language probes the limitations of language both as a means of communication and as a vehicle for the expression of valid statements, an instrument of thoughtJ*WEeii Gessner asked him about the contradiction between his writing and his obvious conviction that language could not convey meaning, Beckett replied, "Que voulez-vous, Monsieur? C'est les mots; on n'a Hen d'autre." But in fact his use of the dramatic medium shows that hj&hgsjnejj^^ beyond language. OjJ]fi_|tiige—witness his two mrmeplays— one canjhspenjfejg^ characters contradict their verbal expression. "Let*s go, say the two tramps at the end of each act of Waiting for Godot, but the stage directions inform us that "they don't move." On the stage, language can be put into a contrapuntal relationship with action, the facts behind the language can be revealed. Hence A^J)^ortarice^o|,jniK lence inJ^e^effi.j^vs-Krapp's eating of bananas, the prat- . faffiTo? Vkd^mir and Estragon, the variety turn with Lucky's hat, Clov's immobility at the close of Endgame, which puts his verbally expressed desire to leave in question. Beckett's use of the stage is an attempt to reduce the gap between the limitations of language and the intuition of being, the sense of the human situation he seeks to express in spite of his strong feel^j;— (. ing that words are inadequate to formulate it. The cohcrefeness andTlSee^dimensionaT nature of the stage can be used to add new resources to language as an instrument of thought and exploration of being. Beckett's^whok wojrk.is^ able: "I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. . . ■. I have the ocean to drink, so there is an ocean then."91 Language in Beckett's plays serves-to-express the breakdown, ^he^dismtegr^on^ofj^jgnagej. Where there is no cer-irecanKno~flenrlrfe.jneanmgs^and the impossibif-ity of ever aftaSning certainty is one of the main themes of Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self 45 Beckett's plays. Godot's promises are vague and uncertain. In Endgame, an unspecified something is taking its course, and when Hamm anxiously asks, "We're not beginning to ... to ... mean something?" Clov merely laughs. "Mean something! You and I mean somethingl''92 Niklaus Gessner has tabulated ten different modes of disintegration of language observable in Waiting for Godot. They range from simple misunderstandings and double-entendres to monologues (as signs of inability to communicate), cliches, repetitions of synonyms, inability to find the right words, and "telegraphic style" (loss of grammatical structure, communication by shouted commands) to Lucky's farrago of chaotic nonsense and the dropping of punctuation marks, such as question marks, as an indication that language has losjJ&sJEuja^on as a means for communication, that questions have turned into statements hot really requiring an answer. But more important than any merely formal signs of the disintegration of language and meaning in Beckett's plays is the nature of the dialogue itself, which again and again breaks down because no truly dialectical exchange of thought occurs in it—either through loss of meaning of single words (Godot's boy messenger, when asked if he is unhappy, replies, "I don't know, sir") or through the inability of characters to remember what has just been said (Estragon: "Either I forget immediately or I never forget").98 In a purposeless world that hasí lost its ultimate objectives, dialogue, like all action, becomes! a mere game to pass the time, as Hamm points out in' Endgame: "... babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together and whisper together in the dark ... moment upon moment, pattering down."94 It is time itself that drains language of meaning. In Krapp's Last Tape, the well-turned idealistic professions of faith Krapp made in his best years have become empty sounds to Krapp grown old. Instead of establishing a bridge of friendliness, Mrs. Rooney's attempts to communicate with the people she meets on the road in All That Fall merely serve to make her more estranged from them. And in Embers the old man's musings are equated with the beating of the waves upon the shore. But, if Beckett's use of language is designed to devalue Ian- 46 THE THEATRE OP THE ABSURD guage as a vehicle of conceptual thought or as an instrument for the communication of ready-made answers to the problems of the human condition, his continued use of language must, paradoxically, be regarded as an attempt to communicate on his own part, to communicate the incommunicable. Such an undertaking may be a paradox, but it makes sense neverthe- v less: it attacks the cheap and facile complacency of those who believe that to name a problem is to solve it, that the world can be mastered by neat classification and formulations. Such com: ; placency is the basis of a continuous process of frustration. The' recognition of the illusoriness and absurdity of ready-made solutions and prefabricated meanings, far from ending in despair, is the starting point of a new kind of consciousness, which faces the mystery and terror of the human condition in the exhilaration of a new-found freedom: Tor to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker, "^ Beckett's entire work can be seen as a search for the reality , that lies behind mere reasoning in conceptual terms. He may have devaluated language as an instrument for the communication of ultimate truths, but he has shown himself a great master of language as an artistic medium. "Que voulez-vous, Monsieur? (Test les mots; on n'a Hen d'autre," For want of | better raw material, he has molded words into a superb instrument for bis purpose; In the theatre he has been able to add a new dimension to language—the counterpoint of action, s concrete, many-faceted, not to be explained away, but making ! a direct impact on an audience. In the theatre, or at least in * " Beckett's theatre, it is possible to bypass the stage of concep- h tual thinking altogether, as an abstract painting bypasses the ■ stage of the recognition of natural objects. In Waiting for % Godot and Endgame, plays drained of character, plot, and | meaningful dialogue, Beckett has shown that such a seeiningly :i impossible tour de force can in fact be accomplished. Chapter Two ARTHUR ADAMOV: THE CURABLE AND THE INCURABLE Arthur Adamov, the author of some of the most powerful plays in the^Theatre of the Absurd, now rejects all his work that might^e^assjfedm^Q^^a^e^^&The development that led him toward this type of drama, however, and the development that led him away from ft again, are of particular interest to any inquiry into its nature^Adamov, who is not only a remarkable dramatist but also a remarkable thinker, has provided us with a well-documented case history of the preoccupations and obsessions that made him write plays depicting a senseless and brutal nightmare world, the theoretical considerations that led him to formulate an aesthetic of the absurd, and, finally, the process by which he' gradually returned to a theatre based on reality, the representation of social conditions, and a definite social purposejHow did it happen that a dramatist who in the late nineteen-forties so thoroughly rejected the naturalistic theatre that to use even the name of a town that could actually be found on a map would have appeared to him as "unspeakably vulgar" could by i960 be engaged in writing a full-scale historical drama firmly situated in place and time—the Paris Commune of 1871? Arthur Adamov, bom in Kislovodsk, in thejCaucasus, in 1908, the .son of a'^weaffliy"oil-well proprietor o'f^SxnTenian origin, left Russia, at the aga-ollous. His parents could afford to travel, and, like the children of many well-to-do Russian families, Adamov was brought up in French, a fact that explains his mastery of I^ench^hferary^'st^'le. The first book he ever read was Balzac's EugSnie Grandet, at the age of seven. The outbreak of the First World War found Adamov's family ;at Freudenstadt, a resort in the Black Forest. It was only 48 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD through the special intervention of the King of Württemberg, who was acquainted with Adamov s father, that the family escaped internment as enemy, citizens, and were given special permission to leave for Switzerland, where they settled in Geneva. Adamov received his early education in Switzerland and later in Germany (at Mainz). In 1924, at the age of sixteen, he went to Paris and was drawn int<^ Surreahst - cn-cIesTHb . wrote - Surrealist poetry, edited an avantgarde 'periodical, - Discontinuité, became a friend of Paul Eluard, and led the Me of tlie Parisian literary nonconformists. , ,. ^ Gradually he stopped writing, or at least stopped publishing what he had written. He himself later, described the severe spiritual and psychological ctísjš. that he went through in/a small book that must be among the most terrifying and rath-less documerite óf.se^ world litěra- ture, L'Aveu XŤhff^mfm^nyy^ít earliest,section: ,of this Dostoevskian masterpiece; dated 'Tariv 1938," opens withjt. brilliant statement óf tlie metaphysical angrôsh that fcrmstne basis of Existentialist Uterature and of, the Tbeatre.-of the" Absurd: . , -;; ■ Whát'is there? I know first oKll that I 'am,(But who'am IB All I know of myself is that I staffer. And ifIspffec^ is?b.e- " cause at the origin of my self there" is mutilation; separation. I am separated." What I am separated from~I cannot' naine it. But I am separated* • - ". In a footnote Adamov adds, "Formerly it was called God." To- , day it no longer has any name."1 A deep sense of jdienation, the feeling that time weighs on him "with its enormous liquid mass, with all its dark power,"2 a deep fooling of passivity—these are some of the symptoms of his spiritual sickness. ' ■ • A Everything happens as though I were only one of the particular existences of some great incomprehensible and central being. . . . Sometimes this great totality of life appears to me so dramatically beautiful that it "plunges me into ecstasy. But móre often it seems like a monstrous beast that * penetrates and'surpasses mé' and which is everywhere, ' Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 49 " within me and outside nwi. . . . And terror grips and envelops me more powerfully from moment to moment. . . .My only way out is to write, to make others aware of it, so as not to have to feel all of it alone, to get rid of however small a portion of it.*1 ... / ■ . ' It is iif'dreams and jn.prayer that the writer of this haunting ' confession seeks escape^-in dreamV that are "the great silent movement of the soul: through the night";1 in prayer that is' v the "desperate need of man, immersed in time, to seek refuge in the only entity that could 'save him*, the projection outward from binfself of that in him which partakes of eternity "fi Yet - what is there to pray to? £I'he name of God shbuld.uo longer! come from the mouth of .man. This word that has so long been ', • --:dBittded'»by-'iu8age- bo- -longer- means anything; r . .To use thfe word' God is more than-'sloth, it Is a refusal to think, a , ,kjrid of 'shortcut,* a, hideous shorthand....."e Thus the crisis r of Witti '4 also a crisis jjff language. "The words in pur aging , voeabidaries are like yery sick "people. S6me may be able to .survive, others,are incurable/'7 _ <.., ■ ' 1, Hit the next section oi'X'Avew, dated "Paris, 1939" (it has bepn published m English, under the 'title '"The Endless : : Humiliation''^? Adamov gives a ruthlessly'frank description of ' Ms own sickness, Ms desire to be. humiliated by the lowest of prostitutes, nis*"in^ap^city^to complete the act of carnal possession."? Fully aware of the* nature of his neurosis-he is well versed in modern psychology 4a\ci has even translated one of Jung's "works into French10—Adamov is^also .aware of the value .. of neurosis, which "grants its victim a peracute lucidity, inaccessible to the so-called normal man,"11 and which may thus give him the vision that "permits him, through the singularity of his sickness, to accede to the great general laws by which the loftiest comprehension of the world is expressed. And„since the particular is always a symbolic expression of the universal, it follows that the^ universal is most effectively symbolized by the extreme of the particular, so that the neurosis which exaggerates a man's particularity of vision defines that much more completely his universal significance."12 ; Having given a brutallydetailed description, itself a symrp torn of masochism by the violence of its seff-htunuiation, of 50 THE THEATRE 0E THE ABSURD Iiis.- neujpsis, with its obsessions, rites, and automatisms, Adamov returns to a diagnosis o£ our epoch in a section en~ titled "Le Temps de rignominie." He. defines ignominy as that which has no name, the unnamable, and the poet's task is not only to call each thing by its name but also to "denounce . .' . the degenerated concepts, the dried-up abstractions that havei usurped . .. . the dead remnants of the old sacred names."?-3; rhe degradation of language in our time becomes the express sion of its deepest sickness. What has been lost is the sensej.of the sacred, "the unfathomable wisdom of the myths and rites of the dead old world."14 . '; ' The disappearance of meaning in the world is clearly Hiiked ' tdjhe degradajion.of language, and both, in turn, to the loss ■ ofjaith, the disappearance of sacred rites and sacred myths.; But perhaps this degradation and despair are necessary steps -, toward a renewal: "Perhaps the sad and empty language that today's flabby humanity pours forth, will^ in all its horror, in all its boundless absurdity, re-echo in the heart of a solitary man who is awake, and then perhaps that man, suddenly realizing that he does not understand, will begin to understand."16 Therefore the only task left to man is to tear off all that dead skin until "he finds himself in the tour of the great nakedness."18 In this document of ruthless self-revelation, Adamov outlined a whole philosophy of the. Theatre of the Absurd,, long before he started to write his first play. '[ In the pages of L'Aveu, we can follow him through the war ^ears—still in Paris in May and June, 1940; in Cassis in July; in Marseille by August; then, between December, .1940, and November, 1941, at the internment camp of Argeles, months passed in a stupor of defection; back in Marseille at the end of 1941; returning to Paris in the last month.of 194a. The last section of L'Aveu and the preface are dated 1943. In reading this astonishing book, we are witnessing a mind laying the foundations of its salvation through self-examination and a merciless recognition of its own predicament. In'his contributions to the short-lived literary review L'Heure Nouvelle, of which he became editor shortly after the end of the war in Europe, Adamov returned to the same themes, but already *> in a spirit of detachment, in the posture of ä thmker called T Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 51, J I upon, at a great turning point in history, to work put a program of action for a new beginning to a new epoch-' ; ;' It is a program characterized by a complete absence, of illusions and easy solutions: "We are accused of pess_ni_m, as ■■"{ though pessimism were but one among a number of possible I attitudes, as if man. were capable of choosing between two alternatives-optimism and pessimism."17 Such a program , would of necessity be destructive in its rejection of all existing dogmatisms. It insists on - the artist's duty, to avoid selecting" >| < just one aspect of, the worId-"religious, psychological,' scien-. ' tific, social—but to evoke behind each of these the shadow of the whole in which they must merge."18 And again this search for wholeness, for the reality underlying the bewfldertog multiplicity of appearances, is'seen as asearch fbj the sacred: "the crisis of our time is essentially a religious crisis. It is a matter of life or death."19 Yet the concept of God is dead. We are on the threshold of an era' of impersonal aspects of the absolute, ' hence the revival of creeds like Taoism and Buddhism. This is the tragic impasse in which modern, man finds himself: "From whatever point he starts, whatever path he follows, ;■. modern man comes to the same conclusion: behind its_yisible appearances, life hides a meaning that is eternally inaccessible to penetration by the spirit that seeks for its discovery, caught in "the dilemma of being aware that it is impossible to find it, and yet also impossible to renounce the hopeless quest."20 Adamov points out mat,this is not, strictly speaking, a philosophy of the absurd, because it still presupposes the convic--■ j .tion that the world has a meaning, although it is of necessity '" outside the reach of human consciousness. The awareness that i there, may be a meaning but that it will never be found is ji^ tragic. Any conviction that the world is wholly absurd would lack this tragic element. In the social, and political sphere, Adamov finds the solution in Communism. But his is a very personal form of support for f ; the. Communist cause. He finds in Communism no supernat-ural, sacred element Its ideology confines itself to purely :\ .. human terms, and for him it remains open to question "whether, anything that confines itself to the human sphere could ever attain anything but the subhuman."?1 If this is \ .' .■ me case, why support Communism? "If we turn to Cornmu-, 53 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD nism nevertheless, it is merely because one day, when it will seem quite close to the realization of. its highest aim—the victory over all the contradictions that impede the exchange of goods among men—it will meet, inevitably, the great no' of the nature of things, which it thought it could ignore in its struggle. When the material obstacles are overcome, when man will no longer be able to deceive himself as to the nature of his unhappiness, then there will arise an anxiety all the more powerful, all the more fruitful for beings stripped of anything that might have hindered its realization. It goes without saying that such a purely negative hope does not seem to us to entail an adherence that, to be complete, would have to manifest itself in action."22 This was Adamov's position in 1946. Since then, largely as a consequence of the emergence of General de. Gaulle after the events of May, 1958, he has taken a more active line in support of the extreme Left. Yet when asked in i960 whether he had changed his attitude since 1946, Adamov confirmed that he still subscribed to what he had written fourteen years earlier. V 14 was SsEKOte-rad-^L^s^f^LSS^AJSm^J^. '^igBE^ He was reading Strind- berg at the time, and under the influence of Strmdbeig's.pXays, notably A Dream Play, he began to discover the stuff of drama all around him, in "the most ordinary everyday happenings, particularly street scenes. What struck me "above all were the lines of passers-by, their loneliness in the crowd, the terrifying diversity of their utterance, of which I would please myself by hearing only snatches that, linked with other snatches of conversation, seemed to grow intp a composite entity, the very fragmentariness of which became a guarantee of its symbolic truth."23 One day he witnessed a scene that confronted him, in a sudden flash, with the dramatic reality he had.wanted to express. A blmd beggar passed by two pretty girls singing a refrain from some popular song; "I had closed my eyes, it was wonderful!" This gave him the idea of showing "on the stage, as_crudely and as visibly as possible, fh^loneIiness~or man^tSe"^ absenceof communication."^" " ' .J ^a7mvdiei'A~Samov's~^st play, is the fruit of this idea. In>, a succession of rapidly sketched scenes, it shows two men Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 53 --infatuated with the same emptyheaded, commonplace girl, Lili. One of them, the "employee," is brisk, businesslike, and ever optimistic, while the other, "N.," is passive, helpless, and despondent. The employee, who, in a chance meeting, has gained the wholly erroneous impression that he has a date with Lili, never loses his hope and constantly turns up at.imagined rendezvous. N., on the other hand, spends his time lying in the street, waiting for Lili to pass by chance. In the end the optimistic, buoyant attitude of the employee and the abject passivity of N. lead to precisely the same result—nothing. Lib' cannot even tell her two rival suitors apart. The employee lands in prison, where he goes on making plans for the future and still hopes to maintain his position, although he has gone bund. N. is run over by a car and swept into the garbage by the street-cleaners. Lili is flanked by relatively successful men ~a. journalist with whom she seems in love and who keeps her waiting when they have a date, and the editor of. his paper, who treats her as his kept mistress. The editor also takes the place, as and when the action requires it, of a number of other persons in authority—the manager of a restaurant, the director of a firm for which the employee works as a salesman, the receptionist of a hotel where he fails to get a room/While ■N. and the employee are seen, as it were, from their own point of view, the journalist and the editor are seen wholly from the outside, as "the other people," who, inexplicably, seem to be able to master the human situation, to whom nothing calamitous ever happens. Two identical and interchangeable couples act as a kind of chorus, the faceless crowd that surrounds us; they age as the action proceeds, but remain anpjajaaQus and interchangeable throughout. . iTirneJs constantly evoked: the^araj3ters[ jceerj jra^king without hands is a recurring feature of the decor. The action of time is also illustrated by the gradual shrinkage of space. A dance hall shown in the beginning appears again in Scene 11 —but'now the set has become much narrower. . At one point, N. is shown with a prostitute whom he begs to humiliate him. As Adamov himself has pointed out, La Parodie served to justify his own attitude; "Even if I am like N., I shall not be punished any more than the employee."25 54 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Buoyant activity is as. pointless as cringing apathy and self-humiliation.. La Parodie is an attempt to come to-terms with neurosis, to make psychological, states visible in concrete ..terms,. Aš Adamov defines it-in the^introduction to the first edition, the performance of a play of this type is "the projection into the world of sensations of states of mind and images that constitute its. hidden content A stage jplay ought to be the point of intersection between the visiWe.and invisible worldst> or, in other words, the display, the inaiiifestaJtiop-xiLthe iHádea. latent contents that form "the shell around the seeds of drama."2" ■ í jts-detemunecL rejection of individuality in favor of schematic types—in which it,resembles German Expressionist drama—-La Parodie represents a revolt against the complexities of the psychological theatre. It is a deliberate return to priini-tivism. Adaápjzj3a£s_no.t want to represent'the world, he wants, to^garody_jt. "When I arraign the world around me, I often reproach it for being nothing more than a parody. But the sickness I admit to—is it anything more than a parody?"27 Parody is direct, harsh, and oversimplified. La Parodie deliberately eschews all subtleties of plot, characterization, or language. This is a theatre of gesture—N. lying in the road, the employee bustling about, the interchangeable couples going through the motions of human existence without being recognizable individuals. Adamov felt that, havingiparodied the world in such simple terms, he had reached a dead end. In his next play, L'lnvasioni he -took the first steps toward portraying real characters in real human relationships. The isolated, lonely individuals of La Parodie are replaced by a family. It is still a family composed of lonely individuals, unable to communicatee But they Tire strongly linked together nevertheless—curiously enough, by., a shared loyalty to a dead hero. This hero is a dead writer, Jean, who has left an enormous mass of undecipherěd papers to his friend and disciple, Pierre, the husband of the dead man's sister Agnes. The apartment where they live, together with Pierre's mother, is in a state of complete disorder, which expresses the disorder reigning jť^ ^tíi&..miňds of the characters. The task of deciphering Jean's if Arthur, Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable ■ 55 ' literary remains is an impossible one. His writing is not only illegible but the characters themselves have faded. One can never know what he really wrote, and there is a constant danger that the literary executor will simply invent what he thinks i the master ought to have Written. And even if a scrap of paper, ■*■ a single sentence, is finally deciphered, it still must be placed in the context of the vast mass of disordered papers. There is another disciple of Jean's who tries to help, Tradel, ,!' but he is suspect precisely because he tends to read things ij into Jean's writing. The disorder within the room where the action takes place is matched by the disorder of the whole country: immigrants are streaming across the frontiers, the j social structure is disintegrating. In the second act the dis-I order in the room, now cluttered up with furniture, has in-1 creased. Pierre finds it ever more difficult to understand the meaning of the manuscripts. A man who is looking for some-; one in the apartment next door enters and strikes up a con-3 versation with Agnes. He is "the first one who comes along" with whom Agnes will run away. In the third act, this man has become a fixture in the room, and Pierre wants to retire to »f his own private den downstairs to work in peace. Agnes duly leaves him and goes off with the "first one who'comes along." In Act IV the room has been cleaned up, the papers are neatly stacked. Order has also returned in the country. Pierre has decided to give up his work. He begins to tear up the manu-i[ scripts. Agnes appears—she wants to borrow the typewriter. Her lover is ill, she is unable to manage his business. Pierre, > who has gone down to his den, is found there by Tradel; he is dead. ■■r'. L'Invaskm is a play about the hopeless search for meaning, - the quest for a message that will make sense in a jumble of F undecipherable papers; but it is concerned with order and disorder in society as welTas in the family. It almost seems that Agnes stands for disorder. Has Pierre, in marrying her, not at the same time married her dead brother with his confused manuscripts? When she leaves, order returns, and disorder and ■ * .. ■ business failure enter the household of the man whose mistress .|* she has become. Yet when Pierre abandons his work on the ',; manuscripts, he dies. He loses Agnes to the first man who L comes along because he is withdrawing more and more from gQ _ THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD ' human contact. The disorder that Agnesi brings; also represejits i the bewildering nature of reality and of relationships'with '; other human beings; which Pierre is unable to cope with. He .'withdraws from contact with others, because lie finds cxxn-%.. munfčátión more and more difficult. Language, is disintegrating before his eyes':. "Why does one say, 'It happens?' Who is that 'it,' whatjloes it want from me? Why does one say 'on the * ■ground' rather than 'at' or 'over'? I have lost too much time thinking about these things. What I want is not the meaning of words, but their volume and their moving body.! shall no longer search for anything. . . . I'll wait in silence, motionless."28 ' I " ■ '' Pierre begs his mother, who will bring him his food in. his ^ den, never to speak to him—a sign of his complete withdrawal. It is when he abandons his attitude of withdrawal, when he decides that he wants to lead a life like everybody else, that he learns that Agnes has left him. "She left too late, or too soon. Had she had a little' more patience, we could have started all over again,"2* he says, and returns to his den —to die, just missing Agnes, who comes to ask "to borrow the typewriter," yet-clearly begging to be taken back. But Pierre's mother,does not, or does not want to, understand, and fails to call Pierre upstairs. Here the tragedy turns on a misunderstanding. Had-Pierre's mother pot taken Agnes's demand for the typewriter, literally, rather than as a symbolic request to be taken back;, and participate in the work of the. family, Pierre might nbr4^ have^ied rejected and unloved. Adamov has described how" ' he thought that he had found an, important n^w dramatic1: device—indirect dialogue, the characters' oblique reference to ifhe subject under discussion, síňce they cannot, find the cour- ' age to display Uieir feelings openly and thereby expose tlační-, selves to tragic misunderstandings. Later he realized that he had merely reinvented a technique already, used by other f dramatists, notably by Chekhov. 1 " . ' .- L'lnvasion is a haunting play. Andre Gide was deeply impressed by it; he felt that it dealt with the greatness of a dead writer and the process by which.his influence and power gradually fade away—surely a curious misunderstanding on the part, of the venerable old man of letters, applying the conceptions Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 57 X of his own generation to the works of a new age. To a contemporary reader, the most striking feature of L'lnvasion is precisely the unrealjtVjrfthe deaá^eja^the-£ac^tliat-his rniigh_ vaunted messagejs_bsse^iajh7j^nihgless-^bm ^earTTnar, the great French director, who had produced .Adamov's adaptation of Buechner's Dantpn's Death at the Avignon Festival of 1948, saw L'lnvasion with the eyes of a contemporary. He praised Adamov for renouncing "the lace ornaments of dialogue and intrigue, for having given back to the drama its stark purity"30 of clear and simple stage symbols. He contrasted this stark modern theatre with that of Claudel, "which borrows its effect from the alcohols of faith and the grand word"30 and, posing the alternatives Adamov or Claudel, clearly answered—Adamov. Gide's and Vilar's tributes to Adamov, together with comments by other distinguished literary and stage figures like René Char, Jacques Prévert, and Roger Bhn, are contained in the slim volume in which Adamov, having failed to get them performed on the stage,, presented his first two plays to the reading public in the spring of 19,50.. The response to this publication had the desired effect; on November 14, 1950, L'lnvasion, directed by Jean Vilar, opened at the Studio des ' Champs-Elysées. Three days earlier, Adamov's third play, La Grande et la Petite Manceuvre, had been presented at the Theatre des Nóctambules, directed by another of the outstanding pioneers'-of the French avant-garde, Jean-Marie Serreau, and with Roger Blin in the leading part. Adamov ^imself has explained the title of La Grande et la ''Petite Manoeuvre as'referring to the small maneuver of the social disorder depicted: in the play, in contrast to the large maneuver of" the human condition itself, which envelops and dwarfs the former,31 the word "maneuver" in this context hav- ■ ing a double military and psychological sense. I^TTTjfgjK^'^ the theme of the paSllélTrvesoF La Parodie with that of the social and_ political disorders in the background of L'lnvasion. The active, : self-sacrificing struggle Of a. revolutionary leader is shown to be as futile as the passivity of a tormented victim of hidden psychological forces, who is compelled to execute the shouted orders of invisible monitors who drive him to the gradual loss I i 58 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD of all his limbs. The action takes place in a country oppressed by a brutal dictatorship. The active character, le militant, leads the victorious struggle against the forces of the police state; in the end he collapses while making a speech admitting that the revolutionaries have been compelled to use methods of brutal terror to gain their victory. Moreover, the militant has caused the death of his own child, because the disorders he himself had provoked made it impossible for the doctor to reach its sickbed. Once again the activist has achieved no more than the passive character, le mutM, who, a legless, armless cripple on a pushcart, is kicked into the road by the woman he adores, to be crushed in the crowd. j The mutM, who must obey the orders of the voices that ^compel him to put his hands into the machine that will cut them off, to walk in front of the car that will run him over, is clearly the chief character in the play, enibodj^jgrfbeaasifSi^^—< I owrj^titpje. His mutilations, like the deaths of N^aiid^Pj^mi, M jinjjjeefldjer.pla^jl,?Je direct outcorhe'j'and the expre,s?ipinjwaSf ^ oEhis inability to make human contact, his incapacity for love^ £> T^rmnseTf'says that'If" he' cbuWliviifwfr^ a child by her, the voices of his monitors would lose their power over him;32 the accidents in which he loses limb after limb usually follow his repeated failures to hold the affection of the woman he loves, Erna, who at times suggests that she really cares for him, while at others she appears to be merely spying on him on behalf of .-a secret-police agent who is her lover. a Adamov himself has interpreted the play, which is based on a particularly vivid and terrifying dream, as an attempt to justify himself for his failure to take,„a... more active partr„ fn^tETpolitical struggXe^oTthTLeft. To the outside observer, this may seem an mcompiete^ccount of the complex content of La Grande et la Petite Manoeuvre; The play not only argues (as Adamov today .believes, unfairly) that the efforts of the revolutionary to eliminate political terror aire vain because all power is ultimately based on the exercise of brute force; it also shows, very graphically, that there is an essential similarity between the activist fighter for justice and the passive slave of the irrational forces of his own subconscious mind. The cate^ gorical imperative that forces the militant to risk his life, to Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 50, Jeave his wife in fear and trembling and ultimately to cause the death of his sick child, is shown as springing, basically,! from the same inabihtvja^kafej as the implacable self-! destructive commands of the subconscious mind that force the/ mutile into masochistic self-destruction. The aggressive im-j pulses of the militant are merely the reverse side of the mutiU's aggression against himself. The very ambivalence of possible interpretations is an indication of the power of La Grande et la Petite Manoeuvre as a dramatic projection of an intense and tormented experience of fundamental human dilemmas. This play also shows Adamov in full command of the technical resources he needed to put his ideas into practice. The action not only moves forward in a succession of effectively contrasted scenes that follow each other with the flow of cinematic montage, it is also a perfect realization of Adamov's conception that the theatre should be able to_ translate ideas and psychological reaUtiesmtosimple and concrete images, so that "the manifestation of . . . contenT should literally, concretely, corporally coincide with that content itself,"33 This concretization of con-[ tent leads to a shift of emphasis from the language of drama; toward visible action. The language of the play ceases to Ee the mam vehicle ofpoetry, as it is in the theatre of ClaudeL with which Vilar contrasted Adamov's work. As Adamov defines this shift, "It is in this growth of gesture in its own right . . . that I see the emergence of a dimension to which language by itself would be unable to do justice, but, in turn, when language is carried along by the rhythm of bodily action that has become autonomous, the most ordinary, everyday speech will regain a power that might still be called poetry, but that I shall be content merely to call functionally effective,"34 In La Grande et la Petite Manoeuvre the transmutation of content into visible, literal outward expression is completely realized. The instrument he had perfected seemed available to Adamov to be used at will. Its only drawback was the narrowness of its field of application; there are relatively few basic human situations that can be expressed in such simple and general terms. Yet while his next play, Le Sens de la Marche (The Direction of the March), contains many of the elements 60 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD and themes of its predecessors, Adamov again succeeded in finding a new expression for his basic preoccupation, while introducing an important new elementio^eajdngjjisprogress in mastering his obsessions. In fZ^Sens ^JSlMS^S^^ ^er0 for the first time refuses to submit, and counterattacks. That action may not be directed against the real author of his troubles, but it is an action nevertheless. The hero, Henri, the son of a tyrannical father, goes through a number of episodes in which he confronts that father figure in a whole series of incarnations: in the commanding officer of the barracks Avhere he goes for his military service, in the leader of a religious sect whose daughter is his fiancee for a time, in the headmaster of a school where he becomes a teacher. He submits to all these, but when he returns to his old home and finds his dead father's sinister masseur installed as the domestic tyrant and lover of his sister, he strangles him. As Adamov has pointed out, the idea from which he started was that "in this life of which the basic circumstances themselves are terrifying, where the same situations fatally recur; all we can_dojs destoy^a_n^tojiJateat thaVwhatwe con^er^mfetake.nly,.lQ, Be the ^al^gbsbicle, buFwnat in fact is merely^^Jast^itemJin a ma^^e|j|j^£^''l&£^&'ll)«r^* Mgmal' idea, and it is fitosf imaginatively realized. Some of the themes of earlier plays recur, such as the revolutionaries, who are again unsuccessful; the hero's inability to love; and the sister figure. Adamov was dissatisfied with he Sens de la Marche and had put it aside for a while When another dream presented him not only with an idea for a play but with an entire,^a]most ready-made, play itself. And this play,| Le Pro^^^Yarat^j became a tu^ngjgofat in Adamov's devBJpjHnenfc The professOTofldieHQeIs* accused of indecent exposure on a beach. He denies the allegation by indignantly pointing out - that he is a distinguished scholar who has even been invited to lecture abroad, in Belgium. But_the more he protests jus^ rmojjeneejjhe more deeply he becomesi uivolved"m~cc^fra^-tijws that nmH"Tjjs^Turrnore proT5aDleT~A~Kay "who comes intcTthe police station seemTto^reSo^n^e him, she addresses him as Professor—but she has taken him for another professor, Menard, whom Tannine superficially resembles. The scene changes to the hotel where he is staying. Again Taranne is Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 61 accused of an offense, that of having left litter in a bathing cabin at the seaside. He protests that he did not undress in a cabin at all—and thus confirms the earlier allegation. The policemen produce a notebook that has been found. Taranne eagerly recognizes it as his, but is unable to read the handwriting. What is more, the notebook consists mostly of empty pages, although Taranne insists that he had used it up entirely. A roll of paper is delivered to the professor—it is the seating plan of the dining room of an ocean liner, with his place marked at the table of honor. Jeanne, a woman relative or secretary, brings a letter that has arrived for the professor. It is from Belgium, from the rector of the University. This will confirm Taranne's claims I But in fact it is an angry refusal to invite him again. His lectures have been found to have been plagiarisms of those of the famous professor Menard. Taranne remains alone. He hangs the seating plan of the liner's dining room on a hook on the wall—it is a perfectly blank piece of paper. Slowly the professor begins to undress, performing the very act of indecent exposure of which he was accused at the beginning. Having been exposed as a fraud, he exposes himself. Jtjsjhjyi^tanan^^ uraJkteJP-esj&bte^ In his dream, which the play transcribes as it was dreamed, without any attempt to "give it a general meaning, to prove anything,"36 everything that happens to Taranne happened to Adamov himself, the only difference being that instead of shouting, "I am Professor Taranne," he exclaimed, "I am the .jmjhnrjjfLa Parodiet"36 Adamov crasiders^te Professeur Taranne of particular importance in his progress as a playwright. In transcribing an actual dream he was, as it were, forced to cross a decisive threshold, For the first time in one of his plays he named an \ actual place, a place existing in the real world. Taranne claims, that he has lectured abroad, in 'Belgium, and he receives a letter that is recognized as coming from that country by its stamp, which bears the Belgian Lion. "This looks like a trifle, but it was, nevertheless, i^^rst time diaiX-emerged from the no man's land of poetrjHmJTn^^ name."37 "~"Xnd indeed for the tormented author of L'Aveu, suffering 62 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD from the sense of loneliness and separation described in that book, it is a tremendous step forward to have established a ^ link, however tenuous, with reality, the reality of the world \ outside his own nightmares, even if at first it appears only in the form of the name of a real country heard within a nightmare. Of course, in L'Aveu itself Adamov had described real scenes from his own life. But there is a vast difference between the deliberate, humiliating exposure of his own suffering (reminiscent of Taranne's indecent exposure) and the ability to deal with the real world in the process of creative imaginative writing, which implies the ability to confront and master a reality outside oneself. ; As Maurice Regnaut has pointed out in a penetrating essay on Adamov,88 Le Professeur Taranne also marks another important stage in Adamov's development. Iri^reingus^ajSjJa. Ijjexpressjbis sense of the fu^te»a^,abjurdjty of life, Adamov flbiad proje"cTearthe~two basically contradicibOT23ffi£u3^3at ^ETtEe enbTaifiountTj^ pairs (. jQfc^^i^^;"tIie employee andK^^rre_ffl^hi^oonvpT^^t mother, the militant and the mutiU, Henri and the revolutionaries. The dream on which Le Professeur Taranne is based showed him, for the first time, the way in which affirmative and self-destructive attitudes can be fi^d,in^smgk-criar|«!to„ simultaneously—in the very act of asserting Ids worth as a citizen, his achievements as a scholar, Taranne reveals these claims to be fraudulent. And it is by no means clear whether the play is meant to show?a fraud unmasked, or an innocent man confronted by a monstrous conspiracy of circumstances engineered to destroy his claims. In fact, as Adamov identifies himself with Taranne, the latter is the more tenable view; after all, in his dream Adamov cried out, "I am the author of La Parodie," which he undoubtedly is, and yet his claim was disproved by a succession of nightmare confrontations. "Of course, if all activity is futile and absurd, feen^J^g^cJ^n to have-WHtteira^a^^ ' final reckoning, a claim jo_no3Sng; death and oblivion wuT Dloroull,'all"acfevemehS? Tnus^in Le Professeur Taranne, the hero isjioth an,,.actiy,e.,^ a respectable citizen anf an'exhibitionist, an optimisfic"hard-working paragon and a self-destructive, slothful pessimist. This opened a Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 63 way for Adamov toward the creation of ambivalent^jhrw-dimensional characters to take the place of schematic expras. sions of clearly defined psychological forces. ' All'am6VwToTe"Le Professeur Taranne in two days in 1951. It had taken him several years to complete his first two plays —a clear indication of how far he had succeeded in mastering his neurosis by harnessing it to a creative effort. After completing Le Sens de la Marche:, the writing of which he had interrupted to put down his nightmare of Le Professeur Taranne, Adamov returned to a subject that had preoccupied him before: the disorder of the times, social upheaval, and persecution. In Tous Contre Tous, we are again in a country that has been flooded by refugees from abroad; they are easily identifiable, because they all limp. The hero, Jean Rist, loses his wife to one of the refugees and becomes a demagogue ranting against them. For a brief moment he is in power, but when the wheel of political fortune turns and the persecutors become the persecuted, he escapes arrest by assuming a limp himself and pretending to be a refugee. He lives in obscurity, upheld by the love of a refugee girl. When there is another upheaval and the refugees are again persecuted, he might perhaps escape death by declaring his true identity. But in confirming that he is the well-known hater of refugees, he would lose the love of the girl. He refuses to do so, and goes to his death. InJeanRist, the persecutor and the victim of persecution, Adamov has again fuseoHwo^pp^ acter^^oj^ta but consecutively, in the ups and dovraislif tEe™paTsale"of"tMe^ foQ^^ffiTlesssuccessfully. The ending, with its self-sacrifice for the sake of love, has been criticized as a lapse into the sentimental heroics of a quite different, romantic convention of drama. This may be unjust: Jean Rist's refusal to save himself might also be interpreted as an act of resignation; of suicide in the face of an absurd, circular destiny. What the play does suffer from (in Adamov's own view) is its failure to come to grips with the reality of the problem it deals with. It is fairly obvious that this is the Jewish problem, or at least the problem of racial persecution. Yet by not situating his characters within a clearly denned social framework at one particular 64 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD moment in history, at one particular point on the map, the author has deprived himself of the opportunity to do justice to the subject; he is unable to provide the background that would explain the rights and wrongs at issue: Why have the refugees taken away the jobs of the inhabitants of the country in question? Are those inhabitants justified in trying to exclude them againP Adamov himself has recognized these flaws. On the one hand, he says, he wanted to show that all sides are equally reprehensible in such a conflict, yet he acknowledges that he has made a larger number of the victims "good'^char-acters, simply because they are made to suffer innocently. But, he adds, "I suffered from the limitation imposed on me by the vagueness of the place, the schematization of the characters, the symbolism of the situations, but I did not feel that I had the force of tackling a social conflict, and to see it as such, detached from the world of archetypes."3* In Le Professeur Taranhe, he had found the courage to let in a glimpse of the real world, if only in a dream. So he decided to return to a world of dreams in two plays with very similar themes: Comme Nous Awns Et4 (As we were, published in the NouveUe Revue Francaise in March, 1953) and Les Re-troumilles (undated, but written circa 1952). Both plays deal With a grown man's regression to childhood, just when he is on the threshold of marriage. In Comme 'Nous Avons Et4, the character A, is having a nap in his room just before setting out to get married. Two women, mother and aunt, enter in search of a little boy who, they believe, must have wandered into the house. A. does not know them, but as the play proceeds he himself gradually turns into the little boy the two women have been looking for. In Les RetrouvaiUes, Edgar is about to leave Montpellier, where he is reading law, to return to his home near the Belgian frontier, when he encounters two ladies, one elderly, the other young, and is persuaded to stay in the house of the elderly woman while becxwning engaged to the younger. He neglects his new fiancee, and she is killed in a train accident. Having finally returned home, he hears that his former fiancee, who had been waiting for him there, has also been killed in a train accident. His mother forces him into a perambulator and pushes him offstage. '' . . S These are dream plays with very obvious psychological im- Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 65 plications; they are both attacks against the mother figure, who is trying to keep the son from establishing an adult relationship with another woman. Adamov has now completely repudiated Comme Nous Avons Eti, to the point of not having given it a place in the edition of his collected plays (although he allowed it to be published in an English translation in 1Q57-40 Les Retroumilles, technically most mtriguing in the way it establishes the dream atmosphere by gradual scene changes and by the reduplication of the two pairs of mother-fiancee characters, has been published in Adamov's collected plays. But in his preface, Adamov rejects the play as a dream that he did not have but merely constructed. Yet he declares, "Lj^R&ttmvafllg&has been most important for me; for, having finished the play, having reread it and examined it well,^ understood that the time hadj^e^lo^pufe^anpendflto^the.ex^-nloitation of the half-dream and the old family contact, Or, to put it in more general terms, 1 think that thanks to Les Retrouvailles I have liquidated all that which, after having made it possible for me to write, now had become a hindrance to m^.writirig.''41 m '" In other words, Adamov had reached a stage where he felt capable of writing a play that, though still an expression of his 1 ^ion,of^ jhe stagejiot j ;With.mere«maaatipM of h^own^ghi b^ijCctoc^l ^existrngjintheK^ from the outside. Tiiis play is Le Ping-Pong, one of the masterpieces^? the Theatre of the Absurd. ^ ^LJjSIS^SSp1^8611*8 tf>e life story of two men—Victor, a medical student when the play starts, and Arthur, an art student. They meet at Mme. Duranty's cafe and play the pin-ball machine installed there. The machine fascinates them as a business proposition, for they observe the employee of the company coming to collect the coins that have been dropped into it; as a technical problem, for it has flaws that could surely be eliminated; and even as a challenge to their poetic instinct -rthe machine has a poetry of its own, flashing fights, and is in some ways a work of art. Victor and Arthur suggest an improvement in the machine. They penetrate to the headquarters of the consortium that controls it, and gradually the machmeJ)e^m_es«the*donim^ ,66 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD trolling their dreams and (heir emotions. If they fall in love, it is with the girl who works at the headquarters of the consortium. If they have quarrels between themselves, they are about that girl and the machine. If they fear anyone, it is the boss of the consortium. Their interest in the society around them is dictated by the relevance of political and social developments to the rise or fall of pinball machines. And so they grow old. In the last scene we see them as two . old men, playlag^r^^ asjheirjita^ Victor^cdl-~Ta^efranames. Arffiur remains alone; L^Ping-?mg,. like Adamov's first play, La Parodie, is .concerned with the futility of^iiTnan.J<«»deWCT^- But while La Parodie merely asserted^Sat"whatever you do, in the end you die, Le Ping-Pong provides a powerful and closely integrated argument to back that proposition—it also shows hotcso much of human endeavor becomes futile, and wKtrTt~is in losing themselves to a thing, a machine that promise's them power, money, influence over the woman they desire, tl^t.Victor and^, Arthm^a^tejhe^ making a machine, a means to an end, and end in itself, they pervert all those values of their lives that are genuine ends in themselves—their creative instinct, their capacity to love, their sense of being part of a community. Le Ping-Pong is a pjjw^riul jmaj*e_ofjhe alienation of man through the worshjpjofjjjalse o^ectiye^ tEe" deification of a machine, anlfiTbrtion, or an ideology. -vf The pinball machine in Le Ping-Pong is more than just a machine; it is the centerpiece of an organization and of a body of thought. The moment the objective—the improvement of pinball machines—becomes an ideal, it embodies itself in an organization with its own struggles for power, its own intrigues and politics, its own tactics and strategies. As such it becomes a matter of life and death for all who serve the ideal. A number of the characters in the play are destroyed in the service of the organization, or m its internal struggle for power. All this is conducted with the utmost fervor, seriousness, and intensity. And what is it all about? A childish game, a pinball machine-nothing. But are most of the objectives men devote their lives», to in the real world-the world of business, politics, the arts, or Arthur Adamov; The Curable and the Incurable, 67 scholarship—essentially different from Arthurs and Victor's dominating obsession? It is the power and beauty of Le Ping-Pong that it very graphically raises this very question. Adamov achieves the difficult feat of elevating the^pjnball machine to a convincmg nnae. ^Hl'*a6'es so by the poetic intensity with which he invests his characters when they talk about the most absurd aspects of that absurd apparatus with a conviction and obsessive concentration that sound utterly true. The play contains the elements of reality and fantasy in exactly the right dosage; time and place are sufficiently real to carry conviction, yet the world in which the action takes place is hermetically sealed off from anything outside the characters' field of preoccupation. This is not because of a lack of realism on the part of the playwright; it springs directly from the obsession of the characters, which effectively confines them in so narrow a segment of the real world that we see the world through their confined field of vision. ^uals. T^lor^ermerely compelled by forces outside their control, or moving through the action like sonrnambuHsts,J5Jiej£-Jjaye„ian\.ejbment^of freedom in detepoirnngwthefcJiKesjsrwe actually watch ArtKm**!^ devote themselves to pinball machines^ Mo! altliough Victor is the more practical of the two, and Arthur a poet, they are Mo. longer menfr,j^on^^ What is perhaps the most original feature of Le Ping-Pong is the way in which an inner contradiction, a dialectical re-lationship, is established beftHMqjfl^^^ This is a play that may well appear completely meaningless if it is merely read. The speeches about improvements in the construction of pinball machines may seem trivial nonsense; the meaning of the play emerges precisely at the moment when the actor, delivers these nonsensical lines with a depth of conviction worthy of the loftiest flights of poetry. It is a play that has to be actecLag^n^the text xafher Jkbm wjferl. This is a technique analogous to the indirect dialogue Adamov thought he had invented for L'lnvoston and later discovered in Chekhov, but it is here raised to quite a different 68 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD level. Chekhov used indirect dialogue in situations where the characters are too shy to express their real thoughts and hide their emotions behind trivial subjects. Here the characters believe in absurd propositions, with such intensity that they put forward their nonsensical ideas with the fervor of prophetic vision. In Chekhov, real feelings are suppressed behind meaningless politeness, in Le Pins-Pong absurd ideas are proclaimed as. it they, were eternal hTitiiS- Adamov has given an interesting account of the genesis of Le Ping-Pong. He started with the final scene of the twofold men playing ping-pong before he had even decided what the subject of the rest of the play would be. All he knew was ;that he wanted once more to show how, in the end, all human endeavor comes down to the same futility—senile whiling away of the remaining time before death reduces everything to final absurdity. But, Adamov says, "this peculiar method of work, paradoxically enough, saved me. Once I was sure that, as usual, I should be able to show the identity of all human destiny ... I found myself free to make the characters act, to create situations. . . ."** Once he had decided to put ^p-, ^illjTjaghme into the center of the action, moreover, he was compelled "'gpgfafr.jhjp, time (the present) and.Jhe^bce (a city very much like Paris) of the action. " Nevertheless Le Ping-Pong belongs in the category of the Theatre of the Absurd; it.shows man engaged in purposeless exertions, in a futile frenzy of, .activity that is bound to end in senility and death. Jjhe pinbdi rnachme jiasj^_tha.fascmating., „£SHgm^^^ bjjsjnesSj but it may equally well stand.for any religions.ror jpolitical ideology that secretes its own organizatiorHraci apparatus of power, that demands devotion and loyalty from its adherents, Y^t-wMe he was working onjhej^yjSAdjmmy^^ away from tneSea "of"a" tfieate^d^hjng witn~"sucH^^^^al hum^'pffistil^r'^te^f^^fHcized Le Pmg^Pong on two counts—UiV1ast*s5ene, which, having been written before the rest of the play, as it were, prejudged the issue and cramped his style; and, second, the schematic nature, of the consortium, which remains, "incompletely detached from allegory. In fact, the social developments that, in the course of years, Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 69 modify the internal organization of the consortium are not really indicated, so that one does not sufficiently feel the state of society on the one hand, the flow of time on the other. If I had gone so far as to tackle the 'coin-operated machine,' I had to examine the wheels of the great social machine with the same thoroughness that I examined the bumpers and flippers of the pinball machine. This is the examination I am trying to carry out in a new play, even more clearly situated in a specific time and milieu than Le Ping-Pong."is This play, which Adamov was working on at the beginning of 1955, when he wrote his mtrqduction to the second volume of his collected plays, was ^^^oP^^ completed the next year and performed by Roger Planchon's brilliant young company at Lyon on May 17, 1957. It marks Adamov's abandonment of I the Theafre of tiieoAb^ma^and his adherence to another,! equally significant movement of the modern stage—theJBrecht-jaoj^epic theatre." He now regards Brecht as the greatest of contemporary^faywrights and puts him next to Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Buechner among the dramatists of world literature he admires most. Having freed himself from compulsions and obsessions, he felt at liberty to follow models outside his own experience. (He had previously translated and adapted works by Buechner and Chekhov.) Paolo Paoli is an epic drama depicting the.soeial(.andKpohti- ^^y*1***^^"1'^**^^ . cr- amming the relationship between a society based onproStand" ""™J°i^^^traG^^ The play spans the period from 1900 to 1914. Each of the twelve scenes is preceded by a survey of the Social background of its period-quotations from the newspapers of the time are projected onto a screen, accompanied by current popular tunes. The charactei^arBjMrt ^ wESTe microcosm of tfaejgoljticjd,^^ "lolncelHrfvo^^ of the First.World War. Adamov's Brilliance as a dramatist is shown by the astonishing ingenuity with which he has condensed all this—and extremely convincingly—into a cast of only seven characters. Paolo Paoli is a dealer in rare butterflies; Floreht Hulot-Vasseur, a collector of rare butterflies and Paolo's costumer, is an importer and manufacturer of ostrich feathers. He also be- 70 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD comes the lover of Paolo's German-bom wife, Stella. An abbé and a captain's, wife represent clericalism and chauvinist nationalism. A worker and trade unionist, Bobert Marpeaux, and his young wife, Rose, complete the cast. The role played by pinball machines in he Ping-Pong is in Paolo Paoli taken by commodities no less absurd—butterflies and ostrich feathers. Yet these objects of trade and manufacture have far greater reality. As one of the newspaper projections before the first scene points out, ostrich feathers and products manufactured from them formed France's fourth largest export in igoo. Adamov brilliantly shows the far-reaching social and political ramifications and implications off the trade in these absurd articles; Paolo's business is founded on the fact that his father, a small Corsican civil servant, served in the public-works department on Devil's Island. This enabled the young man to organize the convicts there as part-time and ill-paid butterfly hunters, Marpeaux, the young workman who was serving a sentence for a petty theft, has escaped to the mainland and the swamps of Venezuela; he is wholly at Paolo's mercy, depending on the butterflies he catches for his livelihood. When troubles break out in China, butterfly hunting becomes more difficult there and the price of rare Chinese specimens goes up. The abbé, whose brother is a missionary in ', China, is able to provide Paolo with these precious goods. And so, in a few strokes, Adamov has shown the .connection " between the seemmgly absurd.object of trade and the .penal j *Sysťem"of French society, .foreign politics^ änä the' workings 'ÔY~tHe' church. The same is true of Hulot^Vasseur's ostrich 1 feathers in relation to the Boer War, and, as the plot develops, the labor and trade-union troubles of his factory and his fight against German competition are very convincingly made ex- I plicit within the narrow circle of the play. • As in Ts Ping-Pong, the characters are obsessed withfrefc. | í pursuit of money and power, represented by the absujd com- j 'modflieVthey deaLin. Paolo grows rich, for a tune at least, 'by becoming a manufacturer of koickknacks made from butterflies' wings—ashtrays, tea trays, even religious pictures, '< which flourish in a period of clericalism and slump when 1 clericalism fades and German competition raises its ugly head. ^ He loses his wife when he sets her up as a milliner, which Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable 71 makes her dependent for her supplies of ostrich feathers on Hulot-Vasseur, whose mistress she becomes. Stella, the German-bom woman, also embodies the absurdities of European nationalism; she leaves France at the nlTSrr£^Ttne*anB-éér-man feeling over Morocco, because people hate her as a German, and returns on the eve of the 1914 war, when her German neighbors persecute her as the wife of a Frenchman. The only characters free of these obsessions are Marpeaux and his wife, Rose (though she for a time becomes Paolo's mistress). When Marpeaux returns, illegally, from Venezuela, Paolo suggests that he should spend the time till his pardon is granted by going to Morocco to hunt butterflies. (The crisis over Morocco has driven the prices up.) Of course, Morocco has become very, .dangerous; the. French are fighting the natives. And here lies the moral of the play—the commodity that seems the object of trade is absurd, mere butterflies, but the j comnMdifj^hai^^ \ hedt^and.gafety^ The ultimate! ofiject of trade ■ is man, who himself becomes a commodity. 1 (This is also the point of Adamóv's very effective dramatization of Gogol's novel Dead Souls.) Moreover the commodities are being bought and sold in deadly earnest; trade leads to war. Marpeaux, the victim of the social system, realizes what is| at stake. After he has received his pardon (at a time when war between France and Germany seemed imminent over Morocco, and volunteers Could gain amnesty), he returns to France and joins the Socialists. Working in Hulot-Vasseur's factory, he opposes the "yellow" Catholic unions managed by the abbé, and also distributes pacifist pamphlets to the soldiers in their barracks. To get rid of him, the abbé denounces him for subverting the fighting forces. As the first troops march off to war, Rose tells Paolo that Marpeaux has been arrested, and this leads to a somewhat unconvincing change of heart in Paolo, who, in the closing speech of the play, vows that henceforth he will use his money to help the hungry and needy, rather than let it circulate in the endless, iniquitous cycle of exchange, the buying and selling of useless commodities. Paolo Paoli is a political play, brilliantly constructed and" | executed as drama, not very original as a political argument^ (Paolo's last speech certainly makes little sense even in terms 7_ THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD of Marxist economics: Money spent on food for the victims of Right Wing persecution is by no means effectively withdrawn from the cycle of capitalist exchange.) Nevertheless, as a tour de force the play shows Adamov as the sovereign master of his material, handling it with remarkable powers of invention, construction, and compression. The question arises—does this piece of powerfully constructed didactic special pleading equal the haunting, dreamlike poetry of far less cleverly structured plays like La Tarodie, La Grande et la Petite Manoeuvre or Le Professeur Tarafine? 4s.,the highly explicit social framework of Paolo Paoli, for alLjhe.vntaosity with which it is handled, equal in depth,, tor even in its power to convince, to the vaguer, more general, but therefore all-embracing images of Le Ping-Fong? There can be no dc_bt'that^jVd^p^|hf. development - from La Parodie to Paolo Paoli represents a gradual -liberation, s^and^^e^^eisgn^^M^i&U- In the whole history of literature it will be difficult to find a more triumphant example of me ijeakng^pow^r^f. AeK is fascinating to watch the gradual breaking down of the barriers that keep the writer of this series of plays from dealing with the realities of everyday life; to watch him gain the confidence that he needs to turn the nightmares that mastered him into mere material that he can mold and master. His early _piays are, jtsj^were, emanations of his subconscious mind, projectedonto the ^tageTas. *si'_J_|..^flS0f!_!!^,-» &-J£&s£yJ£^ ^ISfefi^k.00^0' Pooli's consciously planned and vpti_I__jy.C.?r' trolled. Yet it might be argued that this gain in rationality and conscious control represents a loss of the fine frenzy, the haunting power of jiempsis that gajKeJ-^^axherjolays their ^E^SM^^Ss£j^!^- What is more, ^y^cpne^^ing^ his attack on the political and social front, Adamov has nar- f If in La Grande et la Petite Manoeuvre it was the revolution-i aries' futile struggle that represented the small maneuver, and the all-enveloping absurdity of the human condition dwarfing the social struggle that stood for the big maneuver, then in ( Paolo Paoli the small maneuver looms large and the large ma- Arthur Adamov: The Curable and the Incurable v 73 neuver has receded into a barely perceptible background. "We all know," says the revolutionary leader in the earlier play, " "that death surrounds us. But if we do not have the courage to detach ourselves from that idea, we shall retreat from the demands of the future, and all our sacrifices will have been in . vain."44 This is the argument that Paolo Paoli represents. In the earlier play, Adamov had supplied his own bitterly ironical comment on it: at the very moment when the revolutionary leader speaks these defiant words, his voice becomes lower, the pace of his delivery slows down, and he collapses. Adamov is far too acute a thinker' to be unaware of the implications of his later position. Having in his earlier phase concentrated on the absurdity of the human condition, he now < maintains that "the theatre must show, simultaneously butY well-differentiated, both the curable and the.incurable aspect y of things. The incurable aspect, we all know, is that ot the inevitabifity of death. The curable aspect is the social one."45*' It is precisely because it does succeed in maintaining the extremely deficatejjdance^be^eeji^ the incurable and the "He'regarded as Adamov's finest achievement to date. The pin-ball machine stands for all illusory objectives, material and ideological, the pursuit of which secretes ambition, self-seeking, and the urge to dominate other human beings. There is no necessity to fall victim,to such illusory aims, so there is a social ljMsonjnjhepjajj. Aj^veMhe^sjKi^ in the face of death is never quite forgotten, and is finally put before our eyes by a telling and compelling image. Paolo Faoh, on the other hand, is marred not only by the intrusion of oversimplified economic and social theories but, above all, by the introduction of a wholly positive and therefore less than human character, Marpeaux, and by the even less credible conversion of a hitherto negative character, Paolo, to provide a climax and a solution. This npjbi&jcharaeter and jii^^noble^aciipp are clearly the consequence of the author's special pleading for the curable aspect of things, which leads to an miderplaying of jggTj^J-^^gjcif^f^^ThBiyn.farjfTT*.-*iT-*1 -f^W-l'lOT- Marpeaux's efforts in the last resort, are as futile as those of the employee in La Parodie—he is arrested and the war breaks out in spite of him. Yet the author has to make this into a noble failure, 74 , THE THEATRE OF THE. ABSURD owing to the special wickedness of individual enemies, or of social conditions, at a given period of history. And that is the point at which the pathetic fallacy enters a politically biased theatre. Brecht, who was well aware of this danger, avoided similar pitfalls by foregoing all positive characters in some of his more successful plays (Mother Courage, Galileo), so that the positive message might emerge by inference rather than by concrete demonstration—but with the result that the effect on the audience tends to be one of a negative theatre that concentrates.on the incurable aspect of things. In some respects, Paolo Paoli contains an important promise —it shows the way in which some of the elements of the Theatre of the Absurd can be combined With those of the conventional well-made play to produce a very fruitful fusion of two different traditions. In the simplicity of its construction, the boldness of its characterization, the use of butterflies and ostrich feathers as symbols that are at the same time perfectly valid in the world of economic realities, Paolo Paoli may contato,Js£me_,u^,eful lesso^ theatre combining elements of both the ■dtc^c^ifno-style aSct 3ieTheWe of lrJBJe™ATsurBr™^"~™r" ""™"~ Nor is Adamov s rejection of a nonrealistic style as complete as it might appear. It is surely significant that in the fall of 1958, when he felt himself called upon to take an active part in the campaign against the new Gaullist constitution, ■Adamov found it easier to resort to allegorical techniques than to make his point in the forrnro£ realistic didactic drama. Of the three short pieces he contributed to the volume The"dire de Societe, two are allegorical and only one is realistic—and an acknowledged failure. The most ambitious of these three sketches, Intimity, uses personified collective concepts rather like those we find in medieval mystery plays—de Gaulle is caricatured as The Cause Incarnate, the Socialists as the Cause's servile and stupid lackey, the young blood among the Algerian colbns as a bullying ruffian labeled The Elite. The Cause Incarnate is protected by a bodyguard of brutal strong-arm men; they are called The Effects of the Cause. In the short monologue La Complainte du Ridicule, the personification of ridicule la- *, I ments the sad fact that it seems to have lost the power to kill Arthur Adamov; The Curable and the Incurable 75 v it possessed in former, happier, times in France. Both these playlets, although clearly ephemeral pieces d'occasion, are successful as robust topical satire. The third, Je Ne Suis Pas Frahgais, fails even on this level; it shows the way French parachutists in Algiers were reported to have coerced the Moslem population into demonstrating for France in May, 1958, but remains unconvincing in spite, or because, of its documentary technique. The political purpose is so obvious that the more realistically the subject is presented, the more it seems to lose the effect of reality. Realism and fantasy are also combined in the radio play En Fiacre {1959), by the device of presenting a real, historically authenticated event involving characters who are demented-three old ladies who, having lost the house they lived in, spend the night in horse-drawn cabs they hire to drive around and around the streets of old-time Paris. The incident, presented as based on the casebook of a psychiatrist, and as having actually happened in February, 1902, might well have sprung from the dream world of one of Adamov's early plays. One of the three sisters is killed when she falls out of the moving cab. Has she been pushed out by the other two? And why have these three old women become homeless wanderers in the night? It appears that they learned only after their father died that the house they lived in had been the headquarters of a chain of brothels. There is also a suggestion that the dead sister, the youngest of the three, might have been in on the secret, that she might have been involved in what went on in those brothels, that she had a lover, that she was in the habit of occasionally paying the cabdrivers for those nightly journeys in currency other than mere money. But then all this may be the outcome of the fantasies of insane old women. En Fiacre is strictiy documentary, but, in the nature of a scientific casebook, it does not seek to explain too much; it merely sets down what has been reported, leaving the motives of the action as unexplained as the solution. And while the treatment is naturalistic, the theme is madness, fantasies, dreams, irrational fears, and jealousies. The streets of Paris at night, pitiful victims of neurosis exposed to the insults of cabdrivers-this is a world not too far removed from that of L'Aveu. In hjs^^jj^si.JLe^Btk^^^j,x. >■ a vast can- THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD ofthespulj Like one of his own characters, he is the embodi- j "SentoTtwo conflicting tendencies coexisting within the same | person. Only posterity will be able to tell which of the two was more valuable, which will have the more lasting effect. Chapter Three EUGENE IONESCO: THEATRE AND ANTI-THEATRE The development of Arthur Adamov clearly poses the alternative between the theatre as an instrument for the expression of the individual's obsessions, nightmares, and anxiety, and the theatre as an mstrument of political ideology and collective social action. Adamov has given his own emphatic answer to the question. Eugene Ionesco, who started from the"1 same premises as Adamov and initially developed along parallel lines, has equally emphatically reached the opposite conclusions. And Ionesco, however obscure and enigmatic he might appear in his plays, has shown that he can be highly lucid and brilliandy persuasive in expounding his ideas when he is provoked to defend himself by attacks, such as the one Kenneth. Tynan, the dramatic critic of the London Observer, launched against him in the summer of 1958. In reviewing a revival of The Chairs and The Lesson at the Royal Court, Tynan warned his readers of the danger that Ionesco might become the messiah of the enemies of realism in the theatre. "Here at last was a self-proclaimed advocate of anti-thSdtre: explicitly anti-realist and -by implication anti-reality as well. Here was a writer ready to declare that words were meaningless and that all communication between human beings was impossible." Tynan conceded that Ionesco presented a valid personal vision, but "the peril arises when it is held up for general emulation as the gateway to the theatre of the future, that bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief in man will forever be banished." Ionesco was moving away from realism, with "characters and events [that] have traceable roots in life"—from plays such as those of Gorki; J So THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Chekhov, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Brecht, O'Casey, Osborne, and-Sartre.1 Tynan's ^attack opened one of the most mterestingjdiscus-sions on this subject ever conducted in public. Ionesco replied that he certainly did; not see himself as a messiah, "because I do not like messiahs and I certainly do not consider the vocation of the artist or the playwright to lie in that direction. I have a distinct impression that it is Mr. Tynan who is in search of messiahs. But to deliver a message to the world, to wish to direct its course, to save it, is the business of the founders of religions, of the moralists or the politicians. . . . A playwright simply writes plays, in which he can offer only a testimony, not a didactic message. . . . Any work of art which was ideological and nothing else would be pointless . . . inferior to the doctrine it claimed to illustrate, which would already have been expressed in its proper language, that of discursive demonstration. An ideological play can be no more than the ^vulgarization of an ideology. . . ."2 f Ionesco protested against the imputation that he was a de-1 liberate anti-realist, that he maintained the impossibility of J communication by language. "The very fact of writing and \.presenting plays is surely incompatible with such a view. I simply hold that it is difficult to make oneself understood, not absolutely impossible."3 After a dig at Sartre (as the author of political melodramas), Osborne, Miller, Brecht, et al., as "auteurs du boulevard—representatives of a Left Wing con-formism which is just as lamentable as the Right Wing sort," [ Ionesco stated his conviction that society itself formed one of I the barriers between human beings, that the authentic com-' munity of man is wider than society. "No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political, system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute; it is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa." Hence the need to break down the language of society, which "is nothing but cliches, empty formulas and slogans." That is why the ideologies with-their fossilized language must be continually re-examined and "their ,coiigealed language . . . relentlessly split apart in order te» find the living sap beneath." Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 81 .:" v To discover the fundamental problem common to all ;,. • mankind, I must ask myself what my fundamental problem . ; is, what my most ineradicable fear is. I am certain then to find the problems and fears of literally everyone. That is the .1 true road into my own darkness, our darkness, which I try to bring to the light of day. . . ^Twork of art is the ex-"* i i pression of an incommunicable reality that one tries to com-I municate—and which sometimes can be communicated.^ That is its paradox and its truth.4 ;. , lonesco's article provoked a wide and varied response—a clear indication that both he and Tynan had touched on a vital issue. There were those who congratulated Ionesco on having ''■ written "one of the most brilliant refutations of the current theory of 'social realism,'" but added, "If only M. Ionesco j were able to put some of its clarity and wisdom into his own plays, he might yet become a great playwright!" (H. F. Gar-. ten, the critic and expert on modern German drama), as well as those who agreed with Kenneth Tynan that a repudiation of politics in itself amounted to a political ideology (John .j Berger, the Marxist art critic), George Devine, the artistic di-1 rector of the Royal Court Theatre, supported Ionesco, but insisted that Arthur Miller, John Osborne, and Brecht were by , no means exclusively concerned with social purposes: "The }.■■ framework of these plays is consciously social but the core of them is human," while Philip Toynbee pointed out that he considered Ionesco frivolous and thought Arthur Miller a greater dramatist anyway. In the same issue of The Observer, Tynan himself took up lonesco's challenge. His argument hinged on lonesco's contention that artistic expression could be independent of, and in some ways superior to, ideologies and the needs of the "real 1. world." "Art and ideology often interact on each other, but the ' plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both , draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself, ... They are brothers, not child and parent." lonesco's emphasis on introspection, the exploration of his private anxieties, Tynan ^ argued, opened the door to subjectivisjn, which would make objective value judgment, and thus criticism of such plays, impossible. "Whether M, Ionesco admits it or not, every play g2 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD worth serious consideration is a statement. It is a statement addressed in the first person singular to the first person plural, and the latter must retain the right to dissent. ... . . If a man tens me something I believe to be an untruth, am I forbidden to do more than congratulate him on the brilliance of his lying?"5 • The controversy raged on in the pages of the next issue of The Observer-with distinguished contributions from Orson Welles (mainly on the role of the critic and critical standards), Lindsay Anderson, the young dramatist Keith Johnstone,1" and others.-Ionesco's own second riposte, however, was not published. It has since appeared in Cahiers des Salsons? In it, lonesco tackles the real issue behind the controversy-the problem of form and content. "Mr. Tynan reproaches me with letting myself be seduced I by the means of expressing 'objective reality" (Yet what is ob-j jective reality? That is another question) to such an extent thai ' I forget the objective reality for the sake of the means of expression. . . . In other words, I think that I am accused of formalism." But, lonesco maintains, the history of art, of literature, is essentially the history of modes of expression. "To approach the problem of literature through the study of its ways of expression (which is what the critic ought to do, in my opinion) amounts to approaching its basis, to fathom its essence." Thus Ionesco's Own attack against fossilized formsoj language, which is itself an attempt at revitalizing dead forms, appears to him to be as deeply concerned with objective real; ity as any social realism. "To renew the language is to renew, the conception, the vision of the world. Revolution consists in bringing about a change in mental attitudes." As all really creative artistic expression is an attempt at saying new things in a new way, it cannot, by definition, merely serve for the restatement of existing ideologies. .Form, and structure, which must obey their own internal laws of consistency and cohesion, are as important as conceptual content "I do not believe that there is a contradiction between creative and cognitive activity, for the structures of the mind probably reflect universal structures." A temple or a cathedral, although not representational, re, veals the fundamental laws of structure, and its value as a Eugene lonesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 83 work of art lies in this, rather than in its utilitarian purpose. Formal experiment in art thus becomes an exploration of real-: ity more valid and more useful (because it serves to enlarge man's understanding of the real world) than shallow works that are immediately comprehensible to the masses. Since the be-\ ginning of our century there has been a great upsurge of such 1 , creative exploration, which has transformed our understanding J of the world, particularly in music and. painting. "In literature, l and above all in the theatre, this movement seems to have < come to a stop since, perhaps, 1925. I should like to be able to hope being considered one of the modest craftsmen who have taken it up again. I have, for example, tried to exteriorize the anxiety ... of my characters through objects; to make the stage settings speak; to translate the action into Visual terms; to project visible images of fear, regret; remorse, alienation; to play with words. ... I have thus tried to extend the language of the theatre. ... Is this to be condemned?" Formal experiment, lonesco argues, is more closely concerned with reality than social realism as it was displayed at an exhibition of Soviet painting lonesco visited. The dull representational pictures of.the Soviet artists were liked by the local capitalist Philistines and, what is more, "the social-realist painters were formalists and academic precisely because they had paid insufficient attention to the formal means of expression and had thus been unable to achieve any depth." In the paintings of an artist like Masson, on the other hand, there was both truth and life: Because Masson, the craftsman, had left/human reality : alone, because he had not tried to capture it, tlnhldng only of the act of painting, human reality and its tragic elements had revealed themselves, for that very reason, rightly, freely. Thus what Mr. Tynan calls anti-reality had become real, something incommunicable had communicated itself, and there too, behind the apparent repudiation of all human, concrete, and moral reality, its living heart had been hidden all the time, while on the other side, that of the anti-formalists, there had been only dried-up forms—empty, dead. The heart is not worn on the sleeve.'1' The Ionesoo-Tynan controversy, brilliantly conducted on 84 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD P both sides, shows that Eugene|Ionesco is by no means merely the author of hilarious nonsense plays, as he is so often represented in the press, but a serious artist dedicated to the arduous exploration of the realities of the human situation, fully aware of the task that he has undertaken, and equipped with formidable intellectual powers^ * Ionesco was born in Slatina, Rumania, on November 26, 1912. His mother, whose maiden name was Therese Icar<|); was French, and shortly after he was born, his parents went to live in Paris. French is his first language—he had to acquire most of his Rumanian after his return to Rumania at the age of thirteen. His first impressions and memories are of Paris; When I was a child I lived near the Square de Vaugirard. I remember—it was so long agol—the badly lit street on an autumn or winter evening. My mother held me by the hand; I was afraid, as children are afraid; we were out shopping for the evening meal. On the sidewalks sombre silhouettes in agitated movement, people in a hurry—phantomlike, hallucinatory shadows. When that image of that street comes to life again in my memory, when I think that almost all those people are now dead, everything seems a shadow, evanescence. I am seized by a vertigo of anxiety. ., .8 j Evanescence, anxiety—and the theatre: ' !' ... my mother coulcTnot tear me away from the Punch and Judy show at the Luxembourg Gardens. I stayed there, I could stay there, enrapt, for whole days. The spectacle of the Punch and Judy show held me there, as if stupefied, j through the sight of these puppets that talked, moved, dubbed each other. It was the spectacle of the world itself, which, unusual, improbable, but truer than truth, presented itself to me in an mfinitely simplified and caricatured form, as if to underline its grotesque and brutal truth.... . ■ After a few years at school, the local icole communale in Paris, the boy developed anemia and wasjej^o^f^ecoun^. He has described how he arrived, before he had reacrieTth^ age of nine, together with his sister, who was a year younger, Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 85 When he revisited the village of La Chapelle-Anthenaise on the eve of war, in 1939, Ionesco recalled fragments of memories of playing "theatre" there with other children, of his experiences in the village school and with fellow boarders at the farm, of nightmares and strange apparitions Tike figures out of Brueghel or Bosch—large noses, distorted bodies, horrible Smiles, clubfooted. Later, back in Rumania, I was still childish enough to have such nightmares. But now the phantoms of my anxiety had a different appearance—they were two-dimensional,, sad rather than hideous, with enormous eyes. One is led to believe that there are both Gothic and Byzantine hallucinations."11 He has recalled how at that' time he dreamed of becoming ' a saint but, reading the religious books available in the village, he learned that it is wrong to seek after glory. So he abandoned the idea of sainthood. Shortly afterward, he read the lives of Turenne and Conde and decided to become a great warrior. At the age of thirteen, back m Paris, he wrote his first play, a patriotic drama. The family returned to Rumania; Ionesco encountered a rawer, more brutal world: "Shortly after my arrival in my second homeland, I saw a man, still young, big and strong, attack an old man with his fists and kicking him with his boots. ... I haveno other images ofjthe worldexcegt.thoseof eya^ JS^SS^JSSJ^S^t&^SSS^. anoTrJS|e^Wlhmgness or hideous, useless hatred. Everything I have smc»^xperience3 nas merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood; vain and sordid fury, cries suddenly stifled by silence, shadows engulfed forever in the night. . : ."ls In Rumania, Ionesco went through school and became a student of French at the University of Bucharest. He wrote his at the village of La Chapelle-Anthenaise, where they were to board with farmers. The falling light; my tiredness; the mysterious light of the countryside; the imaginary vision of the long dark corridors of "the castle" [which he took the steeple of the local church to be]; and then the thought that I was about to leave my mother. I could no longer resist. ... I flung myself, crying, against my mother's skirts..10 86 the theatre of the absurd first poems, elegies influenced by Maeterlinck and Francis Jammes. He also ventured into the realm of literary criticism, publishing a withering attack oh three then fashionable and leading Rumanian writers—the poets Tudor Arghezi and Ion Barbu and the novelist Camil Petresco—accusing them of narrow provincialism and lack of originality. But a few days later he published a second pamphlet, praising the same authors to die skies as great and universally valid figures of Rumanian national literature. Finally he presented the two essays side by side, under the title Nol, to prove the possibility of holding opposite views on the same subject, and the identity of contraries. ■ ' ._ ■ Having finished his studies, lonesco became a teacher of French at a Bucharest ^c^e. In 1936 he married Rodica Burileano, a petite woman with an exotic cast of features not uncommon in Eastern Europe, whose Oriental beauty has given rise to the wholly unwarranted rumor that lonesco's wife is Chinese. In 1938, lonesco obtained a governmeiitj^iyo enable him to go to Franco to underrate reseatfbr'athesis he planned on "the themes of sin and death in French poetry since Baudelaire." He went back to France but is reputed, never to have written a single line of this great work. In the spring of 1939 he revisited La Chapelle-Anthenaise, searching for his childhood, putting down his memories in his diary. "I am writing, writing, writing. All my life I have been writing; I have never been able to do anything else.13 . , . To whom can all this be of interest? Is my sadness, my despair communicable? It cannot have significance for anyone. No one knows me. I am nobody. If I were a writer, a public figure, it might assume some interest perhaps. And yet I am like all the others. Anyone can recognize himself in me."14 At the outbreak of war lonesco was at Marseille. Later he returned to Paris, and worked in the production department of a publishing house. His daughter Marie-France was born in 1944. WJ^j^jg^Bfi^e^ lonesco was almost tlnrty-thiee^ _ There was nothing to indicate that he was soon to become a famous dramatist. In fact, he disliked the theatre intensely: "I read fiction, essays, I went to the cinema with pleasure. I listened to music from time to time, I visited art galleries, but I hardly ever went to the theatre."16 Eugene lonesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 87 Why did he dislike the theatre? He had loved it as a boy, but he had begun to dislike it ever since, "having acquired a critical sense, I became aware of the strings, the crude strings of the theatre." The acting of the cast embarrassed him, heiv f^^bj^yasgflfli-f^-n^ft, qgfamrs., "Going to the theatre to me meant going to see people, apparently serious people, making a spectacle of themselves." And yet lonesco liked fiction, he was even convinced that the truth of fiction is superior to that of reality. Nor did he dislike acting in the cinema. But in the theatre "it was the presence on the stage of flesh-and-blood people that embarrassed me. TJreirjnate^ the fiction. I was confronted, as it were, by two planes of real-ity—the concrete, material, impoverished, empty, limited reality of these living, everyday human beings, moving about and talking on the stage, and the reality of the imagination, the two face to face and not comciding, unable to be brought into relation with each other; two antagonistic worlds incapable of being unified, of merging."18 In spite of his dislike of the theatre, lonesco wrote a play, almost against his will. This is how it happened: Inj.0^8, he decided that he ought to Ieam English. And so he acquired an English course. Learned research, published in the august pages of the Corners du College de Pataphysique, has since, by close textual analysis, established that the text in question was L'Anglais Sans Peine, of the AssimU method.17 lonesco himself has described what happened next: I set to work. Conscientiously I copied whole sentences from my primer with the purpose of memorizing them. Rereading them attentively, I learned not English but some astonishing truths—that, for example, there are seven days in the week, something I already knew; that the floor is down, the ceiling up, things I already knew as well, perhaps, but that I had never seriously thought about or had forgotten, and that seemed to me, suddenly, as stupefying as they were indisputably true.18 As the lessons became more complex, two characters were introduced, Mr. and Mrs. Smith: To my astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband 88 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, that they, had a servant, Mary—English, like themselves. ... I should like to point out the irrefutable, perfectly axiomatic character of Mrs. Smith's assertions, as well as the entirely Cartesian manner of the author of my English primer; for what was truly remarkable about it was its eminently methodical procedure in its quest for truth. In the fifth lesson, the Smiths' friends the Martins arrive; the four of them begin to chat and, starting from basic axioms,' Jhey build more complex truths; "The country is quieter than the big city. . . ."lfl Here was a comic situation, already in dialogue form: two jnarried couples solemnly informing each other of things that must have been obvious to all of them all along. But then "a strange phenomenon took place. I don't know how—the text began imperceptibly to change before my eyes, and in spite of me. The very simple, luminously dear statements I had copied diligently into my. . . notebook, left to themselves, fermented after a while, lost their original identity, expanded and ^overflowed."- The cliches and truisms of the conversation primer, which had once made sense although they had now become empty and fossilized, gave way to pseudo-clicbis and pseudo-truisms; these disintegrated into wild caricature and parody, and in the end language itself'disintegrated into disjointed fragments of words. While writing the play (for it had become a. kind of play or anti-play; that is, a parody of a play, a comedy of comedy) I felt sick, dizzy," nauseated. I had to interrupt my work from time to time and, wondering all the while what demon was prodding nie on, lie down on my couch for fear of seeing my work sink into nothingness, and me with it2<>- * That is how Ionesco's first play came into being. At first he wanted to call it L'Anglais Sans feme, later L'Heure Anglaise, but in the end it was called La Canta^riceChauve—The Bald Soprano. lonesco read his play to a group of friends. They found it ^ , funny, although he believed himself to have written a very Eugene lonesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 89 I serious piece, "the tragedy of language." One of these friends, Monique Saint-C6me, who had translated novels from the Rumanian and was at that time, at the end of 1949, .working with a group of avant-garde actors under the direction of Ni- i colas Bataille, asked lonesco to lend her the manuscript. Nicolas Bataille, then twenty-three years old, liked the play. ! ^ and wanted to meet its author. lonesco came to see him at the J little Theatre de Poche. Nicolas Bataille has described that j meeting: j ; ... tradition demands that I should tell what was the first impression I had of him. Well, to follow that usage, I shall say that he seemed to me to resemble Mr. Pickwick. I told him that we wanted to stage his play. He replied, y "Pas possibhl" He had already submitted it, without suc- cess, to, among others, Jean-Louis Barrault and . . . the Comedie Frangaise!21 At first the director tried to stage the play in a wildly paro-distic style. But that did not work. Finally, all concerned realized that, to have its full effect, the text would have to he, acted in deadly seriousness, like a play by Ibsen or Sardou. In fact, when asking Jacques Noel to design die set, Bataille did not give him the play to read. He merely told bun to design the drawing room for Hedda Gabler. Another model the production followed was the conception of the English character conveyed by the novels of Jules Verne, whose English people have a peculiar decorum and sang-froid, which has been bril-1 Kantly captured by the original illustrators in the stiff, be-| '. whiskered'figures of the Editions Hetzel. 1 [ ■> The title of the play was found during rehearsals; in the long and pointless anecdote entitled "The Headcold," which the fire chief tells, there is a reference to an institutrice blonde, a blonde schoolteacher. During one run-through, Henri-Jacques Huet, who played the fire chief, made a mistake and said "cantatrice chauve" instead. lonesco, who was present, { immediately realized that this was a far better title than L'Heure Anglaise or even Big Ben FoUies (which he had considered at one time). And so the play became The Bald Soprano. A brief reference to the "cantatrice chauve" was introduced at the end of Scene 10, when the fire chief, as he is go THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD about to leave, creates general embarrassment by asking about the bald soprano, and after a painful silence receives the answer that she still wears her hair the same way. Another important change that occurred during rehearsals I concerned the end of the play. Originally Ionesco had intended that after the final quarrel between the two couples the stage should be left empty for a moment, then some extras in the audience were to start booing and protesting; this would lead to the appearance of the manager of the theatr&:bn the stage, followed by the police. The police would "machine-gun" the audience, while the manager and the police sergeant would congratulate each other by shaking hands. But 'this would have necessitated a number of additional actors and thereby have increased the costs. So, as an alternative, Ionesco had planned to let the maid, at the height of the quarrel, announce, "The Authorl," after which the author would appear, the actors would respectfully step aside and applaud him while the author would approach the footlights with sprightly steps, but suddenly raise his fists and shout at the audience, "You bunch of crooks! I'll get youl" But, Ionesco . reports, this ending was considered "too polemical" and so I eventually, as no other ending could be found, it was decided. (that there would be no end at all and that instead the play i would start all over again from the begirming. La Cantatrice Chauve^JoHhd as an "anti-pkv," was first performed at the Theatre des.'JNoctambules on May 11, It was coldly received. Only Jacques Lemarchand, at that time the critic of Combat, and the playwright Armand Salacrou gave it favorable'notices. There was little money for publicity, so the actors turned themselves into sandwich men and paraded the streets with their boards for about an horn before the performance. But the theatre^majne^ More than once, when there"were fewer than three people in , the theatre, they were given their'raoney back and the actors : .jsvent home. After, about six weeks they gave up. For Ionesco, this first encounter with the living theatre became a turning point; not only was1 he amazed to hear the audience laugh at what he considered a tragic spectacle of human life reduced to passionless automatism through bourgeois convention and the fossilization of language, he.was also ■■■ ' Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre gi j deeply moved by seeing the creatures of his imagination come to life: One cannot resist the desire of making appear, on a stage, '!, characters that are at the same time real and invented. One cannot resist the need to.make them speak, to make them live before our eyes. To incarnate phantasms, to give them A life, is a prodigious, irreplaceable adventure, to such an extent that I myself was overcome when, during the rehears-I als of my first play, I suddenly saw characters move on the j., stage who had come out of myself. I was frightened. By i what right had I been able to do this? Was this allowed? | ... It was almost diabolical.22 ( Suddenly Ionesco realized that it was his destiny to write ]'< for the theatre, He who had been embarrassed when he saw actors trying to identify themselves with the characters ffiey ' portrayed, to the point of finding such attempts indecent (as 1 Brecht had before him), but who had been, equally repelled by Brechtian acting, which "made the actor a mere pawn in a chess game" and dehumanized him, now realized what it ' had been that made him uneasy: . . , if the theatre had embarrassed me by enlarging and i . thereby coarsening nuances, that was merely because it had enlarged them insufficiently. What seemed too crude was • not crude enough; what seemed: to be not subtle enough ' was in fact too subtle. For if the essence of the theatre lay r in the enlargement of effects, it was necessary to enlarge them even more, to underline them, to emphasize 'them as much as possible. To push the theatre beyond that intermediary zone that is neither theatre nor literature was to put it back into its proper framework, to its natural limits. ^ What was needed was not to disguise the strings that mpved the puppets but to make them even more visible, deliberately apparent, to-go right down to the very basis of the grotesque, the realm of caricature; to transcend the pale irony of witty drawing-room comedies , . . to push everything" to paroxysm,' to the point where the sources of the tragic lie', To create a theatre of violence—violently .comic, violently dramatic.23 92 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD To reach this point, Ionesco has since argued, the theatre_ must work with veritable^ock„tactics; reality itself, the con-;,! sciousness of the spectator, his habitual apparatus of thought.!! —language—must be overthrown, dislocated, turned inside out,| so that he suddenly comes face to face with a new percep-' tion of reality. Thus Ionesco, the persistent critic ofJ3recht,,is in fact postulating a far more radical, a far more fmdamental alienation effect. Wh^f made Em uneasy in the Breehtian style of acting was precisely that it appeared as an unacceptable niixture of the true and the false"; that, in effect, it did loot carry alienation, the abandonment of a simulation of reality, far enough. . ' La Cantatrice Chauve (known as The Bald Soprano in the United States and as[Thgjiald Prima Donram Britain) has been so widely performed and published that it is unnecessary to outline its contents in detail. Some of its features have already become proverbial: the clock that, in a spirit of contradiction, always indicates the opposite of the correct time, or the classic recognition scene between a married couple, who, after a feat of logical deduction, to their great surprise reach the conclusion that as they seem to be living in the. same street, the same house, the same floor, the same room, the same bed, they must necessarily be man and wife. (This scene is said to be based on an episode when Ionesco and his wife found themselves entering the same Metro carriage by different doors and went through an elaborate pantomime of recognition.)2* .-if - Nor is there any doubt left of the meaning^ andjntmtipn of ihgjSay. Ionesco himself, who has said that he never has ideas before writing a play, but has a good many ideas about its meaning after he has completed it,2B has explained it most convincingly. It is in fact a tragicomic picture of life in an . age when "we can no longer avoid asking ourselves what w,e are "doing here on earth and how, having no deep sense of Out"de'stiny^we'can^endSe the crushing weight of the material world. , . . When there is no more incentive to be wicked,i and everyone is good, what shall we do with our goodness,' or our non-wickedness, our non-greed, ourjiltirnate.jxeuJ^lityP; The people in The Bald Soprano have no hunger, no con- ^ scious desires; they are bored stiff. They feel it vaguely, hence Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 93 the final explosion—which is quite useless, as the^eJkaracters and situations are both static and mterchjmgeabj^ tlnngliiids^^ The play^sT&Tattack against what Ionesco has called the~\ "universal petty-bourgeoisie . . . the personification jrf_ac: | cepted ideas^'an3 sidglnsfHlie ubiquitousT corKrmist." What "* Be cleplores is the leveling of individuality, the acceptance of slogans by die masses, of ready-made ideas, which increasingly turn our mass societies into collections of centrally directed automata. "The Smiths, the Martins can no longer talk be- ; cause they can no longer think; they can no longer think because they can no longer be moved, can no longer feel pas- i sions. They can no longer be; they can *become' anybody, anything, for, having lost thefr_identity, they assume the iden- We live in a world that has lost its metaphysical dimension, and therefore all mystery. But to restore the sense of mystery ! we must leam to see the most commonplace in its full horror: > "To feel the absurdity of the commonplace, and of language— ; its falseness—is already to have gone beyond it. To go beyond it we must first of all bury ourselves in it. What is comical is the unusual in its pure state; nothing seems more surprising TtoTme^ffiarRM^ here, within grasp of our hands, in our everyday conversation."28 Having rediscovered his childhood passion for the theatre, .. Ionesco even ajfaagfair^jnto becommg^an^aciQr. He accepted an offer from the director of" La Cantatrice Chauve, Nicolas Bataille, and the well-known theatrical scholar and director, Akakia Viala, to play the part of Stepan Trofimovich in an adaptation of Jpj^iQgvskiV^ The^ Possessed by Bataille and Akakia Viala. He who had always regarded the effort an actor must make as unbearable, bordering on the absurd or a kind of sainthood, now learned what it means "to take on another human being, when one finds it hard enough already to bear with oneself; to understand him with the help of the director, when one does not understand oneself."26 Ionesco did not like the character he had undertaken to act, "because he was another, and in allowing myself to be inhabited by him, I really had the impression of being 'pos- 94 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre sessed' or 'dispossessed,' of losing myself, of renouncing my personality, which I don't like particularly but to which I have at last become accustomed."30 And yet, after many attempts to desert, having been held back merely by the sense of his moral obligation, suddenly the moment came when he discovered that precisely because he had lost himself in the character of Stepan TrcSmmU^}»^S>3^^^. JSSB-^jfei. new sense. "I had learned that each of us is all the others, thaFmy solitude had not been real and that the actor can, better than anyone else, understand human beings by understanding himself. In learning to act, I have also, in a certain sense, learned to admit that the others are oneself, that you yourself are the others, and that all lonelinesses become identified."" . _ ^ dlJff, ^ The run of ^ejjmsesse as symbol | and myth, transcends any search for interpretations. Of course f it contains the theme of the .mconraoumcabflity^ of^jti&tiroBls j exgerienee; of course it dramatizes the futility and failure of human existence, made bearable only by self-delusion and the 'admiration of a doting, uncritical wife; of course it satirizes the emptiness of polite conversation, the mechanical exchange of platitudes that might as well be spoken into the wind. There is also a strong element of the author's own tragedy in the play—the rows of chairs resemble a theatre; the professional orator who is to deliver the message, dressed in the romantic costume of the mid-nineteenth century, is the interpretative artist who interposes his personality between that of the playwright and the audience. But the message jg[J°^_anjr^egg,;.i|di. Ijaudien^^ i "powerful imsm^^J^.-^m^i^. &e ug&JhSUel^ All these themes intertwine in The Chairs. But lonesco himself has defined its basic preoccupation: "The subject of the play," he wrote to the director of the first performance, Syl-vain Dhomme, "is not the message, nor the failures of life, nor the moral disaster of the two old people, but 'the chairs tdiemselv^jjhat is to sav. thel^^^ of People, the absence of the emperor, t!ie'atee_c^of God, the absence of matter, ! the unreality of the world, metaphysical emptiness. The theme I of the play iSj,mt]hingrmA ■ . .the invisible elements must be more and more clearly present, more and more real (to give unreality to reality one must give reality to the unreal), until the point is reached—inadmissible, unacceptable to the reasoning tninrl—whfiu foe iini-eaT elements speak and move ■ . .and jiothingness car^ bje_htarrd. js^r^de concrete. . . ."34 The Chairs was Ionesco's third play to reach the stage, and it did not do so without the greatest difficulties. It took Sylvain Dhomme and the two actors of the old couple, Tsilla Chelton and Paul Chevalier, three months to find the style of acting suitable for the play-a mixture of extreme naturalness of detail and the utmost unusualness of the general -^ceptJonJi None of the established managements in Paris wanted to risk putting on The Chairs, so in the end the actors themselves hired an old unused hall, the Theatre Lanery, where they opened on April 22, 1952. Financially the venture proved a disaster. Only too often the empty chairs on the stage were matched by empty seats in the auditorium, and there were evenings when only five or six tickets were sold. Most of the critics slated the play, but, on the other hand, it did find some distinguished supporters. A defense of The Chairs published in the magazine Arts was signed by Jules Supervielle, Arthur Adamov, Samuel Beckett, Luc Estang, Clara Malraux, Raymond Queneau, and others. At the end of the last performance, the poet and playwright Audiberti was heard, in the almost empty auditorium, shouting "Bravol" at the top of his voice. Four years later, when Jacques Mauclair revived The Chairs with the same actress, Tsilla Chelton, in the part of the old woman, the climate of opinion had changed; the performance at the Studio des Champs-Elysees was a great success. The leading conservative critics, like J.-J. Gautier, of Figaro, still held out against lonesco, but Jean Anouilh himself came to his defense, calling the play a masterpiece, and adding, "I believe this to be better than Strindberg, because it has its 'black" humor, a la Moliere, in a manner that is at times terribly funny, because it is horrifying and laughable, poignant and always true, and because—with the exception of a bit of rather old-fashioned avant-garde at the end that I do not like-it is classical."35 lonesco labeled The Chairs a "tragic farce," Jacques, ou la Soumission a "naturalistic comedy." He called his next play, Victimes du Devoir (Victims of Duty) a "pseudo-drama." This play may have been less successful than some of his earlier works, but it is certainly among his most significant statements. t^^^Vo^I^^wis a playwright's play, an argument for and agaihsrtn^pTobT®i drama: "All the plays that have ever been written, from Ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anytlung but thrillers. Drama'1 has always been realistic and there has always been a detective about. Every pigy.Js^Q-Jflyestigation brought to a successful conclusion. There is a riddle and it is soIvedTn^eTHnaiscenef'8* Evisrthe classical French tragedy, says Choubert, the hero of Victims of Duty, ultimately can be reduced to refined detective drama. 103 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Choubert is a petty bourgeois spending the evening quietly with his wife, who is darning socks. His views on the theatre are immediately put to the test. A detective arrives. He is merely looking for the neighbors, but they are out. He wants to find out whether the previous tenant of Choubert's apartment spelled his name "Mallot" with a "t," or "Mallod" with a "d." The Chouberts ask the detective in; he looks such a nice young man. But before he knows where he is, Choubert is the victim of third-degree methods. He has never known Mallot, or Mallod, but he is ordered to delve into his (Choubert's) subconscious; the answer to the problem simply must be there. Tb^-detebaye is'fdnis, tamed mtQ.-ft..t)sy<%>flriiJ.yat^ J^toSSteMs^^Se detective play and Jhejgsvchojogjcal As Choubert dives deeper and deeper into the bottomless well of his subconscious, his wife, Madeleine, changes too— into a seductress at first, then an old woman, and finally the detective's mistress. So deep down has Choubert gone that he pierces the sound and sight barriers and actually disappears from sight. When he comes to the surface again, he has become a child and Madeleine is now his mother. The detective has become his father. Again the situation changes: Choubert holds the stage, acting out the drama of his search, while Madeleine and the detective are his audience. But all he sees is a gaping hole. Attempts are made to bring him back to the surf ace—he has delved too deep—and is presently going up and up, higher than Mont Blanc^and in danger of becoming airborne. New characters wander in—a lady who sits silently in the corner, but to whom the others occasionally turn with a polite "N'est-ce pas, Madame?" and a bearded man, Nicolas d*Eu (not to be confounded with Nicolas Deux, the late Czar of Russia), who brings the conversation back to the theatre, while Choubert continues his hapless quest for Mallot. Nicolas is for a new kind of theatre, up to date, "in harmony with the general drift of the other manifestations of the modern spirit. . . . Well get rid of the principle of identity and unity of character. . . . As for plot and motivation, let's not mention them . . . no more drama, no more tragedy; the tragic's turning comic, the comic is tragic, and life's getting more cheerful. *» . . ."8T These, of course, are the well-known points of view Eugene Ionesco; Theatre and Anti-theatre 103 of Ionesco himself, only slightly parodied, and Nicolas confesses that he does not want to write—after all, "We've got Ionesco and that's enough."38 In the meantime, the detective is feeding Choubert enormous quantities of bread to stop the gaping hole of his memory. Nicolas dTjU suddenly turns against the detective, who cringes in fear and pleads for his life but is pitilessly knifed by Nicolas. He dies with the cry, "Long live the white race!" Madeleine, who has been bringing cups of coffee throughout the proceedings, so that the entire stage is filled with cups, reminds them that they have not yet found Mallot. So Nicolas takes over the role of the detective and begins to feed the protesting Choubert with bread; he, like the detective, is merely doing his duty—he is a victim of duty as much as Choubert, as much as Madeleine. They are all victosj)f jdujy. W&£Ldiiry2Jn..a^ riddle posej^jii^beginnmg of the, playtJBeing^characters ln*aTplay7 they have to JBnd_a^hition at\^^^7^h*eywMWf find the answer to the question whether Mallot spelled his name with a "t" or a "d." For we are here in the realm of Cp^aidoAamas'' Victims of Duty is one of Ionesco's favorite plays. It deals ; with the subject nearest to his heart, the problem of the__essen-tial„Jasksand limitations of the theatre. The policeman-psychoanalyst stands for the proposition that the mysteries of I existence can be solved. "As for me," he says, "I remain Aris-totelianly logical, true to myself, faithful to my duty, and full of respect for my bosses. ... I don't believe in the absurd; j everything hangs together, eveiything can be comprehended! in time ... thanks to the achievements of human thought and ] science."39 But Choubert, however deeply he descends into! his subconscious, can find no solution there, only a gaping hole i of nothingness. Far from containing the hidden solution to the ' riddle of existence, the subconscious mind opens into a bottomless pit, the absolute void. As Serge Doubrovsky has pointed out, in what is probably the most profound analysis of Ionesco's work yet made, Freudian psychoanalysis is here confronted with Sartre's Existentialist ontology and psychology. Whether rntentionally or not-more probably the latter—Ionesco here illustrates Sartre's 104 the theatre of the absurd proposition that man is a "hole in Being," that he is ''the being through which nothingness enters the world"40 and that "consciousness is a being which in its being is conscious of the nothingness of its being,"41 Man is nothing becsusejta has |he liberty of choice and there^^j^jJ^^^S^^&ch^^,^ the process oTchTJo^gTumself to be, a permaj^nt^ptentiaHty rather thanactual being. No amount of bread that the detec-tive, and laterNicofas d'Eu, stuff into Choubert can therefore, as Doubrovsky maintains, stop the gaping hole in Choubert's consciousness or "give thought a substantial existence."*2 r But if, to quote Doubrovsky again, "consciousness is nothingness, then personality, character, disappear for good."43"!!' man can choose himself anew at each instant of his life, the !conception of character as the final, irreducible essenc^MJja Platonic idea—of each individual person disappearStJis Nicolas d'Eu puts it in Victims of Duty, "We are Hot ourselves. Personality doesn't exist. Within us are only forces that are either contradictory or not contradictory, . . . The characters lose their form in the formlessness of becoming. Each character is not so much himself as another." The brilliantly managed sequence of Chouberfs descent into the depths and subsequent flight into the empyrean is a demonstration of this proposition. As he reaches the different levels of depth and height, Choubert turns into a bewfldering varietY_of difg ferent, and not necessarily'consistent, selves. At the same' time the character of his'wife alsq undergoes a series of changes, both in so far as he sees a different Madeleine at different levels of Ms self, and also as she becomes a different personality in responding to the changes in his character—for example, when he becomes a child, she becomes his mother, and so on. '/ Doubrovsky's essay is based on the assumption that Ionesco J illustrates this Sartreari psychology, and parodies Freudian psychoanalysis. Yet it is possible that Ionesco might just as well be parodying both Sartre and^Ecgud. After all, when he has killed the Freudian^lSitvi^TIicwas d'Eu, the propounder of the fluidity of character, himself resumes the search for Mallot and continues to stuff bread down Choubert's throat. In other words, the two views are interchangeable, and Choubert, the little man, suffers as much under the tyranny of the s one as of the other. It is always dangerous to take Ionesco Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 105 too seriously. On the other hand, much of hfe^prac^ce^jfems, tofpJow^Ae^prrac^ nouneing ready-made solutions to the problems it purports to pose, and abandoning the sacred concept of character as the essenc^oL^iersonahty, i.e., the view enunciated by Nicolas "ofEuTBut for IonesccC the author of No!, that early essay on the identity of opposites, it would not be difficult to hold a belief and to parody it at the same time. Victims of Duty, however, is notjerelyjujkry aboutjJQneSr ; co's theory of the^theatre (the first of a numberof^utS essays) Tn'iK'traHition of Moliere's Impromptu, de Versailles). It is not merely a psychological and philosophical inquiry, or a parody of such an mquiry; it is, above all, a haunting nightmare, a deeply felt and tormented expresaonjijy^ au&orjjx-perierice 6T"th^a"tesXffo^*lmd cruelty of exjsjjerige. Ionesco, like Kafka and Beckett, is primarily concerned withJbryjngjo "~feels. hke?iwhat it meare forhim when he 8ayg»,.*i an" or "I arn^ve," This is *Se point of departure" of all his workT Two fundamental states of consciousness are at the root of all my plays. . . . These two basic feelings are those-of evanescence on the one hand, and heaviness on the other; of emptiness and of an overabundance of presence; of the unreal transparency of the world, and of its opaqueness. . . . The sensation of evanescence results in a feeling of anguish, a sort of dizziness. But all of this can just as well become euphoric; anguish is suddenly transformed into liberty. . . . This state of consciousness is very rare, to be sure. ... I am most often under the dominion of the opposite feeling: Lightness changes to heaviness, transparence to thickness; the world weighs heavily; the universe crashes me. A curtain, an insuperable wall, comes between, me.and the world., between, me and myself. Matter fills everything, takes up all space, annihilates all liberty under its weight. ... Speech crumbles . . .** The proliferation of matter—chairs, eggs, furniture (in The New Tenant), or, in this case, Madeleine's coffee cups—is one of the manifestations of the heavy, leaden, hopeless, depressive state of consciousness. The proltferation of matter, expresses i 106 the theatre of the absurd "the concretization of soutude, of the victory of anti-spiritual forces."46 And humor is the only liberation from this anguish. Victims of Duty clearly belongs to a depressive peripji in lone^co^dev^lorjffient The play was first performed in February, 1953, by Jacques Mauclair, the young director who later brought Ionesco his first major success with the revival of The Chairs. The s^yen^short,pieces,, which Jacques Polieri presented in September of that year at the tiny ThMtre de la Huchette, on the other hand, were largely fight, humorous^ aiicLeuphoric. Only three of these (L^SWan^e^t^utomoSUe^ La Jeune F&le a Marier and Le Maitre) have appeared in print. The four others (Le Connaissez-Vous, Le Shame Oni-rique, La Niece Epouse, and Les Grandes Chaleurs—an adaptation from the Rumanian of Caragiale) appear to be lost, the manuscripts having gone astray. These are slight plays, actually cabaret sketches, but nevertheless very characteristic and revealing of jfonejcojsjiomte techmques. Le Salon de FAutomobUe*9 is based on a confusion between'motorcars and human beings. The buyer rides away in a newly acquired vehicle that is a female and that he decides to marry. The exhibition hall is filled with_the_farmyaid noises of the exhibited vehicles. InfLa Jeune FiUe a MjjESi the comic element is largely surprise; a lady discusses her young and innocent daughter, who has just completed her studies; an expectation of young innocence is built up. Finally the daughter appears: "She is, a man, about thirty years old, robust and virile, with a bushy black mustache, wearing a gray suit."*7 The same comic principle is used again in Le MaUre. A radio announcer and two young couples express ^ounting expectation to see in person a great man (the English translation reads, "the leader" but it is not quite clear whether the personality concerned might not just as well be a literary figure, more usually addressed as Maitre in France). In tones of mounting adoration, his actions offstage are ecstatically described—he kisses babies, eats his soup, signs autographs, has his trousers ironed, and so on. When he finally appears, he is a headless body.48 Ionesco likes to express himself in short plays, or at least in one^gctjglays that can develop without interruption. He finds *i a~3rvistonintotl^ ends, then Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 107 restarts, it ends again, restarts again. ... I don't think one should try to put too much into a play. In a three-act play there are necessarily superfluous things. The theatre needs a very simple idea: a single obsession, a simple, very clear, self-evident development."49 His first effort to write ajfoeejigt play, AmSdSe, ou Comment S'En DSbarasser (lA^^^,or:' l^^^^dlMB.M^lS^SBJ^' may°&OTH uMs" misgivings about the longer form, but it contains some of his most haunting images. The play springs from.iis^darkest, mrotde^gsjfflSLinfiad, and presents what is probably his most p^ewerMsymbol of the proliferation of matter and its stifling of the spirit. The hero of the play, Amedee Buccinioni, is, like Ionesco, a writer. He is, in fact, writing a play, a play about an old ^mSTand an old woman rather like the protagonists of The Chairs. But in fifteen years of work he has succeeded in writing only two Iines^ttratoguo'f the old woman : Do you think it will do? the ojld man: It won't do by itself.30 Amedee and his wife, Madeleine (Madeleine again, like the wife in Victims of Duty), ^sjc^^Jxom^gejivmm.. They have not left their apartment for fifteen years, and even haul their supplies through the window in a basket. Yet Madeleine is still in communication with the outside world, through her job—she works at a switchboard in the living room, where she operates a kind of telephone exchange at certain times of the day. She connects callers even to the office of the President of the Republic, communicates new traffic regulations to inquir-tsrs, and so on. The couple are on very bad terms with each other; they^quarrel constantly. Madeleine is a hard, nagging creature. But tEe~main^h*adow over the marriage is the presence in the. next joom of .^corpse, the body of a young man who came to call fifteen' years ago, and whom Amedee is said, but by no means with certainty, to have killed in a fit of jealousy. Perhaps the corpse is not that of the wife's lover at all. At one point, Amedee suggests that he might have left again at the time the "crime" was committed. Or again it might be that the corpse is that of a baby a neighbor once left in their io8 THE THEATBE OF THE ABSURD care and never called for again. But why should that baby have died? f T^&^sscpse in the next room may be dead, but it is very | active. Ite^EJ^g^g^^-^^^^ its glow with an ^ie^§eiiuS^r^"the dead body itself is growing krgex iindJatger^The corpse is suffering from "the incurable disease of the dead"-geometrfca? progression. As the play proceeds, this growth accelerates; the door of the next room bursts open, an^£^SS^J^!2lPH^etS^&e-J22m■ ^s t^le corPse grows- miisErooms^ corruption. *"~ Who or what is the corpse that is growing so relentlessly? A flashback scene supplies some of the clues to the solution of this riddle. Amedee and Madeleine appear as a newly married couple. Amedee is loving, importunate, romantic; Madeleine is petulant, sullen, unwilling to accept his protestations of love, deflating his romantic notions. The imagery of the dialogue is clearly sexual; the situation is that of an ardent lover and a girl who regards all advances as acts of violation and rape: "Your voice is so piercing! You are deafening me! Hurting me! Don't rend my darkness! S-a-distl S-a-dist!"51 When Ameclee's younger self hears the voices of spring, children's voices, the phantom Madeleine can merely hear "oaths and toads."* The scene comes to a climax with Amedee pleading for love; "What is far can be near. What is withered can grow green again. What is separated can be reunited. What is no more, toiU be Sigma," but as'1 Amedee dreams of happiness in their house of glass (verre), Madeleine insists that their house is of brass (fer)~-4n other words difiJrnagejDiJigbtofiss, ness, amiTein^ 'preggi<^L md oyacitVj, ! ""This flashback scene makes it fairly clear that the corpse in 1 the next room is the porpse of the couple's dead, love, the vic-!tim of their sexual incompatibility. It is a corpse made up of disgustjmilt, and regret It poisons the atmospKere?*wrth*lKe musnroorns" of decay "and decomposition—and it is growing from day to day, from hour to hour. Amedee quite clearly states that what is rotten in their home is the absence of love: "Do you know, Madeleine, if we loved each other, if we really^ loved each other, none of this would be important?" But Eugene lonesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre iog Madeleine has become hard, unsentimental, and matter of fact: "Love can't help people get rid of their troubles!"52 Amedee must get rid of the corpse, which threatens to burst out of the apartment. With a superhuman effort, he tries to push the endless body out of the window. As lonesco puts it in the stage direction, the body pulled near the window should give the impression that "it is dragging the whole house with it and tugging at the entrails of the two principal characters."83 The third act shows Amedee dragging the body through the streets toward the Seine. He meets various people, notably an American soldier outside a bar or brothel. Amedee explains to this foreigner, with whom he is unable to communicate, that he is writing a play in which he is taking the part of the living against the dead, a play against nihilism and for a new humanism. He, Amedee, is for commitment, and believes in progress. As the scene becomes more crowded with people, girls, soldiers, policemen, Amedee continues to assure all and sundry that he is for social realism, against disintegration and nihilism. By this ums,^h^£0rr«ejias^^ _gnd Amedee ;k^re»dx.flii^fiLin^sa,,ak^ Madeleine wants him to come back, the mushrooms are in bloom, but Amedee floats away into the sky. / In Amide"e we see the two basic mgpds of lonesco's expe-"1, rience of the world side by si3e^~beavmess and the proMeration / of matter in the first two acts,.j^^^SIaBd.jvaneseeriefi-in t^EE^rA^-AifletJ^e^getrrlS of the corpse of his dead love, that stifling presence turns into lightness and lifts him intp the air. The play, which is simply labeled "Comedy in Three Acts," is a^cpme^olJibsra^^ As in Victims of Dufy, the polemic against the social realists . runs as a secondary theme through the whole play. At one point Madeleine tells Amedee that the presence of the corpse in the next room falsifies his perception of reality, makes him see the world in a morbid light—hence his failure to write a sociological play. But, as the events of the tliird act show, the facts of the writer's personal life are more immediate than his social intentions. However much he protests his. belief in progress and commitment, the corpse of his past love and personal memories carries him upward and pulls his feet off the ground. llO the theatre of the absurd Eugene lonesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 111 Amidie contains some of Ionesco's most brilliant images. As a stage symbol of tremendous power and immediate impact the growing corpse is sure of its measure of immortality. The claustrophobic feelings of the couple's private world heightened by the echoes of the offstage voices of other tenants of the house and thrown into relief when a postman comes to deliver a letter, which plunges them both into a frenzy of fear and causes them to refuse delivery—are made brilUantly concrete. The weakness of the play lies in the third act, which, is intended to be rather like the final, frantic chase in the last reel' of a Keystone comedy, with soldiers and policemen pursuing each other across the stage. But this intention does not allow itself to be completely realized in the theatre. And the transition from claustrophobia to openness and lightness is a very difficult one to manage on the stage. In the short story Oriflamme,Bi which constitutes a prelirni-nary sketch for the play, the events of the last act occupy barely a page, as against about twelve pages devoted to relating the action of the first two acts. The last paragraph of the story indicates the euphoria of the final floating away even more clearly than the dramatized version: I still heard the Americans, who thought I was performing some sporting feat, greet me with a 'Hello, boy!' I dropped my clothes, my cigarettes; the policemen. divided them between themselves. Then there was only the Milky Way that I traversed, an^riflamme [i.e., like the sacred gold-starred banner of France billowing in the wind] at headlong pace, at headlong pace.85 AmSdde (the play) is dated Cerisy-la-Salle, August, 1953. It was first performed at the Theatre de Babylone on April 14, 1954, under the direction of Jean-Marie Serreau. Within a few weeks of completing AmddSe, lonesco wrote another play, which took him only three days to finish (September 14-16, 1953) and which presents the imagery of proliferating matter wjtjjjenewed force. This play is he Nouveau Locatake ([Tfce ~~Neu> Tenant), and is in one act. The action consists of an ant, a mild middle-aged gentleman who seems unencumbered *t 'wm worldly goods at first and takes his time carefully placing , the first few pieces, but who at the end is literally buried in the unending stream of furniture, at first brought in by two moving-men, but later pouring in by itself. We leara that all I the traffic is at a standstill, all the streets of Paris are blocked J by more and more furniture, and the bed of the River Seine J itself is filled with it. j The-New Tenant is a spectacle of terrifymgjmrjHcity^r^t. ! ^--Jitogue (between the tenant and the Kiclcering, greedy conci-i / ergeTbetween the tenant and the moving-men) is reduced to I ^^^jjjfc^dary role. Primarily, this is a play of objects on the j * move7ob|ecbToverwheIming man, stifling him in a sea of inert j matter. A single poetic image is built up before our eyes, first ; with a certain amount of surprise, later with relentless inevi- ! tability. This is a demonstration of the possibilities of pure theatre: The concepts of character, conflict, plot-construction have been abandoned—and yet The New Tenant remains drama with mounting suspense, excitement, and poetic force. What does it mean? Is the empty room filling up with furniture, slowly at first but later with increasing speed, an image of the life of man, empty at.first,..but gradtialfy cluttered up *^\n3i new'm3*repetitive experiences and memories? Qms. the-, rJajTmer^^^ ^SuffgrjL. The New Tenant was first performed by a Swedish-speaking company in Finland in 1955. It was; presented at the Arts Theatre in London in November, 1956, and reached Paris only in September, 1957. Yet in spite of setbacks, in spite of the ^financial disasters of the first productions of his plays, Ionesco's career was making steady progress. Toward the end of 1954, the first volume of his ThSdtre was published by Gallimard, the leading French publisher, in whose decisions Raymond Que-neau, the poet and novelist who had been deeply impressed by Ionesco's first efforts, and whose own experiments with language clearly influenced lonesco, plays an important part. Of the six plays in that first volume, only one had not yet reached the stage when it was published: Jacques ou la Soumission. This omission was repaired in October of the following year, 1955; when Robert Postec presented Jacques and another play lia THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD by Ionesco, Le Tableau (The Picture), at the Theatre de la Huchette. Unlike Jacques, which was a success, The Picture tailed to please, and Ionesco has omitted it from the second volume of his plays. But it has appeared in the Dossiers Acenonetes du ColUge de Potophysique, that distinguished group of followers of Jarry and his Dr. Faustroll, among whom Ionesco holds the high rank of a Transcendant Satrap (as do Rene Clair, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Prevert, and many other famous pataphysicians). It has also been broadcast, in a translation* by Donald Watson, on the B.B.C.'s Third Programme (March 13. and 15. ^957)^ WS^P4ctuxens a curious play. It opens with a fat, wealthy gentleman who wants to buy a. picture from a painter. They are haggling about the price; the painter wants the buyer to have a look at the picture before he names his price, but the fat gentleman wants to settle that detail first. The painter asks five hundred thousand francs at first, but is relentlessly driven down until, in the end, he is ready to settle for a mere four hundred francs. Only then does the shrewd businessman cast a glance at the picture, which represents a queen, and prompdy criticizes it so savagely that the painter finally begs him to keep the picture without any payment. In fact the painter consents to pay the fat gentleman a fee for storing his picture. The fat gentleman's old and ugly sister enters into the proceedings and is rudely treatedby her brother. But the moment the painter has gone, the situation changes abruptly. Alice, the sister, becomes the tyrant and the fat gentleman is reduced to the role of a cowed schoolboy. Left to himself, the fat gende-man, who is starved for beauty and affection, works himself up into a state of frenzy about the picture. As Ionesco says in a footnote,66 "The actor playing this part must get as erotic as the censorship permits or the spectators will tolerate." When his sister reappears, he has again become bis old dominating self. He menaces his sister with a gun and finally shoots her. But instead of dying she is transformed, becoming as beautiful as the picture. An ugly woman neighbor wants to be transformed the same way. She too is shot and turned into a beau- *t tiful princess. The painter returns, admires his patron's ability Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 113 to create beauty by violence, is shot himself, and becomes a Prince Charming. Shots fired into the air transform the room into a fairy palace. The fat gentleman, who alone remains as fat and ugly as he was, invites the audience to shoot at him. Ionesco calls The Picture a "guignolade"—a. Punch and Judy play. He attributes its failure at its 1955 performance to the fact that the first part, the haggling over the price with the painter, was acted realistically, as a critique of a capitalist's exploitation of an artist "In fact, this Punch and Judy play must be acted by circus clowns m the most childish, exaggerated, idiotic manner possible. . , . The reversals of situations must happen brusquely, violently, crudely, without preparation. . . . It is only by an extreme simplification . . . that the meaning of this farce can be brought out and become acceptable through its very inacceptability and idiocy."6'' The subject of the play, according to the same note, is "metamorphosis, treated ... parodistically, to disguise, out of basbfulness, its serious significance."68 It would be rash to attempt to read too much into this intentionally "idiotic" spectacle. What it seems to be driving at is the vicious circle between the crude commercialism of the Philistine businessman with his mixture of meanness and sentimentality, on the one hand, and, on the other, the supposed transcendence of this ugly world by its antithesis, a world of "beauty" redeemed by "art." But the mean are imprisoned in their own meanness: having lolled the ugliness in themselves, having replaced it by what they consider its direct opposite, they merely enter a world of cheap Kitsch, a world of operetta with the Princesses and the Prince Charmings of the crudest erotic fantasies. B:, at the end of the play, the fat gentleman begs the audience to shoot him, this is merely a variant of the situation in the rejected violent ending of The Bald Soprano, where the Philistine audience was to have been machine-gunned from the stage. Here the Plulistine on the stage wants to be shot by the non-Philistines in the audience. And the play itself has demonstrated the futility of any such thing. Sj^otmg, : yfoknce4 car^^ the hope of: changing the world or the sensibilities of people by violence; is utterly vain and absurd; Ae^ghjnge^ are as idiotic as the. originaljpjsjatipn. ""* ■ r'" ""rni~'''''~~T~mmmm'»~m**t 1X4 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD At the same time, the play isjm^exgerimei^ bmjiesof the theatre. Ionesco once said, "I personally would lilcetbnGSng a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a race horse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon, and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre, and it is the place where one dares the least. I want no other limits than the technical limits of stage machinery. People will say that my plays are music-hall turns or circus acts. So much the better—let's include the circus in the theatrel Let the playwright be accused ^f: being arbitrary. Yes, the theatre is the place where one can be arbitrary. As a matter of fact, it is not arbitrary. The im-, agination is not arbitrary, it is revealing. ... I have decided not to recognize any laws except those of my imagination, and since the imagination obeys its own laws, this is further proof that in the last resort it is not arbitrary,"80 j~ These two interpretations of The Picture, one in terms of 1 a critique of Philistine sensibility, the other in terms of an experiment in ajDurejieatre^ are in no way contradictory. Ajl^^IonescojJ^eaJTe contajns^ two strands sidejjyside-^ * His very first play, The Bald Soprano, was an anti-play, and as such a criticism of the existing theatre as well as of a type of dead ^society. The same, strongly pugnacious spirit manifests itself in lonesco's entire osuvre, and it is therefore quite wrong, to regard him as a mere clown and^prankster. lonesco's plays are a complex mixture of poetry, iaritasy, nightmare—and cultural and social criticism. In spite of the fact that Ionesco rejects, Mid detests, any openly didactic theatre ("I do not teach, I give testimony. I don't explain, I try to explain myself")60 he is convinced that any genuinely new and experimental writing is bound to contain a polemical element. "The man of the avant-garde is in opposition to an existing system. . . . An artistic creation is by its very novelty aggressive, spontaneously aggressive; it is directed against the public, against the bulk of the public; it causes indignation by its unusualness, which is itself a form of indignation."81 lonesco's most opeiih/pqlemical^^ay, his mogJi-djs£l£^t; ^^^as^ast^^jCiiQcSi is Llmpromp^u de J^^fSl^iir^S-CameUon dlTlfferger^lEnglish titlefflmprob^a^n^or"^^. Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre "5 Shepherd's Chameleon}, dated Paris, 1955, and first performed at the Studio des Champs-Elysées in February, 1956. By the title alone, Ionesco proclaims his faith that the avant-garde is merely the renewer of tradition—Moliére's ĽImpromptu de Versailles, and Giraudoux's ĽImpromptu de Paris are clearly alluded to. And, like Moh^e, Ionesco putejhjmself^n^the^stage in the act of writing á play—that is, asíeepwith a ball-point pen in his hand. He is visited by^three Jearned doctors dressed in the gowns of the pompous doctors of M$ieres"Malade Imagi-naire, and all three called Bartholomeus—Bartholomeus I, Bar-tholomeus II, and Bartholomeus III. To the first of these, Ionesco explains that he is in the process of writing a play to be called The Shepherd's Chameleon, which is based on a real incident: "Once, in a large country town, in the middle of the street, during the summer, I saw a young shepherd, about three o'clock in the afternoon, who was embracing a chameleon. . . .It was such a touching scene, I decided to turn it into a tragic farce."62 But, of course, this is merely the pretext, the starting point of the play he is writing. In reality^ Ionesco explains, it will be a play about his ideas on plaýwritíng: "You can say I am the sh^h^d^^ou hke, and thg.,thea1mJsJhe Jjl^JlÉaaiJBecause I have embraced a theatrical career, and the theatre, of course, changes, for the theatre is life."63 Prevailed upon to read what he has written up to now, Ionesco proceeds to read exactly what the public has seen performed—an ingenious and very characteristic mirror effect, which is immediately reduplicated once again by the arrival of the second Bartholomeus, who repeats the same lines as the first; whereupon the third arrives, repeats the same lines as the first two, asks Ionesco to read his play, Ionesco starts off with the same opening passage. There is a new knock on the door and it seems'as though a vicious circle had been established that would go on forever. But this time the person who knocked is not let in, and the Jiscussion can begin. Theifhree ? doctors are..purvevorsor a half-existentialist, ,half-^^^j^ i rar^ago.Gf~dramaf^4heor^, with allusions to Adamov, who dis- • covered the Aristotelian principles before Aristotle, Sartre, and, j of course, above all, lonesco's special bete noire, Brecht. ! Ionesco is rescued from complete stultification by the doctors through the arrival of his c^arwragan (who has been ii6 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD knocking at the door all the f3roe)-I^jsss^^il^mm, sense _and demystrfication. lonesco recovers Bis poise and launches into a confession of his faith as a dramatist. He condemns the three critics for having peddled truisms clothed in extravagant jargon, whereas "the critic should describe and not prescribe . . . he should only judge a work on its own terms, according to the laws that govern artistic expression, according to each work's own mythology, by penetrating into its own world. One does not set chemistry to music, one does not judge biology by the criteria of painting or architecture. ... For my part, I believe sincerely in the poverty of the poor, I deplore it, it is real and can serve as material for the theatre; I also believe in the grave cares and anxieties that may beset the rich. But in my case it is neither from the wretchedness of the poor nor the unhappiness of the rich that I draw the substance of my drama. FojMnjg^theJ^ onto \ i^ejta^^of^foejrorS^^^—it —Trn^aTy^dreamsTmy anguish", \ my dark desires, my inner contradictions that I reserve the right jto find the stuff of my plays. As I am not alone in the world-fas each one of us, in the depths of his being, is at the same time everyone else—rny_dreams and desiresi:invatjnjuisfeB^nd my obsessions do not belong to myseTFlObne; .theyare partof aJljnanBnc^ At this point, Ionesco's manner becomes more and more pontifical. He begins to quote the names of German and American authorities, and is finally asked whether he is really taking himself seriously after all. Abashed, he recognizes that he has fallen into his own trap and is in danger of himself becoming didactic. He apologizes that this, in his case, is the exception, not the rule, a dig at Brecht's play The Exception and the Rule. L'Impromptu de I'Alma takes us back into the thick of the controversy about the didactic, p^o^caJ^thej^, of which the exchange with Kenneth Tynan later became one brilliant, but by no means central, episode. The main attack against lonesco had been launched by some of the critics who had at first hailed him as a master of the new avant-garde, in the pages of such periodicals as Sartre's Les Temps Modemes and the influential Thddtre Fopulaire. It is no coincidence that the same number of the latter periodical (dated March 1, 1956) that Eugene lonesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 117 contained a rather pained notice of L'Impromptu de VAlma and the revival of The Chairs with which it shared the bill at the Studio des Champs-Elysees, also published an essay by Adamov on "Theatre, Money, and Politics," in which he made public confession of his error in having omitted the social theme from his plays that had been performed to date, and called for a revival of a historical, sociological theatre. No wonder that the review of-Xftg Chairs, by Maurice Regnaut, in spite of high praise for direction 'anoTpTirfarr)^ in the ques- tion, "Why, then, in spite of all this, should we too feel our* selves 'cheated? It is because we have been provoked into tak- 1 ing an interest in what basically does not concern us at all. This piece has objective reality only to that extent to which the postulate of the lyrical confession is true. More than loneseo himself, we need to believe that 'one is all people.' But the old mystification cannot long conceal the emptiness of this theatre. To transform the theatre into music is the last artistic dream of the petty bourgeois as Gorki has defined him: man who prefers himself."fis Thus the battle wasjpined between the historical, sociolog-ical, epic theatre and the lyrical, poetical meatre ,pf .±hj^,wprld within, the theatre of dream, mood, and being.. We shall re-^ turn to acQscussion of thesc^t\yo_jMiic^ contemporary theatre in a later chapter. Here it must be noted that the final parting"af the ways between Ionesco's conception and that of Brecht and his newly converted follower Adamov coincided with the breakthrough of lonesco into the world of acceptance and success—a sure sign in the eyes of his opponents, that the bourgeoisie had at last recognized the man who best expressed their decadent point of view. Not only in France but in other countries as well, performances of Ionesco's plays became more frequent. There were still scandals like the one in Brussels where the audience at a performance of The Lesson demanded their money back, and the leading actor had to escape through a back door, but also surprising successes in countries like Yugoslavia and Poland, where The Chairs was performed with the old couple in workmen's overalls. Within six years of the first disastrous performance of The Bald Soprano, lonesco had arrived. Being an accepted author involved lonesco in some strange Il8 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD adventures that might have come straight out of one of his own plays. In May, 1957, some London papers reported that "the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and ten other guests were present at a remarkable theatre performance given recently in the Paris home of the Argentine millionaire, M. Anchorena"68 and that the play presented had been by Ionesco, with music specially composed by Pierre Boulez. A few days later, London papers speculated on the possibility that this play, Impromptu pour la Duchesse de Windsor, might be performed in England, but, as the Daily Mail put it, "It's going to cause some head-' aches" to the Lord Chamberlain, The Evening JVeuw of the same day, May 31, 1957, even spoke of the Duchess of Windsor having refused permission to have the little play performed in London. Yet, according to the Daily Mail again, Ionesco had commented that the Duke and Duchess "seemed quite amused." Jh fact loneseo's second Impromptu is a very slight, but witty and utterly harmless party joke: a short scene in which The Lady of the House discusses with the author and an actress what they might present to amuse the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. This leads to a discussion of loneseo's own work and of his favorite theme of the identity of comedy and tragedy. When The Lady of the House asks Ionesco not to present "a sad play,.one of those modern dramas like those by Beckett or Sophocles,, which might make people cry," he answers, "Sometimes, Madame, comedies make people cry even more than dramas . . . the Comedies that I write. When I want to write a tragedy I make them laugh, when I write a comedy, I make them cry."67 There is also a very amusing nonsense version of English history as seen by a Frenchman, and an equally characteristic sequence of semantic misunderstandings about spirits: when offered a glass of whiskey by The Lady of the House, the author maintains that it is gin, while the actress tastes it and pronounces it Benedictine. When the author, out of politeness, comes round to accepting it as whiskey, the others, also from politeness, accept each others' interpretations, increasing the confusion. The discussion of what might amuse the royal guests finally ends in complete deadlock and the piece concludes with the apologies of the *i hostess. As, according to the Evening Standard, Mme. Marcel Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 119 Achard, the wife of the playwright, remarked after the performance, "Only Ionesco could have handled such a delicate subject." Salvador Dali, another of the privileged number of guests, merely remarked, "It was most moving." The composition of such a Ughthearted trifle did not distract Ionesco overmuch from more ambitious and artistically more rewarding objectives. In November, 1955, the NouveUe Revue Frangaise had published a short story by him that was later to grow into one of his major plays. (Altogether four of loneseo's plays are elaborations of drafts written in the form of stories: Une Victime du Devoir, published in the review Medium, later became Victims of Duty; Orifiamme, in the NouveUe Revue Frangaise, February, 1954, became AmddSe; Rhinoceros, in Les Lettres Nouvelles, September, 1957; and La Photo du Colonel, in La NouveUe Revue Frangaise, November, 1955.) This particular story was La Photo du Colonel (The Photograph of the Colonel),™ which became the basis of the play Ionesco completed during a stay inLondon .1. MTimMfeWa^liMHi^MEIiSBW^tf^tm.--------... .. ---------± f * in August, 1957-^uewT^^^j^ge^, entitled in the English translarion^^^fej^^LiS/hichdoes not quite do justice to the implications of the French, which means KiUer Without Reward (or payment); that is, a gratuitous, purposeless killer, T^ueurSan$„,G^es-4s--lonesea's- second -^(■ree-aet- work, and not only one of his most ambitious, but aIso_groba^^^S_finest .play. Berenger, its hero, is a Chaplinesque little man, simple, awTcward, but human. As the play opens, he is being shown round an ambitious new housing project by its creator, the municipal architect. This is a beautiful new quarter of the town, well-designed, with pleasant gardens and a pond. What is more, as the architect explains, permanent sunshine is built into the project; however much it may rain in other parts of the city, the moment you cross the boundary of the cit4 radieuse, the radiant city, you enter a climate of perpetual spring. Berenger, who never realized that such perfection of modern design or planning existed, and who strayed into this new world by pure chance, is deeply moved. But why, he asks, are the streets of this lovely quarter so deserted? He is shattered to hear that the inhabitants have either left or have locked themselves into their houses, because a mysterious killer is ISO THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD abroad in this happy place, who lures his victimsjo their death^ by promising to show them ,"j3ie~ph^toffaph of We^coConel?' The architect, who reveals that he also" exercises the functions of a police commissar and those of a doctor, cannot understand Berenger's horror at his revelation. After all, the world is full of misery: "Children murdered, starved old men, widows in distress, orphans, people in agony, judicial errors, houses that collapse on their inhabitants . . . mountains that come down in landslides ... massacres, floods, dogs run over by cars— that's how the journalists earn their daily bread." Berenger Is appalled. And when news comes that among the latest victims is Mile. Dany, the architect's young secretary, whom he had just met and with whom he had fallen in love, he resolves to track down the killer. The second act opens in Berenger's dingy room, where a visitor. .Edouard. is silently waiting for him. Outside we hear the voices of the inhabitants of the block conversing in absurd fragments of small talk: a teacher giving a nonsensical history lesson; an efficiency expert calculating the money to be saved by stopping employees from going to the lavatory five times each day and making them concentrate these natural functions into one session of four and a half hours per month instead; old men talking of old times—a whole symphony of grotesque snippets of talk that take up and expand the voices on the landing heard offstage in Amide'e. Berenger returns, tells Edouard the horrible news about the killer, and is astonished to find that Edouard, in factr'everybody, has long known about him, that everyone is used to the idea that such a killer is abroad. Edouard's briefcase opens and is revealed to contain the implements of the killer-the knickknacks he pretends to be selling, stacks of photos of a colonel, even the killer's identity card. Edouard says, he must have picked up the briefcase by mistake, but mysteriously he has further evidence in his coat pocket—the diary of the killer, a map on which the exact spots of past and even future murders are marked. Berenger wants to go to the police. Edouard is reluctant, Finally they go, but Edouard leaves the briefcase behind. In the street a political meeting is in progress; a monstrous woman, la mere Pipe, described as the keeper of the public \ geese and resembling Berenger's concierge, makes a speech Eugene Ionesco; Theatre and Anti-theatre 121 composed of totalitarian cliches. In the world after her victory, everything will be different, at least in name, although the substance of things will remain the same. Tyranny will then be called liberty, occupation will be called liberation. Ajdrunk interrupts the speech; he represents the opposite (Ionesco's own) I m his final reply to Tynan, is made hotby peliticians but by • A J° linkers like Einstein, Breton, Kanamsfcy^Keasso, s and"judy fight, the drunk is knocked out. Berenger discovers that the briefcase has been lost. In a nightmare sequence, he tries to wrest similar briefcases from the hands of passers-by, attempts to interest the police in finding the killer, but the police have more important things to do. They have to control the traffic, Berenger is alone. He walks through the empty streets, the decor changing as he progresses. Suddenly he finds liimself face to face with a grinning, giggling dwarf in shabby clothes. He knows that this is the killer. In a long speech (covering about ten closely printed pages in the French edition), Berenger tries to persuade the killer, who is obviously a degenerate idiot, to desist from his murderous and senseless activity. He uses every known argument for philanthropy and goodness-patriotism, self-interest, social responsibility, Christianity, reason, the vanity of all activity, even that of murder. The killer never speaks a word, he merely giggles idiotically. In the end Berenger pulls out two old guns and tries to kill the killer but he cannot do it. He drops the guns and silently submits to the killer's raised knife. In a note, Ionesco underlines the intention of this last scene, which, as he says, "is a short act in itself." The speech should be presented in a manner designed "to bring out the gradual breaking down of Berenger, his falling apart and the vacuity j of his own rather commonplace morality, which collapses like I a leaking balloon. In fact Berenger finds within himself, in | spite of himself and against his own will, arguments in favor of ; the killer."69 Thejdfler (who, Ionesco suggests in a stage direction, might not be seen at all, only his giggle being heard in the shadows), je^eAtj^ surdity of human; existmce itself. This is the murderous pres-^ 1Ä2 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD ence that lurks behind even the most euphoric moods of lightness and: radiant happiness and turns them back into the cold, gray rainy November of our everyday existence. In the first act, Bérenger. describes at length the experience j . the cite radieuse expresses—the warmth that in former times used to fill his soul from within, the indescribable feeling of euphoria and light that made him cry out with joy, "I am, I am, everything is, everything is!" And then suddenly a feeling of emptiness invaded his soul as at the moment of a tragic separation, "old women came out of their courtyards and pierced my ears with their loud, vulgar voices; dogs barked; and I felt myself abandoned among all these people, all these things." This is the mood we are presented with in the second í act in the symphony of gossiping voices in the courtyard, and later in the horrible political meeting, in the traffic regulated j by policemen. jys.dj&r^aJizatíon, accepted by everybody else j -that life is futile in the face of inevitable death-which ch|ngeseuphoria into depression. Death is the photograph of the colonel, which exercises such a fatal fascination on the kill- .] '. er's victims. No argument of morality or expediency can pre- j w|vail against the half-witteď, idiotic futility of the human | 5 ;reak free from a hidebound 'traditionalism'; we must rediscover the one true and living tradition."81 This is why lonesco is preoccupied with isolating the "pure" elements of theatre, with discovering and laying bare the mechanism of action even if it is devoid of sense. This is why, although he does not like Labiche, he is fascinated by Feydeau and was astonished to find some similarities to his own plays in Feydeau s farces—"not in the subject matter but in the rhythm. In the organization of a play like La Puce a I'OreiUe, for example, there is a kind of acceleration of movement, a progression, a kind of madness. In it one might discover the essence of theatre, or at least the essence of the comic. . . . For, if Feydeau pleases, it is not for his ideas (he has none) nor for the stories of his characters (they are silly); it is this madness, this seemingly regulated mechanism that, however, comes apart through its very progression and acceleration."83 lonesco compares his classicism, his attempt to rediscover "the mechanism of the theatre in its pure state" with this principle of acceleration in Feydeau's farces: "In The Lesson, for example, there is no story, but there is a progression neverthe- Eugene lonesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 131 less. I try to bring about a progression by a land of progressive condensation of states of mind, of a feeling, a situation, an anxiety. The text is merely a pretext for the acting of the cast, starting from the comic toward a progressive heightening, Th| text is merely a prop, a pretext for this intensification."83 Emm ^^[^|^^; (until his breach with the Theatre of the Absurd), whjj&Jia^ or to its eguiyj^ntjji^^z^ rram^^^ch^^gjjre^e^ljng action is seen to^^^^feTsoT^at it would have made no amfen-ce-TFKT never happened. It is true that The Bald Soprano and The Lesson end as they started—with the Martins (or, in the Paris production, the Smiths) beginning to speak the same dialogue we heard at the beginning of the play, and with a new pupil arriving for a new lesson. But in the case of The Bald Soprano tbis ending is an afterthought; Ionesco's original intention was to top the pandemonium of the final scene by a direct aggression against the audience. And in The Lesson we know that the forty-first pupil of that day will be murdered in the same frenzied fashion as the fortieth—that there will be another inevitable, and even more frenzied, climax. This in fact is the pattern of most of Ionesco's plays: we find the same acceleration and accumulation in the obscene JnaljFrenz^ of Jacques as well as in the growing proliferation of funnture in The New Tenant, in the more and more crowded room in The Chairs, and in the growing number of transformations in Rhinoceros, Intensification, accumulation, and progression, however, must not, lonesco insists, be confounded with the storyteller's endeavor to build action toward a climax. In the narrative, the climax leads toward the final solution of a problem. And lonesco detests "the reasoning play, constructed like a syllogism, of which the last scenes constitute the logical conclusion of the introductory scenes, considered as premises."84 lonesco jreju^atesjh^,^ f I do not write plays to tell a story. The theatre cannot be epic . . . because it is dramatic. For me, a play does not 132 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSUED consist in the description of the development of such a story— that would be writing a novel or a film. A,.p)ay is. a structure tha^onsiste of a^erie^fif states of consciousness, or situa; ^Jionvjvjric^^ grow more and more dense, then get entangled, either to be disentangled again or to end in unbearable inextricability.85 j To the elegant, logical construction of the well-made play, \ Idnesco opposes, instead, the demand for intensity, the gradual ijheightening of psychological tensions. To bring this about, the > author, in Ionesco's view, is bound by np rule or restraint: Everything is permitted in the theatre: to bring characters to life, but also to materialize states of anxiety, inner presences. It is thus not only permitted, but advisable, to make the properties join in the action, to make objects five, to animate the decor, to make symbols concrete. Just as words are continued by gesture, action, mime, which, at the moment when words become inadequate, take their place, the material elements of the stage can in turn further intensify these.86 Language is thus reduced to a i^^^y^^ss^^SSSSk According to Ionesco, the theatre cannot "hope to challenge those forms of expression in which language is entirely autonomous—the discursive speech of philosophy, the descriptive language of poetry or fiction. (For this, he argues, the use of language in the theatre is too narrowly circumscribed to language as "dialogue, words in combat, in conflict."87 But language is regarded nrft as ,ftffd fl^jh^ j^pmViTffllft el^enkjamong man.V-.in the theatre: the author can treat, it freely^j^c^makejhe,jLQtioruaQntajdJc^Ae^t^t.^or can let the language of the characters disintegrate altogether. And this too is a device serving the pattern of intensification that underlies Ionesco's theatre. Language can be turned into theatrical material by "carrying it to its paroxysm. To give the theatre its true measure, which lies in going to excess, the words themselves must be stretched to their utmost limits, the language must be made almost to explode, or to destroy itself in its inability to contain its meanings."88 The pattern of Ionesco's plays is one of intensification, ac- Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 133 celeration, accumulation, proliferation to the point of parox-■ ysm,, when psychological tension reaches ^ ' pattern of ,„orjKM). It niu^tj^ofiom^ liberation takes ■theTform of laughter. And that is why Ionesco's "As far as I am concerned," says Ionesco, "I have never been able to understand the difference that is made between the comic and the tragic. As the comic is the intuition of the absurd, ;. it seems to me more conducive to despair than the tragic. The comic offers no way out. I say 'conducive to despair,' but in reality it is beyond despair or hope."89 But this is precisely the Kberating effect of laughter: "Humor makes us conscious, with a free lucidity, of the tragic ot desultory condition of man, ... It is not only the critical spirit itself . . . but. . . humor is the only possibility we possess of detaching ourselves—yet only after we have surmounted, assimilated, taken cognizance of it—from our traeicomicjjuman condition, the malaise of be-rng. To become conscious of what is horrifying and to Jaugn at it is to become master of that which is horrifying. . . . Logic reveals itself in the illogicality of the absurd of which : we have become aware. Laughter alone does not respect any taboo, laughter alone inhibits the creation of new anti-taboo taboos; the comic alone is capable of giving us the strength to bear the tragedy of existence. The true nature of things, truth itself, can be revealed to us only by fantasy, which is more realistic than all the realisms."90 Yet if Ionesco again and again insists on the exploratory, cognitive function.of his theatre, one must always keep in mind what kind of cognition it is he wants to communicate, Bewildered critics first confronted with a Ionesco play like The Chairs or The Killer are apt to ask what these plays seek to demonstrate; after all, we all know that people have difficulty in communicating their personal experience, we know that death is inevitable. Once the audience has realized what the author is driving at, the play should end. But it is not the conceptual, formulated moral that Ionesco tries to communicate, it is his experience, what it feels like to be in the situations concerned. It is precisely against the fallacy that the fruits of human experience can be transmitted in the form 134 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD of pre-packed, neatly formulated conceptual pills that his theatre is directed. That is why his criticism, his savage satire, tries to destroy the rationalistic fallacy that language alone, j language divorced from experience, can communicate human experience from one person to another. This, if it can be done "at all, can be accomplished only through the creative act of the artist, the poet who can transmit something of his own ex-penence by maldng anj^^ No amount of ch'nical description can convey what it feels like, let us say, to be in love. A young person may have.been told, may think he knows what it will be like, but when he really does have the experience, he will realize that any merely intellectual knowledge of it was not knowledge in any real sense. A poem, on the other hand, or a piece of music, can convey, to however limited an extent, the reality of feeling and experience. In the same way, Iojie£cstt*iri^a^Ia.y .^SJM^feJinj^^^onie critics thought, tiymgjtojejl us through three long acts that death is inevitable, he is trying to make us experience with himjjch&t it. ieeh like to be grap-■"^"^^^iW^M""^ mP^^umf what it feels like when at the" end we have to face the harsh truth that there is no argument, no rationalization that can remove that stark, final fact of life. When Berenger, at the end, submits to the knife of the killer, he has finally fought through to the recognition that we must face death without evasion, petrification, or rationalization—and this is "the equivalent of a mystical experience. It is true that the other characters in the play, the architect or Edouard, also accept the presence of the killer in their midst as inevitable. The difference is that they do so out of thoughtlessness, lack of imagination, superficial complacency; they have not grasped what it means to experience the presence of death, and, failing to face the issue of death, they are not fully alive. To wake up the audience, to deepen their awareness of the human condition, to make them experience, what Berenger experiences is the real purpose of Ionesco's play. We do not expect to receive new information in a poem; a moving poem on time or the inevitability of death is not rejected by critics merely because it is not telling us any new trnths.llonesco'sjtheatre is a poetic theatrp. a theatre concerned Engine lonesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 135 with the communication of the experience of states of being, whjch^are^ Jhe. ..jao^M^^.^ttN^^s^^S^^kJ^, language, consisting largely of prefabricated, congealed sym- ence. Whan A. says, "1 am in love," B. will understand by it merely what he has experienced, or expects to experienced which may be something entirely different in kind and intensity, and so A., instead of haying communicated his sense of being, has merely triggered off B.'s own mode of feeling. No real communication has taken place. Both remain imprisoned, as before, in their own experience. That is why lonesco I hasjpdkejaj)^ »*IKeHnrommunicable. * If, howeverT^nguage, because it is conceptual, and therefore schematic and generalized, and because it has hardened into depersonalized and fossilized cliches, is a hindrance rather than a means toward such genuine communication, the-hreak-through into the other human being's consciousness of the poet's mode of feeling and experience has to be attempted on a more basic level, the pre- or sub-verbal level of elementary human experience. This is what the use of imagery and symbolism achieves in lyrical poetry, combined with such elements as rhythm, tonal quality, and association of words. In Ionesco's theatre the same approach is attempted through the _nse of basic human situaticjasJjMit.wifl .evoke....a. direct, an^l In the puppet show, chcus_^wr^_faUm pi the. rbliflraoteraJnjijg^ orherTlaces. All these evoke a ^direct, visceral response in audiences. And by combining -such- basically. eyocatfee„^p-tionaltaiages into mor^^Imors..mmplex^tTuelajres, lonesco "*3?aotualIy forgesTSs theatre into an instrument for the trans-, ^mission of more complex basic ^^^^^^H^^^^^e^e-^ jriencjgs^ " In this he may not always be equally successful, but in plays like The Lesson, The Chairs, Jacques, the first two acts of Amedee, The New Tenant, and Vytims of Duty he has triumphantly succeeded^ni^putting his own experience on the stage and getting it across to the audience. It may be true that, on the^wlTo^ and com- J.36 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD plex, states of mind lend themselves better to brief statement in the form of one-act plays or even sketches than to full-length plays. Yet a play like The Killer shows that it is possible to interweave a number of such basic images of experience into a more complex structure. RhinocSros, which also shows lonesco's ability to sustain a longer form, is perhaps too much of a tract, too closely approximating to a piece a these, to serve as an argument in this context. Of course, the traditional theatre too has always 4>een an instrument for cornmunicating the basic experiences of humanity. But this element has often been subordinated ,to other functions, such as the telling of a story or the discussion of _ ideas, Ionesco is attempting to isolate this one. element—which he regards as the one that constitutes the theatre's supreme achievement, and in which it excels all other forms of artistic expression—and to restore a pure, entirely theatrical theatre. The technical inventiveness Ionesco displays in trying to achieve his end is truly astonishing. In The Bald Soprano alone, his first and in many ways simplest play, Alain Bosquet has isolated no fewer than thirty-six "recipes of the.comic,"91 ranging from the negation of action (i.e., scenes in which nothing happens), loss of identity of characters, the misleading title, mechanical surprise, repetition, pseudo-exoticism, pseudo-logic, abolition of chronological sequence, the proliferation of doubles (i.e., a whole family all called Bobby Watson), loss of memory, melodramatic surprise (the maid says, "I am Sherlock Holmes"), coexistence of opposing explanations for ■ the same thing, discontinuity of dialogue, and the raising of false expectations, to purely stylistic devices like cliche, truism, onomatopoeia, Surrealist proverbs, nonsense use of foreign languages, and complete loss of sense, the degeneration of language into pure assonance and sound patterns. 1 A good many other characteristic devices from lonesco's later plays could be added to this list—above all, the animation and proliferation of objects, the loss of homogeneity^pf individual characters who..change their natures in front of our eyes, the various mirror effects in which the play itself becomes ah object of discussion within the play, the use of offstage dialogue to suggest the isolation of the individual in a sea of irrelevant small talk, the loss of distinction between animate Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 137 and inanimate objects, the contradiction between the implied description and actual appearance of characters (the young girl who is in fact a mustachioed gendeman, in Maid to Marry; the genius who has no head, in The Leader), the use of onstage metamorphosis (in The Picture and Rhinoceros), and a host of others. What, then, are the basic situations and experiences that . Ionesco wants to communicate by the use of this wealth of .| comic—and tragicomic—invention? IonescoxJjieatre ..bas two •* fundamental themes, which often coexist in the same play. 'The lesser of these is the protest against the deadliness of present-day mechanical, bourgeois civilization, the loss of real, felt values', and the resulting degradation of life. Ionesco attacks a world that has lost its metaphysical dimension, in which hu-j; man beings no longer feel a sense of mystery, of reverent awe ;'' in facing their own existence. Behind the violent mockery of fossilized language, there stands a plea for the restoration of a poetic concept of fife: When I wake up, on a morning of grace, from my nocturnal sleep as well as from the mental sleep of routine, and I . suddenly become aware of my existence and of the universal ■■- presence, so that everything appears strange, and at the same time familiar to me, when the astonishment of being invades me—these sentiments, this intuition belong to all men, of all times. We can find this state of mind expressed m almost me same words by all poets, mystics, philosophers, who feel it in exactly the same way I do. . . ,82 But if Ionesco savagely assails a mode of life that has banished mystery from existence, this does not mean that he re-v gards a full awareness of the implications of human existence as a state of euphoria. On the contrary, the intuition óf being that he tries to communicate is one of despair. The main themes that recur in his plays are those of the loneliness and isolation of the individual, bis difficulty in communicating with others, "his subjection to degrading outside pressures, to the mechanical conformity of society as well as to the equally degrading internal pressures of his own personality—sexuality and the ensuing feelings of guilt, the anxieties arising from the uncertainty of one's own identity and the certainty of death, I38 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD { If the basic pattern in Beckett's plays is pairs of interdependent, complementary personalities, and in Adamov's theatre pairs of contrasting extrovert-introvert men, Ipnescp's most frequently recurring basic pattern is the married couple, the family-Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Amedee and Madeleine, Choubert and his Madeleine, the old man and bis wife in The Chairs, the Jacques family in Jacques and The Future Is in Eggs, the professor and his maid (who is both wife and mother to him) in The Lesson, the rich man and his sister?:in, The $ Picture. In this basic pattern, the woman usually plays the part ■ "of an admiring, but nagging, supporter of the husband. In lonesco's later plays, Berenger is a lonely and isolated individual, but he is also, in each case, in love with the ideal of an understanding young workingwoman, Dany-Daisy, who combines grace, beauty, and savoir-faire. lonesco's characters may be isolated and lonely in a metaphysical sense, but they are by no means the tramps and outcasts of Beckett and Adamov, and this, in some sense, increases the despair and absurdity of their isolation—they are lonely in spite of being members of what ought to be an organic comr munity. Yet, as we see above all in Jacques, the family is the agent of society's pressures toward conformity, which not even the sweet and loving Daisy can resist in Rhinoceros. , Nevertheless, the presence of companionship and family ■i. relationships lightens the despair of lonesco's world. It would \ be wrong to regard his attitude as wholly pessimistic. He wants \ to make existence authentic, fully lived, by putting man face \ to face with the harsh realities of the human condition. But j this- is also the way to liberation, "To. attack the absurdity (of the human condition) is," lonesco once said, "a way of stating the possibility of non-absurdity. . . , For where else would there be a point of reference? ... In Zen Buddhism there was no direct teaching, only the constant search for an opening, a revelation. Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic, I feel that every message JofjdeSp.air.-ls the statement of a situation from which everybody must freelyrry to find a way out."93 The very statement of the desperate situation, the ability it gives the spectator to face it with open eyes, constitutes a catharsis, a liberation. Are not Oedipus and Lear confronted Eugene lonesco: Theatre and Anti-theatre 139 ' with the full despair and absurdity of their human condition? Yet their tragedies are liberating experiences. lonesco himself has always opposed the idea that, as an avant-garde author, he stands outside the main stream-of tradition. He insists that the avant-garde is a mere rediscovery of submerged parts of the main tradition. And so, while he admits that Corneille bores him, that he finds Schiller unbearable, Marivaux futile, Müsset thin, Vigny unactable, Victor \ Hugo ridiculous, Labiche unfunny, Dumas fits 'laughably [ sentimental, Oscar Wilde facile, Ibsen heavy, Sfrindberg j " clumsy, Pirandello outmoded, Giraudoux and Cocteau super-{ ficial, he does see himself as part of a tradition, including j Sophocles and Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Kleist, and Buechner, precisely because these authors are concerned with the human t condition in all its brutal absurdity. I Only time can show to what extent lonesco will become I part of the main stream of the great tradition. What is certain, ! however, is that his work constitutes a truly heroic attempt to I break through the barriers of human communication. ! , i ■i I Jean Genet: A Hall of Mirrors 141 Chapter Four JEAN GENET: A HALL OF MIRRORS ^ j S In the most personal of his books, the autobiographical Journal du Voleur (Whjn_Thief s Journal), Jean Genet describes how he once came across Stilitano, the tall, handsome, one-handed Serbian pimp, thief, and drug peddler who was one of the heroes of his youth, lost fa.AJelLqLffifc^ on a fak" ground. It was one of those labyrinths constructed partly of mirrors, partly of panes of transparent glass that are arranged in such a way that the crowd outside can watch the antics of those who are trying to find their way out of the maze. ; And so Genet could observe Stilitano caught like a trapped animal, could see, but not hear, him uttering enraged curses while the large throng of bystanders outside were splitting their sides with laughter: Stilitano jyas^lone. Exeryone jbad_ found the. way^oatex-^cepjt Jhe. Strangely the^universe veiled itself for me. The shadow that suddenly fell over things and people was the j longer aHetoshout, to Tutt hunselT against the walls of glass, resigned at being a mockery for the gaping crowd, \ Stilitano had crouched down on the floor, refusing to go on. . . ,1 This image of man caught in a maze of mirrors, trapped bj^l the reflections of his own distorted image, trying to find the way to make contact with the others he can see around him; but being rudely stopped by barriers of glass (which Genet himself used in his ballet scenario Adam Miroir), also sums . up the essence of Genet's theatre: a series of plays concerned! with expressing his own feeling of helplessness and solitude » iwhen confronted with the despair and loneliness of man caught in the hall of niirrors of the human condition, inexorably trapped by an endless progression of images that are merely his own distorted reflection—lies covering lies, fantasies battening upon fantasies, nightmares nourished by nightmares within nightmares. —J In the whole long line of poetes maudits that runs through French literature, like a red thread, from Villon to Sade to Verlaine, Rimbaud^ and Lautreamont, Jean Genet is surely among the most extraordinary. "On the planet Uranus," he writes, "it seems the atmosphere is so heavy . . . that the animals drag themselves about crushed by the weight of the gases. It is with these humiliated creatures always crawling on their bellies that I want to mingle. If in the transmigration of souls I am granted a new dwelling place, I shall choose that cursed planet to inhabit it with the convicts of my race."2 Jean Genet was born in Paris on December 19, igio^He was ^abandon^^xjjis^mother and brought up by peasant foster parents in the Morvan, in the north of the Massif Central. When he reached the age of twenty-one he was given his birth certificate. From it he learned that his mother had been called Gabrielle Genet and that he had been bom. at 22 Rue d'Assas, behind the Luxembourg Gardens. When he went to find the house, he discovered it was a maternity hospital. In his monumental study of Genet, surely one of the most astonishing books of our age, Jean-Paul Sartre has described how, at the age of ten, the little boy, who had till then been considered pious and docile, was accused of stealing, and how, being described as a thief, he resolved to be a thief. For Sartre this was the great act of existential choice. Genet himself puts the matter in a slightly less philosophical way: "It was not at any particular period of my life that I decided to be .a thief. My laziness and my daydreaming having led me to the maison correctioneUe at Mettray, where I was to stay till I was twenty-one, I escaped, and to gain the signing-up bonus, joined up for five years. After a few days [in the Foreign Legion] I deserted, taking with me the suitcases of some Negro officers. jfor a time I lovedstejling, butjjrostitutimi appealed more to my easygoing ways. I was twenty. . . ,"3 — But in the essential point of existential choice, Genet's fry***' 142 *f~ THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD account agrees with Sartre?s: "Abandoned by my family^. I found it natural to aggravate this fact by the love 'of males, anddiat love by stealing, and stealing by crime, or the complicity with crime. Thus I decisively repudiated a world-that "had repudiated me."4 Between 1930 and 1940, Genet led the life of an itinerant delinquent. After a stay in the Barrio Chino of Barcelona, among beggars and pimps, he went back, to France, made his first acquaintance with French prisons, and then went„-to, Italy. Via Rome, Naples, and Brindisi, he reached Albania. Refused a permit to land at Corfu, he passed into Yugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia. In Poland he tried to pass forged banknotes, was arrested, and eventually expelled. In Hitler's Germany he felt out of place: "Even on Unter den Linden I had a feeling of being in a camp organized by bandits. . . . This is a nation of thieves, I felt, If I steal here, I accomplish no special act that could help me to realize myself. I merely obey the habitual order of things. I do not destroy it."6 And so he hastened on into a country that still obeyed the conventional moral code and therefore enabled an outlaw to feel himself outside an established order. He went to Antwerp, where he remained for some time before returning to France. While France was occupied by the Germans, Genet was in and out of prison. It was prison that made him into a. pqetj_ Once, he told Sartre, while still on remand, he was, by mistake, given prison clothes and pushed into a cell in which all the other prisoners, also not yet convicted, still had their ordinary clothes. He was thus exposed to ridicule and contempt. Among these prisoners there was one "who made poems to his sister, idiotic and self-pitying poems that were much admired. In the end . . .1 declared that I was able to niakejggem^Just , as good. They dared me and I wrote the^^^^^^^JS^v6 —a long and solemn elegy dedicated to the memory of Maurice Pilorge, executed for the murder of his friend at the prison of Saint-Brieuc on March 17, 1939. This poetry has a strange ritualistic, incantatory quality. It nas thedjirk^gjOT^^^ as if the verses were a magic formula, by which the dead man could be brought back to life. The same quality is present m,thejltnmt*' J J , 1 ---'—--11...... ..... If in Ionesco s theatre death is always present, in the sense that the fear of extinction pervades its sense of being, in Genet's theatre the world oj^beingjsxi^^ ilrfe*1ffXworia"oTdream and fantasy. Sartre observes on the verjnTrsTp"S|^OS^ of Genet, "Genet is nothing but a dead man; if he still seems to live, he does so, only in that larval existence that certain peoples ascribe to their dead in their tombs. All his heroes have died at least once in their life.''19 Genetfsgaraejrf^^ reveaIeaaTlm*15p^aTa^re^^2|i^QnJ wl^h^ini«feur.niasje* fvea|^ , Jnfimtum—is a jevire, Jto unc^ : "^i^SZSj^^&ffl^J^^^P0'11* fr°m wnicn we feel we can safely watch the world, made up of deceptive appearances perhaps, but always reducible to an ultimate reality, is itself shown to be a mere reflection in a mirror, and the whole structure collapses. The first coup de thedtre in The Maids is a case in point. We have seen a great lady being dressed by her maid, Claire; accustomed as we are to follow the exposition of a play we are memorizing these relation-ships. But suddenly, on the rmging of._an,..alaimxlo.ck. the fixed point of reference vanishes—what had appeared to "Be" theladyis^ had appeared to be Claire now turns out to be Solange; what appeared to be the opening scene of a conventional play is revealed to be a piece of ritual play-acting within a play. "This moment," as Sartre puts it in the technical language of his Existentialist philosophy, "in which the lights flicker, when the volatile unity of the being of non-being and the non-being of being is achieved in semi-darkness—this perfect and perverse instant makes us realize, from within, the mental attitude of Genet when he dreams: it is the moment of evil. For in order to be sure of never making good use of appearance,; Genet wants his fancies, at two or three stages of derealization, to Mate Jean Genet: A Halt of Mirrors 151 reveal themselves in their nothingness. In this pyramid of fantasies, the ultimate appearance derealizes all others."30 Or, as Genet himself puts it in describing what he was trying to do^ in The Maids, "I tried to establish a distantiatkm which, in 1 allowing a declamatory tone, would carry the theatre into the theatre. I thus hoped also to obtain the abolition of characters . . . and to replace them by symbols as far removed as possible, at first, from what they are to signify, and yet still attached to it in order to link by this sole means author and \ audience; in short, to make the characters on the stage merely ! the metaphors of what they were to represent. . . ."21 Tjjus. the characters, themselves are only characters in appearance— ' aiainere symbols, reflections in a mirror, dreams within a When The Maids had its first performance at the Athenee in Paris on April 17, 1947, under the direction of France's foremost actor, Louis Jouvet, it seemed that Genet had finally established himself in the world of respectability. His narrative prose was already circulating in privately printed editions. In fact it was Jouvet who had suggested to Genet that he should write the play. "Commissioned by an actor famous in his time, my play was written out of vanity, but in boredom."23 Brilliantly produced in a set of breamtaking beauty designed by Christian Berard, The Maids achieved c^nsjdfir^Ie^success. But Genet had not yet redeemed himself compietely^ta JL94& he was faced with the prospect of a sentence of life imprison-ment. It was only a pebtionj£gnedJ?XJ^ liS^ that, in the "end, persuaded the President of the Republic to grant him a pardon. He started v^ftnigjijBhTi and worked on it for a number of years. But it was not produced, One of France's leading publishers began to publish a'monumental edition of his works; the first volume appeared in 1951, Sartre's great introductory study in 1952, a further volume in 1953. But Genet seemed to have stopped writing for the theatre. In fact he was reported to have forsworn the theatre after his experience with The Maids and Deathwatch (first produced at the Theatre des Mathurins in February, 1949). In his letter to Pauvert about The Maids, 152 the theatre of the absurd he speaks of his djsM^of^e^h^aJie^jn^Jts^vojrkl: "The poet who [would venture into it] would find ranged against him the haughty stupidity of the actors and theatre people. One cannot expect anything from a profession that is exercised with so little seriousness and reverence. Its starting point, its raison d'etre, J£f hunjajiJbgfflgg; only when there will be a demand inMadame Irma's brothel for the trappings of the totalitarian Police Chief will he feel secure. Anxiously he keeps inquiring whether anyone has yet \ v.. Jean Genet: A Hall of Mirrors 155 asked for this particular setting in the brothel. Everything is prepared for that day, but nobody has yet wanted to dream of this brand.of grandeur. We meet the revolutionaries in a scene that sets the counterpoint to the world of the Grand Balcony, but there, too, power is based on sex fantasies. Some of the rebels want to build up Chantal into a land of trademark of the revolution, the beauti-ful gi|l leading the attack, singing rousing tunes to fire the men to greater exertions. Roger, the leader, resists these demands but has to yield in the end, protesting, "I didn't carry you off, I didn't steal you for you to become a unicorn or a two-headed eagle." But Chantal goes nevertheless. The royal palace is blown up, the Queen and her court swept away. An envoy from the palace appears at the Grand Balcony, Only if the people can be made to believe that the age-old 'W^^^'&'WW&t'sll&'WSiSt^^hie day stifl"T510aWdrWifl Madame Irma assume the part of the Queen, and her customers—the men who dressed up as bishop, general, and judge —assume these roles in earnest? Madame Irma and her customers consmtrSolMm^y^fIie)rappear on the balcony and bow to the crowd. Chan^njaheg^p to the..balcOTy„and'|snkiBBd Jbjj a jhot jrom belgWj. A stray bullet? Or a shot fired by the revolutionaries themselves to turn her into a myth? Or was it the bishop, who wanted to turn her into one of his saints? The revolution has Jjeen defeated. But "bishop," "general," and~"judge," having to exercise tlielr power in the real world, are weary and nostalgic for their fantasies. When they try to assert the reality of their functions, the Chief of Poficg rudely reminds them that it is he who holds the reafpbwer. Yet he, too, still longs for the day when his function will be invested with the dignity of being the center of erotic dreams. He is having an immense mausoleum constructed for himself, in the hope that this will bring him nearer to his goal. He is trying to evolve a symbol for his dignity that will stir men's imagination. He has rejected the executioner's red coat and axe. His newest idea is that he.should;be represented,by'a,eigaritic jghallus. The first customer who wants to dress up as a Chief of Police arrives. It is Roger, the leader of the defeated revolutionaries. Anxiously Irma (now the Queen) and her dignitaries I56 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD watch the scene through the intricate apparatus of mirrors and. periscopes that enable the madam of the brothel to see what goes on in all the private rooms. Roger enacts his own fantasy of power and torture, but finally, exclaiming, "Since Fm playing the Chief of Police . . . I've a right to lead the character I have chosen to the very limit of his destiny—no, of mine—of merging his destiny with mine," he pulls out a knife and castrates himself. The Chief of Police, satisfied that his image has become enshrined in the fantasies of the people, has Mrri-self immured in his tomb—or its representation in the brothel. Bursts of machine-gun fire are heard. A new revolution is in progress. Madame Irma dismisses her customers, divests herself of her royal dignity, and prepares to return to her old role of the keeper of a house of illusions. In the stage directions for Peathwatch, Genet had to insist that it should be acted as a dream. In The Balcony there is no need for such specific instructions. It is quite clear that the play represents a world of fantasy about a world of fantasy; Genet's dream about the essential nature of power and sex, which, to him, have the same roots; his wish-fantasy about the true nature of judges, policemen, officers, and bishops. The outcast child, repudiated by society and not recognizing any of its codes, unable to understand the motives of the organs of the state's coercive apparatus, weaves its own fantasy about the motives of the men who have acted as the instruments of ^-■the state. The outcast comes to the conclusion that these men 1 are expressing their sadistic drive for domination, and that they j are using the awful symbolism with which they are sur-1 rounded, the ritual and ceremonial of courtroom, army, and ■ church, to buttress and secure their domination. Thus sex, which to Genet is essentially a matter of domination and submission; the power of the state, which manifests itself in the domination of the prisoner by the court and its policemen'; and Ijthe romantic ceremonial, the manifestation of myth in sex as i*. well as in power, are basically one. r~ A feeling of helplessness when confronted with the vast in-^ tricacy of the modern world, and the individual's impotence in making his own influence felt on that intricate and mysterious machinery, pervades the consciousness of Western man today. A world that functions mysteriously.outsideoiir con- Jean Genet: A Hall of Mirrors 157 1 scious control, must appear absurd. It has lost the metaphysical motivation of a religious or historical purpose; it has ceased, to make sense. The convict who is being physically separated from the outside world has literally been deprived of any means to make his presence felt, to make an impact on reality; in that sense the convict experiences the human condition in our time more intensely and more directly than any of us. He, I or at least a convict of Genet's sensibility and power of expres- 4 sion, can therefore become the spokesman for the unspoken/1 j thoughts, the subconscious malaise of Western man. I * Genet's vision in The Balcony may be vindictive, and dis-• torted by the outcast's violent rage at society, but it has its 1 . validity nevertheless. It would be wrong to criticize the play on the ground that the analysis of the workings of society it presents is manifestly false, that the church, the law, and the defense forces have other functions than merely those of giving ; . expression to the lust for power of those holding responsible j positions in their hierarchies (although these motives no doubt play a powerful part in the psychology of lawyers, bishops, and generals). Genet is not concerned with giving j such an analysis. He is projecting the feeling of impotence of the individual caught up in the meshes of society, he is dramatizing the often suppressed and subconscious rage of the "I" alone and terrified by the anonymous weight of the nebulous "they." It is this helplessness, this impotence, that j seeks an outlet in the substitute explanation of myth and day-I dreams. They try to bring back meaning and purpose into the i universe, yet they are bound to collapse again and again. 1 Reality is an unattainable goal. Nothing the individual can do ř j can have meaning in a world on the brink of annihilation for. j reasons and by means that the individual is unable to graspj ]' and over which he appears to have no control. I ■J.ř The revolutionaries in The Balcony try to abolish a system J of power based on mythical images. Rut in the very act of i , trying to break out of the iron ring of myth into the world of í reality beyond it, they are compelled to construct their own 1 ~ myth. For it is by the fantasies of the masses that society is kept ',!, going. Chantal, who escaped from Madame Irma's brothel beji cause she could not bear prostituting herself for the fantasies of ] impotent little men trying to partake of the feeling of power I58 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD | and sexual potency they felt deprived of in reality by escaping j into a world of make-believe, is inevitably turned into an object j of myth, a sexual image designed to lure the cannon fodder of the revolution to its death. And after her own self-sacrifice in that heroic part, Chantal, the mythical Joan of Arc, is without difficulty^appropriated by the fake bishop as part of his own liturgy. (It is noteworthy that Brecht, whose work Genet is unlikely to have known, uses exactly the same image. His I saintly revolutionary girl in St. Joan of the Stockyards js , j canonized by the capitalists immediately after her death.) ' In the end, the leader of the revolutionaries himself faces the ■ j truth about his own motivation. The reality he wanted to break j jjjito was the reality of power, the power represented by the \ secret-information service and terroristic methods of the mod- j ern totalitarian state. That is why he wants to satisfy his frug- j trated craving by coming to the.brothel to seek satisfaction j in impersonating the Chief of Police. But, at the same time, he 1 feels guilty about this realization, and is filled with a furious ; ; desire for revenge. His act of self-castration while impersonating the Police Chief is an ambivalent one; he wants to punish 1 "himself for his desire for power, and at the same time punish the Police Chief vicariously by an act of sympathetic magic. "Power and virility being equated in Roger's mind as well as in Genet's, the Police Chief himself having chosen a gigantic phallus as his heraldic symbol, such an act of sympathetic i magic is bound to be an act of^eniasculation. Roger, although he makes only two relatively brief appearances in a long play, is the real hero of The Balcony. His role is analogous to that of Lefranc in Lieathwatch and of Claire in The Maids. Lefranc tries to escape from his isolation and rejection by committing a murder. He fails and falls back i into even more complete loneliness. Qajre, having failed tof j murder her lady, kills herself while pretending to be the lady,| j in exactly the same way that Roget castrates the Chief of | I Police by proxy. As Claire, who really wants to become the ' ! lady whom she both loves and hates, both fulfills her craving \ by impersonating the loved character and punishes herself for that craving by lolling herself, so Roger acknowledges his ( desire to be the Police Chief while punishing the Police Chief 1 j in his own person. But neither. Claire nor Roger can break out . : | ■ ■ ^ i Jean Genet: A Hall of Mirrors 159 into reality. Claire can neither become like her lady in reality nor kill her in reality, Roger can neither attain power through revolution nor really punish the Police Chief by sympathetic magic. On the contrary, his action puts the final seal on the consecration of the ritual acceptance of the figure of the Chief of Police in the pantheon of mankind's fantasies of sex and power. Instead of smashing a mirror to reach the outside world, Roger has merely added another cabinet of rnirrors to the many others that serve to reflect the fake images of little men dreaming of real power. This analysis of myth and dream is itself quite clearly a dream and a myth. Even more than in Deathwatch and The' Maids, the audience is left in no doubt that they are not meant to take' any of the events they see as real. There are no charA acters in the conventional sense in The Balcony, merely the images of basic urges and impulses. Nor is there, strictly speaking, a plot. Essentially the play is a series of rituals,- followed by their equally ritual debunking—the customers of the brothel performing their rites, the ritual presentation of the new hierarchy of power, the ritual castration of the frustrated revolu- ; tionary. The plot structure needed to link these ceremonial actsJ together is the weakest part of the play. That is why all critics agree that the final part is too long and less impressive than the opening of the play. It is here that the figures of fantasy are briefly supposed to be shown exercising real power, but hT fact they do nothing concrete beyond discussing the relative merits of their myths and posing for press photographers—i.e., exhibiting themselves to the populace. Here Genet himself clearly fails to achieve the breakthrough into reality. On the other hand, the ceremonial or mock-ceremonial parts' of the play are superb both as theatre (witness the triumphant use of the cothurnus to make the dream images of little men appear as gigantic figures) and in the splendor of their language. This unevenness springs from Genet's basic dilemma. He) strives for a theatre of ritual, but ritual is the regular repetition f of mythical events and, as such, closely akin to sympathetic magic. It endeavors to influence the real world either by re-enacting the key happenings that have shaped that world or (as in fertility rites) by performing in an exemplary manner what is hoped,will be happening in abundance. A theatre as i6o THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD ritual and ceremonial like the theatre of ancient Greece presup-, poses a valid and vital body of beliefs and myths. And this is precisely what our own civilization lacks. Hence in The Balcony Genet is faced with the need to provide a plot structure that will furnish the rationale for his mock-liturgy and mock-ceremonial. And heJfesoxojLqmjI^cc^^ j and ritual, _______ In JLea:J$dgresrJ^^&^SglbSI he has found an extremely ingenious spj^tiqn to this problem. Here he presents a play, , labeled ajdotgnfrje (a. rJfiwnjfiinwr't. which is entii^ ri^al ^piAfimfemiM^^ A group of Negroes \ performs the ritual re-enactment of its resentments and feelings Lflf revenge before a white audience. As Genet insists, in a prefatory note to the play, it would lose its ration d'etre if there were not at least one white person in the audience. "But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theatre. And if the blacks refuse the masks, then let a ^dirmmyJbe used."30 In other words, the^rejence—even the merely ritual, symbolic presence—ofj^Ieastjme_w^ todjgpen-^. jjable to tiusparticular ritUaT**^ v " The Negro actors^errorming this ritual are divided into two groups: those who appear as Negroes and will enact the Negroes' fantasy, and those who appear grotesquely, and visibly, masked, to represent the Negroes' fantasy about the white man's reaction to the Negro world. ThejvJ^tejmdience m ^*L£k§§fee is confronted bv a grotesque mirror imag&of I^LjHJKLe^j^ge. The Negro actors stand between two audiences of whites. The stage audience consists, however, of the Negroes* fantasy image of the white man, embodied in the hierarchy of power in a colonial society—the queen, haughty and remote; her governor; her judge; her missionary; and her valet, who plays the part of the artist or intellectual who lends his services to the hierarchy of power while not strictly belonging to it. It is significant that queen, judge, bishop, and general (the governor is a military man) are identical with the figures of the hierarchy of power in The Balcony. In front of this audience of their own projected image of. the structure of alien rule, the group of Negroes enacts its fantasies of resentment. The central part of the ritual is a fan- Jean Genet: A Hall of Mirrors 161 tasy of the ritual murder of a white woman, elaborately and lovingly imagined in lurid detail. It is this white woman who is supposed to be inside the coffin that stands in the center of the stage. For, as one of the Negroes puts it, "we must deserve their [i.e., the whites'] reprobation and get them to deliver the judgment that will condemn us."31 At first the Negro named Village, who is supposed to have committed the murder, describes the victim as an olifcrone they found drunk and helpless by the docks and then strangled. Later, when the actual murder is lovingly reconstructed, the victim becomes a buxom white woman who has been so 'seduced by her black visitors superior sexual attractions that she has invited him into her bedroom, where she was both violated and strangled. As an additional touch of irony, the Negro who has to enact the raped white woman is supposed in private life to be a black priest, Diouf. After his ritual murder, he takes his place among the other "whites" on the platform backstage. f°~After the Negroes have acted out their hatred and resem> f ment, but also their feeling of guilt, the next phase follows—the ffeijh^ The queen and her court descend, as™moughengaged on a punitive expedition to the colony. They are trapped and ignominiously put to death by the blacks, the missionary bishop is castrated. Thanking the Negro actors who have impersonated the whites, Archibald, who acts as the stage manager throughout the play, sums up the significance of the ritual: "The time has not yet come for presenting dramas about noble matters. But perhaps they suspect what lies behind this architecture of emptiness and words. We are what they want us to be. We shall therefore be it to the very end, absurdly."32 f eehngs ^boutjhe whites has been made grotesquely clowjush .) to render it bearabfe„ip.ar^ttdierjsje of whites. In opening the procee^m^TArchibald informs the spectator's, "In order that you may remain comfortably settled in your seats in the presence of the drama that is already unfolding here—in order j that you be assured that there is no danger of such a drama's worming its way into your precious lives—we shall even have the decency—a decency learned from you—to make communication impossible. We shall increase the distance that separates i6a THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD us—a distance that is basic—by our pomp, our manners, our insolence. For we are also actors."38 Hence th^rjjaxjak^sj&e form of a ritual ceremony rather tharT^^^a direct discussion JOfegJSQlS1 problem or colonialism. In ritual, meaning is ex-pressed by_the repetition^ symbolic actions. The participants have a. sense of awe, of mysterious participation rather than of conceptual communication. The difference is merely that here the audience sees a grotesque parody of a ritual, in which the bitterness that is to be communicated emerges from clowning' and derision. Yet this is only the initial deception in this complex hall of mirrors. As the action proceeds, the audience is made aware that something else, something more real than the ritual concerned, is happening offstage. One of the characters, Vflle de Saint-Nazaire (or Newport News, in the translation), who was sent off with a revolver in the opening scene, returns toward Tthe end and reports that a Negro traitor has been tried and ^executed, ^t^^ We have seen a ritual of the murder of a white woman, but . .the reality was the trial and execution of a Negro—a Negro traitor. It is. on the entrance of Ville de Saint-Nazaire with the news of the traitors execution that the actors who have been impersonating the white court remove their masks and reveal themselves as Negroes. It is only after.they have heard the news that a new revolutionary delegate has been sent to Africa, to resume the work of the executed traitor, that they put on their masks again and enact the execution and torture of the white oppressors. So the whole ritual of revenge was a grotesque diversion. Or actor,, and that nothing .real hasi beengoing on behind the |scenCT^a^TmTact the theatricail?erT6rmanc^ ithepretended reality of execution and revolution. Whether intended by Genet or not, the pretense at political action behind the smokescreen of a grotesque performance is merely another reflection in a chain of mirages. Moreover, we know full well that the Negroes on the stage Jean Genet: A Hall of Mirrors 163 stand for more than simply Negroes. Just as the servant girls in The Maids, even if acted by women, are really meant to be boys playing women, but representing a world of men, the Negroes in The Blacks, acted by Negroes, are not really Negroes. As Genet himself puts it in a cryptic prefatory note to the play, "One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exacdy is a black? First of all, what is his color?"34 TjieNegroes in tijwpjay.are an image of ^aU^^gut-1 1 caste of society: they stand, above all, for .denet Ibmnge^aj^hoJ '"when called" a tEeFat'm'e^ what; * they want,,us*ta«lie. OFa's-Archibald puts it, On ffiis^StSge we"'are like guilty prisoners who play at being guilty."85 The Pi blacks are again the convicts, the prisoners who,^deprived of 'tHechance to partakeS^^ b guilt and_revenge—including thetrial and execution of traitors. "We—you and I," says Village, "were moving alongThe edges of the world, out of bounds. We were the shadow, or the dark interior, of luminous creatures. . . When he speaks these lines, Village is talking about his love for Virtue, the black prostitute. For a moment when that love was kindled, he was at the threshold of reality: "When I beheld you, suddenly—for perhaps a second—I had the strength to reject everything that wasn't you and to laugh at the illusion. But my shoulders are very frail, I was unable to bear the weight of the world's condemnation. And I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love and when love would have made men's contempt unbearable, and their contempt would have made my love unbearable. The fact is, I hate you."*8 Being denied the dignity of man, the outcasts, the blacks,! are denied the emotions of the real world. Yet at the end of the play, when the grotesque ritual has dissolved, Village and Virtue remain alone on the stage. And Village tries to leam the gestures of love, hard though they may be to learn. T^sjg^eJ first gleam of hope jn Genet's dark jdiealie—two of his char- acters who have found the courage to break out of the vicious 1 circle of daydreaming and establish genuine human contact through love. Or is this tgooptimistic an interpretation? Is this_ happy end only itself~a~ranEjsy]of wish-fulfillment, and false as such? It does not seem soTlKTmaTtableau of The 164 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Blacks shows the whole cast standing at the back of the stage, with only Virtue and -Village turning their backs to the audience and walking toward their fellow actors to the strains of the minuet from Don Giovanni. So the lovers have turned fheirbac^^ The blacks was written in 1957 and first performed by a troupe of Negro actors, Les Griots, under the direction of Roger Blin, at the Theatre de Lutece on October s8, 1959. Brilliantly acted, the play achieved considerable success and had a run of several months, although it bewildered a large part of the audience and a good many of the critics. In spite of his often professed contempt for the theatre as a place to work in, and for actors as artists, Genet seems to have abandoned writing novels and prose narratives altogether and to have finally settled^down as a dramatist. His latest play, Les Paravents ({Tfee S^ensj 1961), presents his acid oom-1 ment on the Algerianjwar. At first sight it might appear as \ though Genet was following the development of Adamov in abandoning the Theatre of the Absurd and turning into a political realist. But this is not really the case, although Les ^Paravents certainly shows where Genet's sympathy lies in the conflict he has chosen as his theme. In fact, Les Paravents resumes and restates the subject ot Les Negres, and, on the whole, less successfully. The play, which manipulates a very large number of characters, again sees the poorest of the poor, ^Algerian peasants, as outcasts, of society, fighting a desperate battlFagairist the powers thai be—the authorities, les juries. But whereas Les Negres concentrated the action to a powerful poetic image, Les Paravents scatters it over a vast open-air stage (Genet insists that thenlay must be performed in the open air) rising in four tiers?^me_action is to take place, often on severaljtjers_at^the same jtime, mfrontof; a wide variety of screens_ that are to be rolled on stage on silent rubber wheels. The indication of the background for each sceneis to appear patatecljm^these^ sheens, and will in certain cases be drawn oriTEem byme^forTtEemselves. The cast list comprises almost a^bundredcharacterSjbut Genet specifies that each_actor. should play five or sis parts. The focal point of this wide canvas is occupiedby Said, the poorest of all Arabs, so poor in fact that he can afford to marry Jean Genet: A HaU of Mirrors 165 only the ugliest girl, Leila. Said's mother dominates Said as well as the action of the play; she is, as mother figures usually are in Genet's work, a highly ambivalent character. Said and his mother are involved in the rebellion; the mother is killed and appears on the uppermost tier of the stage, together with a whole row of other dead, who look down on the action like the masked figures of the whites in Les Negres. Tjiejffejjf an Arab village—with its cadi, its brothel, its market, its colons, its policemen—is vividly evoked. Grotesque caricatures of French soldiers perform cruel and scurrilous antics. But the anti-colonial tendency of thejjfev is largely overlaid by a profusion of images of an anal eroticism that had not hitherto appeared^o"openTyTnT^ie^^iamaric works, although it has always been present in his prose fiction. On this score, and on that of its diffuseness, Les Paravents appears less success-,^_tban Gjemi^earli^r^Dla^.Tt clearly cannot be performed, in France wmlethe Algerian conflict remains unsettled. It had its world premiere, in a much cut version, in West Berlin in May 1961. It is as yet not quite clear whether Les Paravents forms part of the cycle of seven plays on which Genet is said to be working, or whether it stands outside it as a topical comment , on the times. Genet is also reported to have completed a film script for the avant-gardist director Georges Franju. Its title is Mademoiselle, ou Les Reves Interdits (Mademoiselle, or The Forbidden Dreams), and it is said to deal with a young girl schoolteacher who is also an incendiary. In writing for the theatre, Genet has achieved what all his characters (with the possible exception of Village and Virtue) have failed to achieve—he has broken through the vicious spi-•v ral of daydream and illusion, arid by putting his fantasies onto •""""pr the stage-concrete, brutal, and disturbing—he has succeeded "in making his impact on the real world, if only by leayingan audience of les fustes deeply stirred and disgusted. As Sartre puts it in summing up Genet's astonishing career, "ha willing himself to be a thief to the utmost limit, Genet plunges into dream; in willing his dream to the point of madness, he makes himself a poet; in willing poetry to the final triumph of the . word, he becomes a man; and the man has become the truth i66 THE THEATEE OF THE ABSURD of the poet, just as the poet had been the truth of the thief."3T If the young outcast's anti-social acts were attempts to revenge himself on society, to destroy the whole of its fabric in symbolic acts of sympathetic magic, his activity as a writer is ■ a direct continuation of this protest by other and more efficacious means. "If," as Sartre points out, "Genet, confined as he is in a world of fantasy by the pitiless order of things [i.e., an outcast who can have no impact on the real world], renounced his attempt to scandalize by the action of a thief? ... If he. made . , . the imaginary sphere a permanent source of scanf dal? If he could bring it about that his dreams of impotence tapped, in their very impotence, an infinite power and, in defiance of all the police forces of the world, put society as a,J whole in question? Would he not, in that case, have found a point of junction for the imaginary and the real, the ineffective and the effective, the false and the true, the right to act and the action?"38 It is clear that in confronting society itself in the theatre, rather than as solitary readers of his narrative prose, Genet comes far closer to his objective. Here a group of living people constituting a collective unity—the audience—is confronted with the secret world of the dreams and fantasies of the outcast What is more, the audience, by experiencing the impact of what they see, even if that impact takes the form of horror and disgust, is forced to recognize its own psychological predicament, monstrously heightened and magnified though it be, there in front of it on the stage. The fact that a large part of the audience may have been drawn into the theatre by rumors that the spectacle will be scandalous or pornographic only increases this effect of shock. For here the prurient among les justes will find that their own fantasies are not so dissimilar from those of the self-confessed outcast. G_ep.ftt-s theatre may lack plot, character, construction, coherence, or social truth. It undoubtedly has__DS.YchpIojjcal jrju&, His plays are not intellectual exercises (cleverly.though they are instructed) but the projections of a world of private, myjdj^conceived as such in the pre-logicaTmodes of thought ithat are the hallmark of the sphere of myth and dream; hence *the nre; ssajgnceijf„magical modes of .action in Genet's plays-it^ jdentMcatiori of subject ,and_oty&rt^ jymtol ar^jeajity, Jean Genet: A Hall of Mirrors 167 word and concept, as well as, in some instances, the divorce qf"~the namelnMia'thething it signifies; the objectification of the"*word. (Genet once told Sartre that he hated roses, but loved the word "rose.") Injhe^wpr^ dream, and myth, language becomes incanifition instead of communication;^^^q?'^^^)t j^SsMk^S^^^^^^^^ cally coiuraesjiii^^ s^"^rra^ovT^p7e^triemseIves in the wish for possession through identification and incorporation of the beloved object. Incantation, magical substitution, and identification are the essential elements of ritual. It is the use of language^.a&ja,-^cantatory magic—the objectification of words—that makes Genet's tBeatre, in spite of its harshness and scabrous content, into a truly poetical theatre, a translation, as it were, of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai into dramatic imagery. Genet's theatre is, profoundly, theatre^ jjf^gaaJLprgtest. Yet, like that of Ionesco and of Adamov before his conversion; to epic realism, it resolutely rejects pojjtijad^prr^itaigr^t. po-! litical argument, didacticism, or propaganda. Injdeattogj^th| foe dream world of the outcast of society, ttjpplcjs^fejhuj! marTpmadition, theafienation of man, HETsohtade, Although Genet's theatre driers in many aspects of method and approach from that of the other dramatists discussed in this book, it bears many of foe essential hallmarks foat,foey have in common—the abandonment ot the concepts of charac-"^ teTanar*mu5rjwaBbn; the concentration on states of mind and basic human situations, rather than on the development of a narrative plot from exposition to solution; the devaluation of language as a means of communication and understanding; the rejection of didactic purpose; and the confrontation of foe spectator, with foe harsh facts of a cruel world and his ownj jisoIatiQniAs such The Balcony and The Blacks can with certainty, The Maids with a good deal of probability, be regarded/ as examples of the Theatre oi the_ Absurd. Chapter Five PARALLELS AND PROSELYTES ■f By its very nature, the Theatre of the Absurd is not, and never can be, a literary movement or school, for its essence lies in the free and unfettered exploration by each of the writers concerned of his own individual vision. Yet the wide response these, at first sight baffling and uncompromisingly difficult, plays have evoked shows not only how closely they express the preoccupations of our age, but also how great is the yearning for a new approach to the theatre. In turning their backs on the psychological or narrative theatre, and in refusing to conform to any of the old-established recipes for the "well-made play," the dramatists of the Theatre of the Absurd are, each in his own way and independent of the others, engaged in establishing a new dramatic convention. In this enterprise of trial and error and ceaseless experimentation, the four dramatists whose work has been examined in some detail in this book by no means stand alone. A number of writers of their own generation have been experimenting on'parallel lines, and a growing number of younger dramatists have been encouraged by the success of some of the work of Beckett, lonesco, or Genet to develop their own personal idiom in a similar convention, A survey (which does not claim to be complete) of the experiments of these contemporaries and followers of the masters of the new convention may show the possible future lines of development. The writer whose work represents the most comprehensive range of experiment in this field is undoubtedly |jean JJard|g^ tbom in 1903), who, older than Beckett, AdamovTGenet, and lonesco, was already well-known as a poet before the Second '1 World War. Having tried to write plays in his early youth, Parallels and Proselytes 169 s V Tardieu turned to an austere style of lyrical poetry based on P Mallanne, and became known as the author of the best French .] translations of the poems of Hölderlin. After the war, he turned I to experiments with language, in the vein of Jacques Prevert ) and Raymond Queneau, and to exploring the limits of the pos- sibilities of the theatre. He joined the staff of the French Radio and Television Service after the end of the war, became head of its experimental workshop, the club d'essai, and started to write experimental plays in 1947, at about the time Beckett, : Adamov™Gerfet, änH lonesco also made their first steps as I dramatists—a curious instance of the Zeitgeist at work, t Tardieu's dramatic experiments, which have been published j in two volumes—ThSätre de Chambre (1955) and Poemes ä j Jouer (i960)—are mostly on a very small scale, Many_of4em j are short cabaret sketches rather than even one^acTplays7b*ut j "their range is wider than that of any other dramatist of the Absurd, extending from the fantastic and eerie to the purely j lyrical, and beyond it into the sphere of a wholly abstract theatre in which language loses all conceptual content and j merges into music, " ' I The earliest ofjh£jfcgtches in ThSätre de Chambre antici- J j pate lonesco. ^mTe^L^P (dated 1947, and earlier than Therd Bald Soprano)"start^wMh exactly the same situation^-a famS^" o? tather, mother, and son seated around the dinner table. The father is interrogating his wife and son about their activities, during the day, but as he clearly knows the answers alreadyj he supplies them himself without waiting for any information froin those he has questioned: j What did you do this morning? I went to school. And you? I went to the market. What did you get? Vegetables, more j expensive than yesterday, and meat, cheaper. Just as well, one makes up for the other, And you, what did the teacher j tell you? That I was making good progress. . . j A mysterious woman appears who warns the father of an approaching danger. There is someone at the door. The father i opens it. A huge man stands outside. He strangles the father j and carries his corpse away. The mysterious woman invites the j wife to look out of the window. There are dead bodies outside ! as far as the eye can see. The father's body is among them. i THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD The son calls the father; he rises from the dead and returns to the room, The wife asks, "Who killed you?" The father replies, "It was not a human being." "Who are you?" asks the wife, "I am not a human being" replies the dead man. "Who were your "Nobody." The lesson of the little play seems to be the need to search for the human image that is not yet alive within any of us, but that we might find one day. In the words of the mysterious woman visitor, who concludes the play, "The window is lighting up. Someone approaches. Let us waitl"2 Qui Est La?Yis \ an attempt to produce a poetic image of the situation" at the j end of the war—man faced with the fact that the routine of a bourgeois existence is as inhuman as the mass killing of the i | battlefields and concentration camps, and the need for finding ■ja new, fully human way of life. ... If Tardieu's first sketch of this type reproduces the opening situation and—to some extent—the message of The Bald So prano, it is even more curious that his second short play.tLa Pblktesse inuttle\-aho dated 1947—should open with professor-nuDillrhiaticji^of The Lesson. Yet here the similarity is purely superficial. The professor is saying goodbye to a yoang~man off to his exams. He impresses on him that it is not what he knows that matters but what he is. When the pupil has left, another visitor, a vulgar and sinister individual, enters. He receives the professor's elaborate Old World politeness with a show of extravagant rudeness and finally slaps him savagely. The professor picks himself upland addresses the audience: I shall not explain this story to you. Nn dnuht it h^ppfm^ri very far from here, at the bottom of a bad memory. It is from there that I come to warn you and to convince you. ... Shush! There is someone asleep here who might overhear me. ... I'll come back . . . tomorrow.3 The same dream^or■ riightmajsSjjm^ a good many of TardteiiVeartier sketches. In Le Meuble, an inventor is trying to sell a buyer, offstage, a fabulous piece of furniture that is designed to perform any conceivable service, including recitations of Musset's poems. But gradually the machine gets out of hand; instead of Müsset it sings doggerel verse and finally it pulls out a revolver and kills the buyer. If this sketch Parallels and Proselytes 171 is reminiscent of lonesco or Adamov, La Serrure has overtones of GenetJn a brothel, a customer is awaiting the fulfillment of his dreams—to see his beloved girl through an outsize keyhole. In ecstasy, the client describes what he sees as the girl discards one garment after another. Yet even after she has reached a state of complete nudity she goes on undressing, discarding her cheeks, her eyes, and other parts of her body until only the bare skeleton remains. Unable to control himself any more, the customer rushes against the door and falls down dead. The madam appears: "I think . . .the gentleman ... is satisfied." A similar motif appears in Faust et Yorick, which also experiments with the representation of the flow of time in the manner of Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner. Faust, a Scientist, spends his life looking for an example of a more highly developed skull, which will represent the next stage of human evolution. We see him getting married, his child becoming a woman, Faust growing old, always neglecting his family to find that skull. He dies without having found it. Yet the skull he has been looking for all his life is his own. In Le Guichet, one of "the longer pieces in Ttedtre de Chambre, we are in a world of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. A man comes to an information office to ask about the tune of a train. He is subjected to a rigid cross-examination about his whole life. Finally the official behind the counter draws up the man's horoscope and informs him that he will be killed on leaving the office. He leaves and is promptly run over. In all these sketches, Tardjeujs^^^ "Ee* i"s"^oriropemy experimental and even didactic" in trying out what'can, or'cannoC^e^dme with various stage conventions, such as die use of asides (Oswald et Zenaide, ou Les ApartSs—what an engaged couple say to each other, and what they think) or monologues (II Y Avait Foule au Manoir, ou Les Monologues—a. crowded stage suggested by a succession of monologues that could be spoken by a single actor), or in ^^jdtmonstiating the rek^^ty^£flanguaje (Ce Que Parler Veut Dire^au^T^Patois des Families—each family has its private slang) or^jnanners (Vn Geste pour un Autre—a. world traveler demonstrates how the most absurd behavior is regarded as 173 the theatre of the absurd exquisite good manners in distant civilizations). These didactic sketches, which take the form of illustrated lectures, are Tar-dieu's least successful efforts—they recall the more hackneyed procedures of the little revue. f" Tardieu'sinmost MenssHngja^ in which. / Ire exj^resiJ-Ke possibilities of a wholly abstract theatie.^kux "'^mW^^^wen^'for'exarnple'™pfesents a Wgjrijr dramatic ao» tioiTthat remains wholly unexplained. We see the characters engaged in violent quarrels referring to hidden motives and guilty secrets, without ever learning what these are or even*in ' what relationship the four people involved stand to each other. JQnly they know"itj;" By presenting, a wholly motiveless action I thaytslill holds the .pubhVs. attention, ^ demon- e{^strating_^ But he goes further than this. Two of the short pieces in Ttedtre de Chambre (La Sonate et les Trois Messieurs and Cmversation-SinfonieUa)lattempt an approximation of dialogue.^ music. Int^JEMte^e have three gentlemen, labeled A., B., and C, engaged in a conversation the subject of which remains undefined but which evokes a certain type of image, tempo, and rhythm to correspond to the notations of a sonata: first movement, Largo (slow, nostalgic description of an expanse of water); second movement, Andante (more animated discussion—what was it that they have seen?); third movev ment, Finale (animation leading to a dying fall). Conversation-Sinfonietta repeats the same experiment with six voices (two basses, two contraltos, a soprano; and a tenor) under the direction of a conductor. Again there are three movements: Allegro ma non troppo, Andante sostenuto, and Scherzo vivace. The text consists of the most banal fragments of small talk: "Bon-jour, Madamer "Bonjour, Monsieur!" or "Mais oui, mais oui, mats out, mats ouf followed by "Mais non, mats non, mais non, mais non!" or lists of foods liked by the speakers, with directions as to how they are to be cooked. Having explored the possibilities of constructing the ecjmya- .guagg, Tardieu took the logical step forward. In the second volume of his collected plays, we find the results of this development. ___ LesAmants du Metro {jiThe Lovers in the Subwau)), written Parallels and Proselytes 173 in 1951, is described in the subtitle as "a^comjCjbEdj^wiJhjj.ut. dance_and without mijsic"; that is, language in movement is totaj^th^^Ja^^ The first scene is a Metro staticu.Tl^ small talk of the waiting passengers has a thematic relationship to the main subject, the meeting of the two lovers. Two gentlemen deeply immersed in their books collide and introduce their reading matter to each other—"St. Paul!", "Marquis de Sade!"—while a student tells his girl the story of Hero and Leander. The lovers themselves are introduced in a passage of abstract dialogue simulating a waltz rhythm: "Un, deux, trois, amour" "Un, deux, trois, Adour." "Un, deux, trois, toujours" and so on. Later, when the lovers quarrel they do so in strings of women's names: "Emmal Eloal Heloise! Diotimal Georgia! Hildal" and so on. In the second scene, the lovers are inside a Metro carriage, separated by a crowd of other passengers, who represent the anonymity and hostility of mass society. Another Leander, the hero has to cross this sea of puppetlike fellow men. When he has finally managed to reach his beloved, she too has relapsed into the depersonalized anonymity of the crowd. Only when he violently slaps her face does she wake up and become an individual again. As an experiment with the expressive possibilities of language, even when almost wholly empty of conceptual content, Les Amants du MStro is a fascinating tour de force; jt^hows the richness of the textural and rhythmic possibihties of kn-Jugi^ as distinct from discursive, use of dramatic dialogue, which replaces the exchange of ideas or information between the characters by the striking up and development of poetic images and themes by a new logic of association. This idea is ^carried ajstepfortkexJiy Tardieu in L'A.B.C. de Notre Vie ^^^OB~S7ofOurLife^, written in 1958 and first performed on May 30, 1959. Tardieu describes this as conc^o^ A protagonist has the main solo part, the individual man, a day in whose life among the crowd of the great city is the subject matter of the poem, starting with his awakening from his dreams in the morning and ending with his return to 174 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Parallels and Proselytes 175 sleep at night. The choral part consists of the indistinct murmur of the crowd, against which articulated parts of sentences rise and fall. Two further characters, Monsieur Mot and Madame Parole (Mr. Word and Madame Speech), illustrate the proceedings by reciting strings of words from the dictionary, which, the author states, are "musical notes or touches of color" rather than concepts. Other solo parts include a couple of lovers, a criminal, the voices of dreaming women. Three themes are interwoven in the movements of this concertqjin-words: the individual's illusion of his uniqueness against the indistinct murmur of the mass to which he belongs; the power of love to take man out of the flow of time and to make him into a true individual; and, finally, the recognition of man's rootedness in humanity as a whole—"Humanity, tu es mon paysage." The murmuring of the mass becomes one of the sounds of nature, like the wind in the forest, like the waves of the sea. In another "poem for acting," Rhythme d Trots Temps, ou Le Temple de Sigeste (Rhythm in Three-Time, or The Temple of Segesta), written in 1958, Tardieu has tried to reproduce the feelings of a traveler when he first sees the Greek temple of Segesta. Six girls represent the six columns that face the traveler as he approaches, a voice offstage embodies the traveler s feelings. The girls express calm and immutability, the ecstatic traveler is rhapsodic and emotional. Both L'A.B.C. de Notre Vie and Rhythme h T.rois Temps were accompanied at their first production by musipal quotations from the works of Anton Webern. In exploring the limits of the theatre, Tardieu has even tried. to write ajshortjjjaxjn^ybj^ Une Voix SdnfTeTsonne l^^qjc^WMbsaii^^^^ ■ The stage represents an empty room. A voice offstage recalls die memory of a room once familiar; the lighting onstage changes in accordance with the moods recalled. Only occasionally, a woman's voice is heard, like an echo from the past. This is certainly an interesting and ingenious, though by no means conclusive, experiment; it merely proves that fighting and decor have a part to play in creating poetry on the stage. But this has never been in need of proof. On the same program with Une Voix Sans Personne at V 5 the tiny Theatre de la Huchette in 1956, Tardieu presented his nearest approximation to a straight play, Les Temps du Verbe, ou Le Pouvoir de la Parole (The Tmse^fJheVerb, or The Power of Speech), two acts designed to demonstrate the tmesis th^'*tne"tenses of the verb govern our standppmtjrr, tirn& The ratheFmelodramafic^^ who has "Tost his wife in an automobile accident. He has withdrawn from the present, lives in the past, and speaks exclusively in the past tense. When he dies, his body is found to be that of a man who died a long time ago. As the body lies on the empty stage, the moment just before the accident comes to life again. Robert hears the voices of his wife and his niece speaking in the future tense. At that moment before his wife was killed, she still had a future, but "Past, present, future, which is true? Everything partakes of each at the same time! Everything fades away, but everything remains—and everything remains unfinished!"4 The volume of Tardieu's Poemes a Jouer concludes with his earliest dramatic effort, the verse gJay^JTomjcrre Sans Orage, ou Les Dieux Inutiles ^ln(T^er^tthout_Storm^or TheJiJseless Gods), dated 1944. This outwar^y,j^ftYen^ ^^^Tay^rnight almostJBeT^ogram note ^on_ thej>ub^ terJ5r"the IfEeSre of.thg.Absurd, 6'nTEe threshold of death, Asia, the mother of the titan Prometheus, reveals to her grandson Deucalion that the gods do not exist. She herself invented the myth of their existence to curb Prometheus's ambition when he was young. But far from inducing him to submit to higher powers, the supposed existence of the gods spurred Prometheus into his lifelong struggle against them. Deucalion tells Prometheus what he has learned^ but Prometheus, who is about to unleash a conflagration that wiH destroy the gods, and the world with them,/can no longer stop events from taking their course. Deucalion sails away into the unknown, "seeking in the reflection of the two abysses an alliance with my-new god—nothingness,"5 while Prometheus remains behind alone: I know, I know full well henceforth. In the superb desert of the night, Which is the god I threaten; It is myself, Prometheus!5 176 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD It is in the light of this reeogrution ofjhe absurp^ty^jjjhg, human situation in a go6UesT^^^jth*aTwie must see Tardieu's Impfe^ve'ejmHffiStaTwork; it is an attempt to find a means _of expression adequate to represent nmX^tojJbyojdto^rb^-geff*ia ajneaiiingless universe. Being: avowedly experimental, Tardieu's piaysT^tEougTi some of them contain poetry of great distinction, eannpJjMmJ^ ownjigjit. They are explorations, materials for research from which vahiablejxgerienceja^^ works of art that Tardieu himselrTorothers, making use ofjbis researchTmlght build on the foundations he has provided. This is. not to deny Tardieu's very considerable achievement, but rather to emphasize his importance. Here is a playwright's playwright, a dedicated pioneer bent on enlarging the vocabulary of his art. Alone among the playwrights of the avant-garde, Tardieu can claim that his work spans the .entire gamut of exploration. He straddles the poetic theatre of Schehad£ as well as the sardonic anti-theatre of Ionesco and the psychological dream world of Adamov and Genet. But by its very ' awareness, its experimental consciousness, its playfulness in trying out new devices, Tardieu's work misses the obsessive compulsiveness, and thus the hypnotic power, the inevitable-ness, of some of the masterpieces of the Theatre of the Absurd. If Tardieu's experiments pursue a course parallel to, but independent of, the development of the mam^stream of the new convention, the^jjngjejday AaJ^JaUj, within it clearly shttwT thT'^gns of the direct in-fcence_of .Ionesco, his fellow satrap in the College^^^^T pEysfaue. This play, Les Bdtisseurs d'Empire $T]wJ<4p!pMe %BjM3ei^, was first performed in Jean Vilar's experimental Theatre Recamier on December 22, 1959, six months after the tragic death of its author. Boris Vian was one of the most , remarkable figures of the postwar period in Paris. Engineer, jazz trumpeter, chansonnier, film actor, novelist, wit, jazz critic; one of the great characters of the Existentialist bohemia of the caves around Saint-Germain-des-Pres; translator of Raymond Chandler, Peter Cheney, James Cain, Nelson Algren, Strindberg, and the memoirs of General Omar N. Bradley; iconoclast and condemned pomographer; science-fiction ex- ^ Parallels and Proselytes 177 pert, and dramatist, Boris Vian seems an epitome of his time-sardonic, practical, a working technician and inventor of gadgets, a violent enemy of cant, and at the same time a sensitive poet, an artist concerned with the ultimate reality of the human condition. Boris Vian's first play, L'Equarrissage Pour Tous (which might be rendered in English as Knackery Made Easy—written in 1946-47 and first performed in 1950), already shows him as a master of a bitter, black humor, although the play, a tragicomic farce, still fits into a traditional pattern, in spite of the fact that Jean Cocteau greeted it as an event comparable ^ to Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de TirSsias and his own Marie's de Id Tour d'Eiffel. Described as "a paramilitary vaudeville in one long act," L'Equarrissage Pour Tous takes place in a knacker's yard at Arromanehes on the day of the Allied landings there, June 6, 1944. While the knacker's eccentric family go about their peaceful business of horse-slaughtering and ar-, ranging the marriage of one of their daughters to a German soldier, the place is continually invaded by military personnel of various nations, ranging from a Japanese parachutist to a Soviet Russian woman soldier, who inexplicably is one of the daughters of the house. There are also numerous Americans and members of the Free French forces. The hilarious and bawdy proceedings end when the knacker's house is blown up to make room for the glorious rebuilding schemes of the future. By this time the whole family has been killed, and the curtain falls to the strains of the "Marseillaise." So soon after the war, this sardonic play provoked veritable howls of indignation from all sides, particularly for its irreverent portrayal of members of the Free French forces, although they are expressly shown as opportunists who have joined the Resistance only that very day, and spend their time looking for cars they can requisition. In fact, the play is as harmless a piece of satire as it is a brilliant example of Vhumour noir at its blackest. Les\ BdtismUtiuEJZmnixe also has its touches of humor, but is a play of an altogether different kind—a poetic image of moi^Jji^jmd..±heJ.fcafcof«deaih. Its three acts show a family on the run from a mysterious but terrifying noise, which they try to escape by moving onto a higher and higher floor, into 178 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD an ever-smaller apartment. In Act I, father, mother, daughter Zenobie, and their maid, Cruehe, are shown taking possession of a two-room apartment. In Act II they are one floor higher, in a one-room apartment. The maid leaves them, and their daughter, who has gone to the landing, cannot return to them when the door mysteriously closes. Only the father and mother are left. The world becomes narrower and narrower for them. In the third act the father is seen entering a tiny attic room, so terrified of the noise that he barricades the entrance before his wife can get to him. He is alone. But the noise, tihejgrjf^ ing noise of the a^oacJfe„gf^dejdj, cannot be exdudedAnd *^w^txierea*^^wnereSLe father can escape to. He dies. Apart from the characters named, who have speaking parts, there is a mysterious, silent character, a half-human being, called a schmurz, "covered in bandages, dressed in rags, one arm in a sling, he holds a walking stick in the other. He hmps, bleeds, and is ugly to look at."6 This silent figure seems not to be noticed by the characters. Nevertheless they constantly rain brutal blows on him. Simple in structure and relentless in its progression, Les Bdtisseurs (FEmpire is a powerful and very personal statement. Proud as we are, confident that we are building our own world, our personal empire on earth, we are in fact constantly on the run; far from growing wider, our world contracts. As we jpr proach death, .we get more and more lonely, ouf'range of l^^^^^^^^^mSMSSSS'» * increasingly cuificuTt to commuiiicatc with the younger generation, and the subterranean noise of death grows louder and louder. AH this is clear enough. But what does the schmiirz stand for? It is perhaps significant that Boris Vian wrote some of his contributions to the more popular magazines under the pseudonym Adolphe Schmiirz. There can be little doubt that Les BdHsseurs a"Empire dramatizes Vian's own feelings. He knew be was suffering from a serious heart condition, the aftereffect of a fever attack. He had to give up playing his "beloved jazz trumpet: "Each note played on the trumpet shortens my life by a day," he said. It was his own life he saw narrowing. Does the schmurz therefore stand for the mortal part of ourselves that we brutally flog and maltreat without noticing what we are doing? The fact that the schmurz collapses and dies just Parallels and Proselytes 179 before the hero of the play does points in this direction. On the other hand, after the hero's death other schmurzes are seen invading the stage. Are they the messengers of death and is the hero's own schmurz his owii death, silently waiting for him, thoughtlessly flogged by the hero when he is not aware of his own mortality? Or is schmurz, derived from the Ger^ man word for pain—Scftmerz-simply the silent, ever-present pain of heart disease? Boris Vian died on June 23, 1959, while watching a private preview of a film based on one of bis books. There had been a good deal of controversy about the adaptation and he had not been invited to attend, but had merely sneaked in. In Les Bdtisseurs d'Empire the flight from death takes the form of trying to escape upward. The same im^gejppe^sta the opposite direction in a remarkable play bCDino^Bl^^, (bom in 1906), the eminent Italian novelist anil journalist on the staff of the Corriere della Sera in Milan. This play, first performed by the Piccolo Teatro, Milan, in 1953, and in Paris in an adaptation by Cainus in 1955, is{W^S]®^^ &1 two parts (thirteen scenes), it shows the death of a middle-aged businessman, Giovanni Corte. Busy, overworked, tyrannized but pampered as the family's breadwinner, whose health must be preserved, he is disturbed by hallucinations of a female voice calling him from the distance and by the specter of a woman that seems to haunt his house. He is persuaded to consult a famous specialist, and^goes-to-see him at his ultramodern hospital. Before he knows what has happened, he is an inmate of the hospital, about to be operated on. Everybody reassures him—this hospital is organized in the most efficient.modem n% 01 merely under iolbservarion, are on the top floor, the seventh. Those who are slightly less well are on the sixth; those who are ill, but not really badly, are on the fifth; andjsojanjjawjas chamgw^^y^tlji. ***Tn a terrifyingj^uencE^pfjacenes. Buzzatt shows hisjierols. descent. At first he is moved to the sixth floor merely to make foomTbr someone who needs his private ward more than he does. Further down, he still hopes that he is merely going ISO THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD down to be near some specialized medical facilities he needs, and before he has fully realized what has happened, he is so far down that there is no hope of escape. He is buried among the outcasts who have already been given up, the lowest class of human beings—the dying, Corte's mother comes to take him home, but it is too late. Un Caso Clinico is a remarkable and highly original work, a modern miracle play in the tradition of Everyman. It dramatizes the death of a rich man—his delusion that somehow he ism a special class, exempt from the ravages of illness; his, gradual loss of contact with reality; and, above all, the imperceptible manner of his descent and its sudden revelation to has found a terrifying imagejjfjsociety itself—an impersonal ..5jg|^^^5r^j^^0g5*^^" mdividuaT"on Kis way to death, caring for him, providing services, but at the same time dis-J tant, rule-ridden, incomprehensible, and cruehj While Les Bdtisseurs cFEmpire shows man in active fHghTTfrom death, Un Caso Clinico depicts him gradually overtaken by old age and illness, while totejy^j^^ J&, jhjy^dualjMocess^^ JusjDeniorialrty. Look- ing at the raincoat he wore aTthlTnsdgbt of his powers, Corte says, "Once Corte, the engineer, wore this fine raincoat. . . . Do you remember him? A dynamic man, sure of himself . . . how sure he was of himself, do you remember . . . P"7 Buzzati, the author of an outstanding Kafkaesque novel (11 Deserto dei Tartari) and many, short stories in a similar vein, has followed Un Caso Clinico with another play, Un Verme al Ministero (A Worm at the Ministry), which, however, belongs to a different theatrical convention. It is a political satire on a totalitarian revolution, reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 but with a curiously mystical ending—the appearance of a Christ-like figure at the moment when the turncoat bureaucrat is about to insult the Crucifix to prove his sincerity in supporting the atheist dictatorship. Another interesting^Kaj^uxontribution to the Theatre of the Absurd is that of^fe^^^Hw^born in 1892). A man of many parts, dTCrrieohad made a name as a painter and a writer of thrillers in the vein of Simenon, art critic, film writer, Parallels and Proselytes 181 and journalist, when, in 1948, he turned to writing plays. His output of well over twenty plays since then has been varied, but has gradually veered in the direction of the Theatre of the Absurd. The starting point here is a criticism of the modern world, which, in II Formicaio (The Anthill), appears as a grotesque, dehumanized place in which the hero, Casirniro, ends up by losing not only his individuality but even the gift of articulate speech. Tempo di Cavallette (Time of the Locusts) shows postwar Italy as a ruined village inhabited by selfish opportunists. When Joe, the Italo-American, arrives to share his wealth with the people of his homeland, he is murdered by a pair of juvenile delinquents. He reappears as a Christ-like figure, but the inhabitants are destroyed in a holocaust—of locusts or of atom bombs?—which incinerates the ruins of the village. Only a little boy survives, the hope of a new world, TSmpo di Cavallette had its first performance at Darmstadt in the spring of 1958, in German. D'Errlco's experimental plays seem to have daunted the theatres of his native Italy, for his most important play to date in the convention of the Theatre of the Absurd, La Foresta '\r%e_Fore^), also had its first stage appearance in German— on September 19, 1959, in Kassel. The forest of the title consists of the grotesque relics of a mechanical civilization: broken telegraph poles, a derelict petrol pump, pylons and gallows growing out of a soil of concrete. In the spring, "the concrete burgeons like a mold, a filthy mold that rises, stratifies, and invades everything."8 The people inhabiting this forest, from which there is no way out, are lost souls. Like the tramps in Waiting for Gt?^oi,-they; are-hoping for a mirade^fi^ nme"ro time a train is heard passing in the distance and a ticket collector appears—he is an image of death. Those whose tickets have run out must die. Among the derelicts are an old professor; a man of the world, and his ex-prostitute mistress; a vintner who in some ways represents Christiamty and who struggles to hold on to his faith; a general whose family was killed in an air raid while he was directing operations at the front, and who lost his military unconcern with death when he saw the ruins under which they were buried; and a young poet who lost i8a THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD contact with reality when he was forced to take a humdrum job to support his family—he conducts animated and agonizing conversations with unseen characters whose replies take the form of improvisations on the saxophone and the violin. The main action of the play turns round the efforts of Mar-got, the ex-prostitute (who was forced into prostitution when captured by enemy troops during the war), to redeem the young poet. But when she offers him her love and invites him to flee, he cannot bear to return to reality, and kills himself. Margot reproaches herself for having offered romantic*o-tions of love to the boy, rather than wirming him back to reality with her body, and she goes mad. The vintner reaffirms his faith that man is not abandoned by the deity, but the play ends with the radio idiotically bawling out the morning gymnastics, and Max, Margofs lover, mechanically performing the grotesque exercises it prescribes. The forest of concrete is an apt poetic image of an industrial civilization, and the characters who inhabit it are all sufferers from its scourges—war, intellectual pride, the suppression of the poetic impulse by commercial pressures, religious doubt, and all the horrors of the concentration camp. (Max was forced under torture to betray his best friend, the friend left him his vast fortune, and he is now roaming the world to escape from his memories. Margot was tortured and forced to become a prostitute for the troops during the war.) The play is the passionate outcry of a romantic against the deadening, of sensibilities, the loss of contact with organic nature, that the spread of a tivilization of concrete and iron has brought about. D'Errico's dream world, absurd and harsh though it may be, has a wistful poetic symbolism, a softness that sometimes verges on sentimentality. In the work of another Latin writer, ^Manuel de Pedrolo/(born in 1918), we are in the presence ofan intelligence of almost geometrical austerity. De Pedrolo would by now be better known outside his native country but for the fact that he writes in a language—Catalan—that is little understood even by those in the English-speaking world who would normally have access to French, Spanish, or German. He is a prolific novelist and short-story writer, and also the author of a number of plays, some of which fall into the con- Parallels and Proselytes 183 vention of the Theatre of the Absurd. After fighting in the Spanish Civil War, on the losing side, he has worked as elementary-schoolteacher, insurance agent, salesman, translator, and publisher's reader. He has gained an impressive number of literary prizes. De Pedrolo's one-act play Cruma (first performed in Barcelona on July 5,1957), is a study in human isolation. "Cruma" is the name of an Etruscan measure or measuring instrument0 and the play shows an attempt to measure the human situation by standards that have become inoperative and meaningless. In an empty and bare-walled corridor .that seems part of a larger apartment, a man who is at home there—and is therefore called "the resident"—is about to measure the dimensions of the walls. He is joined by a visitor who helps him in this work—which is in vain, because they discover that the measuring tapes they are using are blank, without markings or figures. The situation of the resident in the corridor of his apartment is as mysterious as that of the two tramps on their road in Waiting for Godot. The resident is unaware of an outside world. He does not know how the objects he uses have reached him. The visitor notices that he is using an ashtray, and asks him where he got it. "I don't know," the resident replies. "Someone brought it and now it is here." The visitor warns him, "If you are not careful, objects will invade your life."10 The visitor, too, is oblivious of the outside world, although, as the resident reminds him, he must have come from outside. It is in the same dreamlike atmosphere that the two are brought into contact with other characters. Voices are heard outside calling a woman's name, Nagaio. A girl passes through the corridor but is barely noticed by the resident and the visitor. When the visitor, who wants to wash his hands, opens the door to the bathroom, a stranger emerges, whom the resident takes for the visitor, a misunderstanding that makes communication almost impossible. Nagaio, the woman whom the voices have been heard calling, is seen when the window is opened in an apartment on the other side of the courtyard. Again the resident and the visitor find it difficult to communicate with her, but the stranger immediately makes friends with her and arranges a date. The stranger also has no difficulty in establishing contact with the girl, who again traverses the cor- 184 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD ridor. He decides to go out with this girl, instead of Nagaio. When the girl disappears behind a curtain leading into one of the rooms, he wants to follow her, but the curtain has turned into a solid door. The resident is able to open the door and let him reach the girl. Resident and visitor are left alone. They try to understand what has happened, and come to the conclusion that the strange beings who have disturbed them do not exist. But then they themselves cannot claim that they exist in reality. This being settled, they can return to their work. There is a knock at the door. As the resident goes to open it, the curtain falls. This strange short play poses the problem of the reality of the "others" and the possibility of establishing contact with them. Each character represents a different level of being. The resident occupies one, end of the scale—he is an authentic being exploring his own world, hence unable to relate himself to others, unable even to distinguish his friend from a stranger. On the other end of the scale is the young girl—she exists only insofar as others want her. The other three characters represent intermediary steps on this scale. The greater the inner reality or authenticity of a human being, the less able he is to establish contact with the outside world, in its crudity and deceptiveness. And yet this interior solitude is bound to be disturbed; at the end of the play, the whole cycle of invasions from the inauthentic, everyday world is about to begin anew. De Pedrolo's second, and more ambitious, play in this convention, Homes i No (^^n^^^^No^. first performed in Barcelona on December 19, 1958), is described by the author as "an investigation in two aets." The stage is divided into three parts by two screens of iron bars; in the compartment in the middle, the prison guard, a strange inhuman being called No, watches over the inmates of the cells to the left and right. No has fallen asleep, and the two couples, Fabi and Selena in one cage, Bret and Eliana in the other, try to overpower their jailer. But he awakes in time. The attempt of the two human couples to break out from behind the bars that imprison them fails. But the human beings, now that they have become conscious of the possibility of escape, have high hopes that someday they will succeed—and if not they themselves, their , children. ' Parallels and Proselytes 185 In the second act, the two couples are joined by a son, Feda, in one case, and in the other by a daughter, Some. Feda and Some are in love and resolve to do all they can to break out from the cages that prevent them from being united. They undertake a thorough examination of their prison and find that on the far side the cells end in an unbridgeable abyss. Their parents had been so fascinated by No that they had never even taken the trouble to explore the other side of their prison. Yet there seems no escape that way. Hence the young people concentrate on the back wall, and discover that this is by no means as solid as it seemed but has, rather, the appearance of a kind of curtain. Shall they tear that curtain down? No, the inhuman jailer is deeply perturbed, and begs them not to do so. If they do, it will be the end for them. Death? No, much worse. As the tension grows, Feda finally decides to take the risk and they tear the curtain down. Behind it there is another row of bars, which not only close their respective cells but reveal that No himself is merely a prisoner in a third cell. Behind this new row of bars sit three new jailers clad in black, silent and motionless. No has been a prisoner himself, but as Feda exclaims, "even more so, because he knew itl"11 Homes i No is indeed an investigation—an investigation into the probjemjaf liberty. Man is imprisoned in an infinitelyre-ceding series <^S^SSSSTWa^svefne tinnks~that he has broken through one of these barriers (the barrier ot superstition, the barrier of myth or tyranny, or the inability to master nature), he finds himself face to face with a new barrier (the metaphysical anguish of the human condition, death, the relativity of all knowledge, and so on). But the struggle to overcome the new row of iron bars continues; it must go oň, even if we know in advance that it will reveal only a further barrier beyond. In the simplicity of its conception, and in the complete merging of the philosophical idea with its concrete representation in terms of a stage picture, Homes í No must occupy a high place among the most successful examples of the Theatre of the Absurd. Manuel de Pedrolo has completed a number of further plays in this convention. If they maintain the promise of his first attempts, he will take his place among the major exponents of the genre. l86 the theatre of the absurd Another Spaniard who may well be able to claim such a place is^ernai^E^riafeal/ who was born in Melilla (formerly Spanish Morocco) in 193a, completed his law studies at Madrid, but has been living in France since 1954, and writing his plays in French, Arrabai's world derives its absurdity not, like that of de Pedrolo, from the despair of the philosopher trying to probe the secrets of being, but from the fact hending eyes,of xhildlike .simplicity'. Like children, they are often cruelbecause they have failed ten^enbm^'or^eveiidto'. notice, the existence of a moral law; and, like children, they puffer the cruelty of the world as a meaningless ajHi^^""'". Arrabai's ErSTp^ (the title2 is a cruel pun—it might be taken to mean "picnic in the country," but actually stands for "picnic on the battlefield"), already clearly shows this approach. He wrote the play at the age of twenty, under the influence of the news from the Korean War, This short one-act play shows a soldier, Zapo, isolated in the front line of the fighting. His father and mother, who are too simple to grasp the ferocity of modern war, arrive to visit him, so that they can have a Sunday picnic together. When an enemy soldier, Zepo, turns up, Zapo takes him prisoner, but later invites him to join the picnic. As the party gaily proceeds, a burst of machine-gun fire wipes out all the participants. This is Chaplinesque comedy without the redeeming happy end; it already contains the highly disturbing mixture of innocence and cruelty so characteristic of Arrabal. This is also the atmosphere of Oraison, a drame mystique in one act, which opens the volume of Arrabai's Thi&tre, published in 1958. A man and a woman, Fidio and Lilbe (notice the baby talk of the names), sit by a child's coffin discussing ways and means of being good—from today. Lilbe cannot grasp what it means to be good: Ui.be; Shall we not be able to go and have fun, as before, in the cemetery? fidio: Why not? lilbe: And tear the eyes out of the corpses, as before? fidio: No, not that. lube: And kill people? Parallels and Proselytes 187 fidio: No. lilbe: So well let them live? ftdio: Obviously. lilbe: So much the worse for them.12 As this discussion on the nature of goodness proceeds, it is gradually revealed that Fidio and Lilbe are sitting by the coffin of their own child, whom they have killed. Naively they discuss the example of Jesus, and come to the conclusion that they will have a try at being good, although Lilbe foresees the likelihood that they will get tired of it. In Les Deux Bourreaux (The^^^Exemtioners), we aire faced with an analogous situation, but neifeliOTvem^onal mp-rality is more directly attacked^^elf^conbrad^towprwoman, TPran^seT^omeTmtrTher two sonsj Benoit ancTMaurice, to denounce her husband to the two executioners of the title. He is guilty of some unspecified crime. Francoise, who hates him, wants to witness his being tortured in the next room. She rejoices in his sufferings, and even rushes into the torture chamber to put salt and vinegar on his wounds. Benoit, who is a dutiful son of his mother, accepts her behavior, but Maurice protests. Maurice is thus a bad son, who disobeys his mother and hurts her. When the father finally dies of his tortures, Maurice persists in accusing his mother of having caused his death, yet finally he is persuaded into the path of duty. He asks to be forgiven for his insubordination, and as the curtain falls the mother and her sons embrace. In Fando et Lis, a play in five scenes, Fando is pushing his beloved, Lis, who is paralyzed, in a wheelchair. They are on the road to Tar. Fando loves Lis dearly, and yet, at the same time, he resents her as a burden. Nevertheless he tries to amuse her by playing her the only thing he knows on his drum, the Song of the Feather. They meet three gentlemen with umbrellas, who are also on the way to Tar, a place that they, like Fando and Lis, find it almost impossible to reach. Instead of getting to Tar, they always arrive back in the same place. Fando proudly displays Lis's beauty to the three gentlemen, raising her skirt to show off her thighs, and inviting them to kiss her. Fando loves Lis, but he cannot resist the temptation to be cruel to her. In Scene 4, we learn that, to show her off i88 THE THEATEE OE THE ABSURD to the gentlemen, he left her lying naked in the open all night. Now she is even more ill than before. Fando has her in chains, and puts handcuffs on her, just to see whether she can drag herself along with them. He beats her. Falling down, she breaks his little drum. He is so furious that he beats her unconscious. When the three gentlemen arrive, she is dead. The last scene shows the three gentlemen with umbrellas confusedly discussing what has happened. Fando appears with a flower and a dog—he promised Lis that when she died he would visit her grave with a flower and a dog. The three gentlemen decide-to. accompany him to the cemetery. After that the four of them can try to make their way to Tar. In its strange mixture of commedia dell'arte and Grand ISSJaTJ^^aiaJaJai- % projecting the emotions of child- " hood into an adult world, Arrabal achieves an effect that.is i both tragicomic and profound, because it reveals the truth] hidden behind a good deal of adult emotion as well. Arrabal's most ambitious play to date is Le Cimetiire des Voitures fS£3^^^2£-H^^^^' a pIay in acts' which attempts no less than^recg^ruciioj3 of the,,passion of Christ seen through -'ArrabaTs .cMdlike eyes and„place4,. in a grptosque landscape of squalor. The scene is a derelict graveyard of old motorcars, wKich is, however, run on the lines of a luxury hotel. A valet, Milos, provides the service—breakfast in bed and a kiss from Dila, the .prostitute, for every gentleman before he falls asleep, The hero, Emanou (i.e., Emanuel), a trumpet player, is the leader of a group of three musicians: his companions are Tope, the clarinetist, and Fodere, the saxophone player, a mute modeled on Harpo Marx. Emanou, like Fidio in Oraison wants to be good. This desire expresses itself hi his providing music for dancing to the inmates of the auu> mobile graveyard every night, although the playing of musical instruments is strictly forbidden by the police. Throughout the play, two indefatigable athletes, a man, Tiossido, and an elderly woman, Lasca, cross the scene in a grotesque show, of sportsmanship. In the second act, these two are revealed as police agents who are after Emanou, They pay Top6 to betray his master for money—he will identify him by a kiss. When Parallels and Proselytes 189 this happens, the mute Fodere denies him by vigorously shaking his head as he is asked whether he knows Emanou. Emanou is savagely beaten and taken away, dying, his arms tied to the handle bars of a bicycle. The grotesque high life of lie automobile graveyard continues. Emanou's desire to be good is shown as a vague wish rather than a rational conviction. He recites his creed of goodness mechanically: "When one is good, one feels a great interior joy, born from the peace of the spirit that one knows when one sees oneself similar to the -ideal image of man/' but by the end of the play he seems to have forgotten this text and gets !into a complete muddle when tiyirig to recite it. At the same time, he earnestly discusses with his disciples whether it would not be more profitable to take up another profession-such as stealing or murder—and decides against these occupations merely on the ground that they are too difficult. When Dila tells him that she too. wants to be good, Emanou replies, "But you are good already; you allow everybody to sleep with you."13 Although the parallels between Emanou and Christ are made so obvious as to border on the blasphemous (he was born in a stable, his father was a carpenter, he left home at the age of thirty to play the trumpet), the play achieves an impression of innocence—the search for goodness pursued with total dedication in a universe that is both squalid and devoid of meaning. Insuch a world there camotte^^j^toa^ablg ethical standards^jmd^^ Tnfeipnse^gic in itsldjsmdto, aTabsurd as the strenuous ^running of the police spies in the pursuit ot sportsmansnip. Arrabal's preoccupation with the problem of goodness-the relationship between love and cruelty, b^jguesri^omg^ofall accepted etblc^sto^ir&i|fcpm,jii0- fta^^M.MS^^ wEowutdTe only too eager to^cc^ <¥muS^^'&&^p^^^t^P%T^m^ of Beckett's tramps in WaWfe for Godot. Arrabal, who insists that his writing is the expression of his personal dreams and emotions, acknowledges his deep admiration for Beckett. But although he has translated some bFAdamov's plays into Spanish, he does not think that he has been influenced by him. Arrabal's published plays are intensely human. Yet he is also J-90 . THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD greatly interested in developing an abstract theatre that would eliminate any human content altogether. In his Orchestration Théátrale (first performed under the direction of Jacques Poliéri in the fall of 1959), he has tried to create a dramatic spectacle consisting entirely of Jthji^movemenisJ^abste^^ tm%e-o%iehsMtřál šhapéXšóíne of which were mechanical de-■f^é^Twlulě^ffiřTwere moved by dancers. The formal world of this strange spectacle was based on the inventions of Klee, Mondrian, Delauney, and the mobiles of Alexander Calder. Arrabal is convinced that the incongruities of mechanical movement are a potential source of highly comic effects. The script of Orchestration Théátrale, which contains no dialogue whatever, resembles the notation of a gigantic game of chess (Arrabal is a passionate chess player) and is illustrated by fascinating colored diagrams. The difficulties of putting this daring conception on the stage within the means of a struggling avant-garde company proved so formidable that the lack of public acclaim achieved by the experiment is by no means conclusive proof of the impossibility of an abstract mechanical theatre. Another experiment by a foreign author living in France that contains the promise of a widening of scope of the convention of the Theatre of the Absurd, is a play by a young Israeli, Amos Kenan, which Roger Blin directed and which had its first performance in French at the Theatre de Lutěce on October 28, i960. Le Lion, translated from the Hebrew by the author and Christiane Rochefort,14'clearly shows the influence of Ionesco in its disregard for any congruity between the nature and the physical appearance of the characters. The cast list of three consists of "the báby, aged about fifty," "the woman, aged about thirty," who treats the baby as her own child, and "the chauffeur, aged about twenty." The three characters, all of whom are never together on the stage at the same time, are in constant flux. From being a baby in a playpen, the fifty-year-old brusquely changes into a general directing a battle and an industrial tycoon engaged in vast building operations. The chauffeur, who has been driving him around on this inspection tour of battlefield and factory, turns into a burglar who breaks into the woman's house, where he is made to help S Parallels and Proselytes 191 himself to all valuables and makes love to the woman, who has previously been shown as the baby-tycoon's mistress, being served by him in a shoe shop. In the final scene, the woman is again the mother trying to make the baby eat its cream. But the baby insists that he is now a Hon. What does all this amount top The play seems to be an attempt to produce a synoptic view of human emotions by abolishing the sequence of time. The baby already contains the general and the general is still in many respects a baby, and both, with their aggressive instincts, are also, at the same time, a hon. The woman is mother, distandy adored mistress, and sensuous accomplice of the burglar, who, in turn, at one point is the servile subordinate of the general, then becomes the innocent victim of persecution, and then again a tough criminal. If we saw the life of our fellow men all at once rather than in a time sequence, the play argues, we would be struck by the simultaneous coexistence of such seemingly contradictory characteristics. Le Lion shared the double bill at the Theatre de Lutéce with a play by an already established writer of acknowledged eminence, most of whose work lies outside the scope of this book, flMax Frischl (born in 1911), the important German-Swiss dramatisTand novelist. The play in question,t^^rf«a»re "uW^WWam&e^, (Biedermann and the IncendW^ftkt produced in the original German at the Zurich Schauspielhaus on March 29, 1958, is Frisbh's first excursion into the realm of humour noir and the Theatre of the Absurd. Frisch and his compatriot, Friedrich Duerrenmattj without doubt the leading dramatists of the German-spéakúig world today, have developed a dramatic idiom of their own, a style that owes a great deal to Bernard Shaw, Thornton Wilder, and Bertolt Brecht, and one that might perhaps most aptly be described as a theatre of intellectual fantasy, airing contemporary problems in a vein of disillusioned tragicomedy. In being a sardonic commentary on a contemporary political phenomenon, Biedermann und die Brandstifter clearly belongs in this vein, but in the parodistic treatment of the subject and its resolute pursuit of the absurd, the play also shows the influence of the Theatre of the Absurd. iga THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Labeled a "didactic play without a lesson," Biedermann und die Brandstifter tells, in six scenes and an epilogue, the cautionary tale of a highly respectable bourgeois (Biedermann means precisely this in German), a manufacturer of hair lotion, whose house is invaded by a trio of shady characters. Biedermann knows that his home town has been the scene of a series of incendiary acts that are the work of men who have sought shelter in various houses, on the ground that they are homeless. He soon suspects that his guests are incendiaries, but even when they openly stack drums of gasoline in his afciie,/ even when they fix fuses and detonators in front of his own eyes, he believes that they will not set fire to his house, and to the whole town, if only he treats them nicely and invites them to a special dinner of goose and red cabbage. As one of the incendiaries sums up the situation, "Jocularity is the third-best kind of camouflage; the second-best is sentimentality- . . . But the best ajnd_Safertcamouflage is ..stflljthg pure, jifkedj^^ Biedermann is shown as heartkšsarianSnícal. He has driven one of his employees to suicide by dismissing him after years of faithful service, but at the same time he sees himself as an affable fellow who knows how to charm people. And this is his undoing. Two of the incendiaries, though depicted as victims of the social order, are destructive purely for the sake of destructiveness and the feeling of power they get from seeing things burn. The third is an intellectual who thinks he is serving some abstract principle. When the fuses are about to be lit, the intellectual rats on his fellow conspirators, having discovered that they are not interested in his ideological rationalizations of destruction. But Biedermann does not believe this warning either^When tEe incendiaries find that they are out or matches, he obhgmdyJianrlaJhem his own, so that thevjcan hghtlhejuse.that_b^ his wiferHms^Tand the wholejgwju. """The civilization that is jjemgdestroyed^j^ "m°st D|°JBkJ^fTOjiot_in God butjri^tiig^^jjriggig."16 AnáHthe play is framed bylľTíurTôíque pseudo-Greek chorus of firemen, who are constantly affirming their readiness to intervene. Injhjsjjpjkigue,^^ but in this unmetáphysical age the Devil himself (who is re- s Parallels and Proselytes 193 vealed as one of the incendiaries) r^uíésjo_oonduct a hell for georile^^JBiedermarm,. As the destroyjjd^cil^Jia^ b^u^iňořej^autiful than befiscS&Žeeins that life can go on. Biedermann und die Brandstifter is more than just a very telling piece of p^ti^aljajtire. The political satire is certainly there: Biedermann's situation, according to Hans Baenziger, the author of an excellent study of Frisch, is based on the situation of President Beneš of Czechoslovald^_^S°Jt^S^^^ "Communists mtó 'fesHgovem^ were^hgaj^^ It is ; also the situation of the German intellectuals who thought that Hitler did not mean what he said when he spoke of war and conquest, and so allowed him to start a world conflagration. And it is also, in a sense, the situation of the world in the age of the hydrogen bomb, when the attics of the world's major powers are stored with very highly inflammable and explosive material. But beyond this purely political aspect, Frisch's play describes the státe of mind of the family in Ionesco's JhejMd^ ""^^^^^S/where the destruction of values has reachedapoint "where the bewildered individual can no longer distinguish between the things that ought to be preserved and those that should be destroyed. The fire brigade is ready, but there is no one left who can recognize the incendiaries as dangerous, and so the measures taken to prevent the fire are bound to _fafljWhat is more, in a world of dead routine, of unceasing consumption and production, the destruction of a civilization will be felt merely as a beneficial way of clearing the ground t for a new building boom—so that production and consumption can continue. The Theatre of the Absurd has struck a responsive chord in the German-speaking world, where thej^Uapse of a whole f "loss ofineaning and cohesion in men's lives more evident than / * elsewhere. Thema^ —Y more suceessTuTln Germany than anywhere else to date. Yet šFtotáThas been the vacuum leftby HfflerHthat ithas taken a long time for a new generation of dramatists to arise. (Hence the leading position occupied by two Swiss dramatists in the Y 194 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD contemporary German-speaking theatre.) Nevertheless;, the breakthrough of a new generation of writers has started. / f^oJfg^gTIMeSh'e^^ (born in 1916), one of the first German dramatists to take up the idiom of the Theatre of the Absurd, spent the war years, significantly enough, in exile abroad, and is still an_ Israeli citizen. Originally a painter, Hildesheimer started his career^slTdramatist with a series of witty and fantastic radio plays—picaresque tales of forgers, grotesque Balkan countries, and Oriental romance. The step from this type of intellectual thriller to the Theatre of the,Absurd .seems a natural development. Hildesheimer regards the Theatre of the Absurd, as he has pointed out in a briUiantly argued lecture on the subject,18 as a theatre of parables. Admittedly, "the story of the prodigal son is also a parable. But it is a parable of a different kind. Let us analyze the difference—the story of the prodigal son is a parable deliberately conceived to allow an indirect statement (that is, to give the opportunity to reach a conclusion by analogy), while<&gjab^a intentional omission of any statement. f^or life, too, makes no sjalement/19 Hildesheimer's collected volume of the plays that illustrate his conception of the Theatre of the Absurd has the title Spiele in denen es dunkel wird (Plays in Which Darkness Falls) .20 This is literally the case. As each of the three plays unfolds, the light fades. In Pastorale, oder Die Zeit für Kakao (Pastoral, or Time for Cocoa);, some elderly characters disport themselves in a strange syncopation of dialogue concerned with business matters and stock-exchange deals, with artistic and poetic overtones (a mixture very characteristic of the tone of West German society today). As the fight grows darker, summer turns into autumn and winter, and death overtakes the president of a big company, a consul, and a raining engineer. In Landschaft mit Figuren (Landscape with Figures), a painter is shown at work painting the portraits of a group of equally empty and pretentious characters—a great but aging lady, her gigolo, and an elderly tycoon. Here too the characters pass from middle to old age before our eyes until they die, are neatly packed into boxes, and sold to a collector—so that the characters themselves have become their own por-*i Parallels and Proselytes 195 traits. As this work proceeds, a glazier is putting new panes of glass into the studio windows. It is through them that the light gradually becomes dark. But at the end the painter and his wife are as young as they were in the beginning, and as they are left alone, the mauve panes of glass fall to the ground and the stage is once more bathed in light. The glazier appears again in Die Uhren (The Clocks), but this time the panes of glass he puts into the windows of a room inhabited by a man and wife are jet black and impenetrable. As the work proceeds, the couple relive scenes from their life together; toward the end a salesman comes who sells them a profusion of clocks of all kinds. And at the final curtain the man and his wife are inside the clocks, making ticking noises. These chamatijcjoarables^ are impressive poetic statements, even thou^i^ey^refarTrombeing free from rather obviously drawn analogies and somewhat facile conclusions* Hildesheimer's parable plays are gentle and elegant. The theatre offSv^^^^ssj (born in 1927) is of a far rougher texture. Grass also started his career as a painter. His plays are like the canvases of Bosch or^Goya brought to life—violent and grotesque. InfOnKei, Onkel)(Uncle, Uncle), we meet Bollin, a_young malTsmg^mmHedly dedicated to.murder-f ^wheJs^Iwayi^howtt-as^f^ victims disjil&y^JgiS helhas hidden takes no notice*of him when he emerges, but merely asks him to help her with her crossword puzzle; the gamekeeper he traps in the woods continues to instruct two city children in the botany of forest trees and methods of escape; the film star whom he wants to kill in her bathtub drives him away with her foolish chatter; and in_the end_two^children .stealJBofiin^revojver ancLshoot htm cl^ad., ^. In ZKehmd^re^sigTMhne (Thirty-two Teeth),'me meet a schoolmaster as single-minded as Bollin—for him tooth hygiene overrides all other passions. Hockwasser (The Flood) shows a family fleeing from the rising water onto the top floor of their house and then to the roof, where they meet a pair of philosophical rats. As the waters recede and they return to routine fives frTa ruined home, they regret losing the excitement and the corrupt figures of fantasy they met during the emergency. 10,6 the theatre of the absurd The short play Noch Zehn Minuten bis Buffalo (Ten Minutes to Buffalo) presents an ancient toy locomotive passing through a nonsense landscape accompanied by nautical conversation and never getting to Buffalo at all. Giinter Grass's most interesting play, however, Die Bosen Koche (The Wicked Cooks), is an ambitious attempt to transmute a religious subject into poetic tragicomedy. Cooks proliferate on the stage—there are two rival factions of cooks and they are after the secret of a mysterious gray soup consisting of ordinary cabbage soup with the addition of a special kind : of ashes. The holder of this secret is known as the Count, although his real name is the very ordinary one of Herbert, Schymanski. The cooks make a bargain with the Count. He can marry Martha; the nurse, if he promises to let them in on his secret. But when they demand that he keep his part of ■the bargain, the Count has forgotten the recipe. "I have told you often enough, it is not a recipe but an experience, living knowledge, continuous change. You should be aware of the fact that no cook has ever succeeded in cooking the same soup twice. ... The last months, this life with Martha . . . has made this experience superfluous. I have forgotten it."21 Unable to fulfill their part of the bargain, the Count and Martha kill themselves. There can be little doubt that an analogy to the Passion pervades the play. Martha washes the Count's feet shortly before he dies, and there is an association between the mysterious food and the Eucharist, which, after all, was instituted in the course of, and is symbolized by, a meal. Giinter Grass wrote most of'his plays before 1957. He has since then achieved a major success with a vast and grotesquely exuberant novel, Die Blechtrommel (1959), but it is to be hoped that he will not abandon the theatre altogether. Another notable novelist who also started his career as a painter and who has also ventured into the field of the Theatre of the Absurd is Robert Pinget (born in 1919). Pinget is a native of Geneva who now lives in Paris. He studied law, painted, taught French in England for a while, and became Wound Alain Robbe-Grillet. Pinget is a close friend of Samuel Beckett and his play Lettre Morte (Dead Letter) shared the Parallels and Proselytes 197 bill with Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Theatre Steamier in thejjprinj^jrf i960. Lettre Mortestakes up the theme of Pinget's novel Le Fiston (i959)j ^3en"is in the form of a letter addressed by an abandoned father to his prodigal son; the father does not know where his son has gone, so the letter cannot be sent off and remains a "dead letter." Le Fiston tries to reproduce the rambling, ill-organized shape of an endless epistle, added to from day to day; the book lacks even pagination, thus increasing the reader's illusion that he is reading a real letter composed by a besotted old man. The play, Lettre Morte, puts that same old man, Monsieur Levert, on the stage. It is as though the author had become so obsessed with the reality of the long letter that he had to see the man who wrote it before his eyes in the flesh. We see Monsieur Levert in two situations—in the bar, opening his heart to the bartender, and in the post office, trying to persuade the clerk behind the counter to have another good look to see whether there isn't somewhere, after all, a letter from his lost son that might have gone astray. But the bartender and the post-office clerk are played by the same actor, the counter of the post office is the same as that of the bar. The fM innn is .waiting without real hope, like the tramps in "^^2fcfe«rS£^c He is continually racking his brain to find the reason why his son has left him, what he has done wrong to lose his affection. Outside, a funeral procession passes. Monsieur Levert is waiting for death. In a short scherzo in this symphony of melancholy and regret two of the actors of an itinerant company come into the bar and playfully repeat passages from the sentimental bedroom farce they have been performing that night. The play is called The Prodigal Son, and it deals with a father who writes letters to his son, imploring him to return. Whereupon he does return. Here the worn-out convention of boulevard theatre, where everything -"happens as it should, is cruelly confronted with that of the ^Theatre of the Absurd where nothing happens at all and where tneJ^s^r^oMlo^ue do not flit wittily to and fro like pmg-pong blTllsTjuFare as repetitious and inconclusive as in real life—and hence as absurd as reality in a meaningless woria is bound to be. Pinget's second attempt at the dramatic form is a short 198 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD radio play, La ManiveMe (translated under the title The Old Tune by Samuel Beckett, and first broadcast in the B.B.C.'s Third Programme on August 23, i960), in which the absurdity of real speech is carried to the extreme: two old men, an organ-grinder and his friend, are talking about the past. The conversation rambles from subject to subject, and each of the old men comes out with some choice bit of his past life. The trouble is that the other immediately contradicts the truth of that information, so that each one's recollection of his own past life is called into question. The past of each of these two old mejfi:, mutually cancels out the other. What are they left with? Was their past life a mere illusion? As the two stand talking in the, street, the sounds of modern traffic almost drown their recollections. Eventually, however, the handle of the barrel organ that had jammed (hence the title of the French original) turns again, and the old tune rises triumphantly above the traffic, perhaps a symbol that the old tune of memory, however rickety and uncertain, still prevails. This short radio play, brilliantly translated by Beckett into an Irish idiom, creates, out of fragments that in their strict naturalness are incoherent to the point of imbecility, a strange texture of nostalgic associations and lyrical beauty. For there is no real contradiction between a meticulous reproduction of reality and a literature of the Absurd. Quite the reverse. Most real conversation, after all, is incoherent, illogical, ungrammat-ical, and elliptical. By transcribing reality with ruthless accuracy, the dramatist arrives at the^disintegrating language of the Absurd. It is the strictly logical dialogue of the rationally constructed play that is unrealistic and highly stylized. In a world that has become absurd, transcribing reality with meticulous care is enough to create the impression of extravagant irrationality. This is also the method of one of the most promising exponents of the Theatre of the Absurd in the English-speaking world,l|(arog^ESE6^(born in JQgo)^ The son of a Jewish tailor inHackney, in East LondonT* Pinter started writing poetry for little magazines in his teens, studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, and, under the stage name David Baron, Parallels and Proselytes 199 J efflb^ikfcd^oiLfin acting career, which led him around Ireland \ in a Shakespearean company and to years of strenuous work I in provincial repertory. After starting on a novel,, The Dwarfs, i which he did not finish, he began to write plays in 1957. He I himself has told the story of how he mentioned an idea for a j play to a friend of his who was working in the drama depart- \ ment of Bristol University. The friend liked the idea so much I that he wrote to Pinter asking for the play, adding that if the I university was to perform it, he would have to send the manu- > script within a week. "So I wrote back and told him to forget ] , about the whole thing. And then I sat down and wrote it in J four days, I don't quite know how it happened, but it did^£_w. I This rapidly and spontaneously written one-act play^T/ie^ f rfloo»L"|first performed at Bristol University in May, 1957), \ already contains a good many of the basic themes and a great J deal of the very personal style and idiom of Pinter's later and I more successful work—the uncannily cruel accuracy of his re- 1 production of the inflections and rambling irrelevancy of I everyday speech; the commonplace situation that is gradually I invested with menace, dread, and mystery; the deliberate I omission of an explanation or a motivation for the action. The room, which is the center and chief poetic image of the play, is one of the recurring motifs of Pinter's work. As he himself once ■ t put it, "Two people in a room—I am dealing a great deal of the I " —. time with this mage^of tprojgeopJeiJni!j^mr£Oniit The curtain I goes up on the stage, anaTTseeitlis a very potent question: I What is going to happen to these two people in the room? Is I someone going to open the door and come in?"23 The starting t f point of Pinter's theatre is thus a return to some of the basic 1 I ._. elements of drama—the suspense created by the elementary ■ I ingredients of pure, pre-Iiterary theatre: a stage, two people, . 1 » door; a_dEpeHcJrfla£e^ I When asked by a critic what his two people in his room are I afraid of, Pinter replied, "Obviously they are scared of what is I outside the room. Outside the room there is a world bearing j upon them which is frightening. I am sure it is frightening to i you and me as well,"24 i In this case, the room is inhabited by Rose, a simple-minded i old woman whose husband, Bert, never speaks to her although he is pampered and fed with ovemhelming motherliness. The 90 2QO THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD room is in a vast house; outside it is winter and night. Rose sees the room as her only refuge, her only security in a hostile world. This room, she tells herself, is just right for her. She would not like to live downstairs in the basement, where it is cold and damp. The room becomes an image of the small area of light and warmth that our consciousness, the fact that we exist, opens up in the vast ocean of nothingness from which we gradually emerge after birth and into which we sink again when we die. The room, this small speck of warmth and light in the darkness, is a precarious foothold; Rose is afraid that she may be driven from it. She is not sure of the place of her room in the scheme of things, how it fits into the house. When she asks Mr. Kidd, whom she takes for the landlord but who may be merely a caretaker, how many floors there are in the house, even he is vague about the matter: "Well, to tell you the truth, I don't count them now."28 Mr. Kidd is an old, doddering man, vague about his own origins: "I think my mum was a Jewess. Yes, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that she was a Jewess."20 Rose's husband and Mr. Kidd leave. Rose remains alone. The door assumes all the menace of an opening into the vague unknown of the house, with its uncertain number of floors, the night and the winter outside. And when Rose finally opens the door to take the refuse out, two people are seen standing outside it; A moment of genuine terror has been produced with the utmost economy of means. And even though the strangers are merely a young couple looking for the landlord, the atmosphere of terror is kept up. They are looking for a room, they have heard there is a good room to let in that very house. Wandering through the empty house, they heard a voice in the dark basement, confimiing that there was a room to let. As a matter of fact it was No. 7—Rose's room. The strangers leave. Mr. Kidd returns. There is a man downstairs who wants to see Rose. He has been there for days, waiting for Rose's husband to leave, just lying there in the basement. Mr. Kidd goes out. Rose is left alone. Again the door becomes the focal point of a nameless menace. It opens. A blind Negro enters. His name is Riley. He has a message for Rose: "Your father wants you to come home. Come home, Sal."27 We know the woman is called Rose. But she does not parallels and Proselytes 201 deny being called Sal. She merely insists, "Don't call me that." Bert, Rose's husband, returns. He, who has not spoken throughout the entire first scene, now speaks: "I got back all right." Again, a real coup de the'dtre is brought about by the simplest of devices. Bert speaks about the menace of the dark and how his beloved van got.him back. Then he notices the Negro. He upsets the chair on which he is sitting and beats him savagely until he remains motionless. Rose clutches her eyes. She has gone blind. The Room shows not only the main characteristics of Pinter's style fully formed; the weaknesses it displays also allow us to judge how he gradually learned to avoid the temptations into which he fell in his first bout of spontaneous enthusiasm. The weakness of The Room is clearly its lapse from horror, built up from elements of the commonplace, into crude symbolism, cheap mystery, and violence. The blind Negro with the message from the father calling his daughter home, the killing of this near-parody of a death symbol by the jealous husband, and Rose's own blinding—all these are melodramatic devices that are out of keeping with the subtly built-up terrors of the opening scenes. Here mystery becomes threadbare mystification. Pinter's SBcond-one^ict play still contains this element of mystification, but already it is far more subtly and wittily used. Inj^^^^EK^© (written in 1957, first performed at the Hampstead Theatre Club, in London, on January 31, i960), we again have a room with two people in it-rand the door that opens on the unknown. The two men in this dingy basement room are two hired killers employed by a mysterious organization to go around the country and assassinate their employers' victims. They are given an address and a key and told to wait for instructions. Sooner or later their victim arrives, they kill him or her, and drive off. They don't know what happens then: "Who clears up after we have gone? I am curious about that. Who does the clearing up? Maybe they don't clear up. Maybe they just leave them there, eh? What do you think?"28 BeAAadJSn&j the two gunmen, are very nervous. They want to make tea but are frustrated. They have no matches. An envelope with matches is mysteriously pushed under the door. But even then they don't have the shilling to put into the gas 3261 202 the theatre of the absurd meter. At the back of the basement room there is a serving hatch, a "dumb waiter"—this must have been the kitchen of a restaurant at one time. Suddenly this contraption begins to move; an order on a piece of paper comes down; "Two braised steak and chips. Two sago puddings. Two teas without sugar." The two gunmen, anxious not to be discovered, are pathetically eager to fill this mysterious order from above. They search their pockets for bits of food and send up a packet of tea, a bottle of milk, a bar of chocolate, an Eccles cake, a packet of potato chips. But the dumb waiter comes bacfeior more. It demands more and more complicated dishes, Greek and Chinese specialties. The two men discover a speaking tube next to the dumb waiter, and Ben establishes contact with the powers above. He hears that "the Eccles cake was stale, the chocolate was melted, the biscuits were mouldy."29 When Gus goes out to get a glasFof water, the speaking tube comes to life again. Ben,#ets hjs, final jnstrac^onsjTom above. TjprjMte.toLkffl^ It is Gusľ*He is"~ stripped of jacket, waistcoat, tie, holster, and revolver, Jtjs, ífeJM^J&á^ in completely fusing tragedy with the most hilarious farce. It äiso^íucceeaT":^^ dient, which was merely senlmie^^ jffitojffl. additional element of comedy: the spectacle of the heavenly powers bombarding two solemn gunmen with demands for "macaroni pastiisto, ormMha ň^acarounada, and char siu and bean sprouts" is wildly funny. Yet the main element of comedy is provided by die brilliant small talk behind which the two men bide their gTpwnig anxiety. These discussions nf^ which tootoairteam is playing away on that particular Saturday, whether it is correct to say light the kettle" or "light the gas," the desultory discussions of trivial news in the evening paper are utterly tree ^dlyjanu^^ Pinter's first full-length play, ^Q^^tofl^^^^combines some of the characters and^t^Sôn^ and The Dumb Waiter while, for.die.£r^Jína&^nät^ig-the-melo_dra- t pätíc, supernatural ejement-widjaait-aTOd^ ^SSrľŤnTsäre and warm haven of The Room has here~oe^" t come a dingy seaside boarding house kept by a slovenly but Parallels and Proselytes 203 motherly old woman, Meg, who has many of the features of Rose in the earlier play. Meg's husband, Petey, is almost as silent as Rose's husband Bert. But he lacks Bert's brutality. He is a kindly old man, employed as a deck-chair attendant on the promenade. Ben and Gus, the two gunmen of The Dumb Waiter, reappear as a sinister pair of strangers—an Irishman, brutal and silent, and a Jew, full of false bonhomie and spurious worldly wisdom. But there is a new central character —Stanley, a man in his late thirties, indolent and apathetic, who has somehow found refuge in Meg's boarding house, which has not had any other visitor for years. Meg treats him with a motherliness so stifling as to be almost incestuous. Little is known about his past, except for a clearly apocryphal story that he once gave a piano recital at Lower Edmonton. It was a great success. But then, at his next concert, "they carved me up. Carved me up. It was all arranged, it was all worked out. My next concert. Somewhere else it was. In winter. I went down there to play. Then, when I got there, the hall was closed, the place was shuttered up, not even a caretaker. They'd locked it up. . . .A fast one. They pulled a fast one. I'd like to know who was responsible for that. ... All right, Jack, I can take a tip."60 Though Stanley is dreaming of a world tour, it is clear that he is taking shelter from a hostile world in Meg"s sordid seaside haven. Then, as in the two earlier plays, the door opens. Two sinister visitors, Goldberg and McCann, want a room in Meg's boarding house. It soon becomes clear that they are after Stanley. Are they the emissaries of some secret organization he has betrayed? Or male nurses sent out to fetch him back to an asylum he has escaped from? Or emissaries from another world, like the blind Negro in The Room? This question is never answered. We see them merely organizing a birthday party for Stanley who insists that it is not his birthday, and brainwashing him in a terrifying but nonsensical cross-examination; coldberg: You verminate the sheet of your birth. mc cann: What about the Albigensist heresy? Goldberg: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne? mc cann: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett? 204 thf theatre of the absurd goij>berg: Speak up, Webber. Why did the chicken cross the road? Stanley: He wanted to-he wanted to-he wanted to— mc cann: He doesn't knowl Goldberg: Why did the chicken cross the road? Stanley: He wanted ... mc cann: He doesn't know. He doesn't know which came first! Goldberg: Which came first? mc cann: Chicken? Egg? Which came first? Goldberg and mccann: Which came first? Which came first? Which came first?31 The birthday party proceeds—with Meg, oblivious of what is going on, grotesquely playing the belle of the ball; with Goldberg, who seems to have a large number of different names, seducing the dumb blonde from next door—until eventually it culminates in a game of bhndman's buff. Stanley, whose glasses have been snatched by McCann, becomes more and more hysterical, tries to strangle Meg, and is finally driven upstairs by the two sinister strangers. In the third act, Goldberg and McCann take Stanley away in a big black car. He is now dressed in a black jacket and striped trousers, has a clean collar, wears a bowler hat, carries his broken glasses in his hand, and has become speechless and blank, like a puppet. When Meg comes down, she is still dreaming of the wonderful party and does not realize what has happened. f The Birthday Party has been interpreted as. an allegory of * the pressures of conformity, with Stanley, the pianist, as the artist who is forced into respectability and pin-stripe trousers by the emissaries of the bourgeois world. Yet the play can equally well be seen as an allegory of death—man snatched away from the home he has built himself, from the warmth of love embodied by Meg's mixture of motherliness and sexuality, by the dark angels of nothingness, who pose to him the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. But, as in the case of Waiting for Godot, all such interpretations would miss the point; a play like this simply explores a situa- , tion that, in itself, is a valid pj^eticir^^ Parallels and Proselytes 205 seen as relevant and true. It speaks plainly of the individual's 'l "pathetic seanffforTe^^tyJ"of jecret dreads and"anxienesp6T ' the terrorism of our world, so often embodied in lalse bon- J (homie and bigoted brutality; of the tragedy that.jJises-from I jbck^of^mdeKtanding..between., people.on different levels of ! fawareness (the subject of Pedrolo's Crutna). MegTwarmfh Wd love can never reach Stanley, who despises her stupidity and sktternliness, while, on the other hand, Meg's husband Petey is tongue-tied almost to the point of imbecility, so that his evident warmth and affection remain unexpressed and bottled up. The possibility of an over-all allegorical interpretation of a play like The Birthday Party would presuppose that the play had been written to express a preconceived idea. Pinter emphatically denies that he works in this manner: "I think it is, impossible-and certainly for me—to start writing a play froml any kind of abstract idea. ... I start writing a play from an! image of a situation and a couple of characters involved, and these people always remain for me quite real; if they were not, the play could not be written."32 For Pinter, there is no contradiction between the desire for. \ realism and the basic absurdity of the situations that inspire! him. Like Ionesco, he regards life in its absurdity as basically] [ funny—up to a pQ.i^j"Everything is funny; the greatest earnestness is funny; even tragedy is funny. And I think what I try to do in my plays is to get to this recognizable reality of the absurdity of what we do and how we behave and how we speak,"33 Everything is funny unriLthe-horror of .thehuman situation | rise's to the surface: "The point about tragedy is that it is no j loh^eT^fuyBvyr^ls'funny, and then it becomes no longer! funny."34 Life is funnv; bfinnnsn i^ is arbitrary, based .onJLa \^^^^^&^^^^S^eps6xe^T&&t he is going on a^world tour as a pianist, bejeauje^iysjbu^ tense and the grotesguejax^ makes, tain and relative. There is no fkednpint^weare surrounded, mrjhg jSSknpwjif And "the fact that it is verging on the unknown leads us to the next step, which seems to occur in my 206 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD plays. There is a kind of horror about and I think that this horror and absurdity go together."35 The area of the unknown that surrounds us includes the motivation and background of the characters. What Pinter, in his search for a higher degree of realism in the theatre, rejects in the "\vell-madej}lay'' is precisely that it proyidas.,too much informatiim^bimLih^^ ^d_Wdvationjof_Jea5i character. In real life, we deal with" peopleall the ^me^wHosel j early history, family relationships, or psychological motivations | we totally ignore. We are interested if we see them involved in some dramatic situation. We stop and look in fascination at a quarrel in the street even if we do not know what is at issue. But there is more to this rejection of an overdefined motivation of characters in drama than the desire for realism. There is the ^problem of the possibility of ever knowing the real motivation behirTcTtlie ^c^oia~^h^n^^^i^^^^^ej^^ 'pex''^dWlwr]5se^sycnol6gical makeup is contradictory and unyCTmaDie. One or Pmter s major concerns as a dramatist is precisely that of the difficulty of verification. In a note inserted in the program of the performance of his two one-act plays at the Royal Court Theatre in London in March, i960, Pinter stated this problem as follows: The desire for verification is understandable but cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. The assumption that to verify what has happened and what is happening presents few problems I take to be inaccurate. A character on the stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his. past experience, his present behaviour or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives, is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one who, alarmingly, can do all these things. The more acute the experience the less articulate its expression.86 The problem of verification in Pinter's theatre is closely linked with his use of language,, Pinter's chnically accurate ear for the absuro^ty oForainary speech-enables htoi'to transcribe" everyday conversation m all its repetitiveness, incoher- Parallels and Proselytes 207 ence, and lack of logicjir grammar. The dialogue of Pinter's playsTsT^asebook of tffiTwK3e~gamut of non sequiturs in small talk; he registers the delayed-action effect resulting from differences in the speed of thinking between people—the slower-witted character is constandy replying to the penultimate question while the faster one is already two jumps ahead. There are also the mfaunderstandings arising: from in-abiHty to fisten; mcompreh^stoiTof polyiyffiibio words used tor show by*Bie more articulate characters; mishearings; and false anticipations. Instead of proceeding logically, Pinter's dialogue follows a line of associative thinking in which sound regularly prevails over sense. Yet Pinter denies that he is trying j to present a case for man's inability to communicate with, his f" fellows. "I feel," he once said, "that instead of any inability) to communicate there is a dehljerate jsvasjonof. commuruca-I Joan- Communication irselHbetween people is so frigntenirigj that rather than do that there is continual cross-talk, a continual talking about other things, rather than what is at the root of their relationship.**87 The Birthday Party was Pinter's first play to get a professional performance in London. (It opened at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge on April 28, 1958, and was transferred to the Lyric, in Hammersmith, in May.) The play failed at first, but could not be kept down. Pinter himself directed it in Birmingham in January, 1959. It achieved a brilliant success in an excellent performance by the Tavistock Players at the Tower Theatre, in Canonbury, London, in the spring of the same year, and was seen by millions of British viewers in an exciting television performance early in i960. The impact of so strange and demanding a play on the mass audience of television was fascinating. While viewers were clearly exasperated by the lack of the cheap and obvious motivation to which they were used in their daily fare, they were also visibly intrigued. For days one could bear people in buses and canteens eagerly discussing the play as a maddening but deeply disturbing experience. The Birthday Party reached the United States in July, i960, when it was very successfully staged by the Actors' Workshop in San Francisco. Much of Pinter's astonishingly rich output since he started writing plays in 1957 has been for radio and television. In the »08 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD radio phyiAMig^^he\(Sist performed on the B.B.C.'s Third Programme, on July 2g7 1959), Pinter makes brilliant use of the limitations of the medium. Of the three characters in the play, only two speak, The third remains entirely silent and is thus invested with the terror of the unknown. An old couple, Edward and Flora, are disturbed by the mysterious presence ^ of a matchseller at the back gate of their house. He has been standing there for weeks, holding his tray without ever selling anything. They finally call him into their house. But whatever they say to him, he remains silent. As though challenged*'by the stubbdrayabsence of any reaction, Edward begins to tell the man his life, story. Edward insists that he is not frightened, but he is, and goes to get some fresh air in the garden. Now it is Flora's turn to address the silent visitor with a flood of reminiscences and confessions. She even talks of sex, being clearly attracted and repelled by the old tramp. "I'm going to keep you, you dreadful chap, and call you Barnabas." Lik&„ Meg in The BMhday^Pqrty, Flora's atntude_to^arjjjbja.old ^nan a mixfiffe~cf^ Edward be- cbmeTvMenly^^ As he still fails to elicit any reaction, he becomes more and more personal while visibly disintegrating. The play ends with Flora installing Barnabas in the house and sending Edward away: "Edward! Here is your tray!"38 The tramp and the ^ife^^g^changejdjghwes. —. .-- There is a curioWluffinityT)etween the silent matchseller in A Slight Ache and Ionesco's Killer, whose silence also leads his antagonist, Berenger, to paroxysms of eloquence and eventual disintegration. Here, as there, the silent character acts as a catalyst for the projection of {he_ojher's deepest feelings. Ed-waH, in project •"emptiness and disintegrate^wTOe^ora prbjectslierlml vital sexmiay and |chan^:'pMiagia, Yet as the silent matchseller ^TneWf*BeMd7not even inthe inarticulate giggle of the Killer, he might equally well be a figment of the old people's imagination. The audience of the radio play will never be able to verify whether he was real 01 not. But A Slight Ache also proved effective when produced on the stage (Arts Theatre, London, January 18, 1961). ■ The element of mystery is almost entirely absent in Pinter's ' Parallels and Proselytes 209 second radio play, A Night Out (first broadcast in March, i960, on the Third Programme; television version on A.B.C. Television, April, i960), and in the television play Night School (first broadcast by Associated Rediffusion TV in July, i960). In both of these plays, as in a number of short revue sketches he wrote at about the same time, Pinter relies entirely on his mastery of real-life idiom to produce a feeling of the absurdity and futility of the human condition. A Night Out tells of the adventures of a. repressed clerk; Albert Stokes, who is kept on his mother's apron strings and stifled by a possessiveness reminiscent of Meg's motherliness toward Stanley, or Flora's toward the enigmatic matchseller^ Albert has been invited to an office party. He breaks loose from his mother and goes to the party, where his office rival causes him embarrassment by egging on the girls to draWrum out. He is accused of having "interfered" with one of the girls, returns home, is received with nagging by his mother, loses his temper, throws something at her, and leaves, thinking that he has killed her. A prostitute takes him to her room, but when she too nags him about spilling cigarette ash on her carpet, he terrifies her with an outburst of temper and runs away. Returning home in the morning, he finds his mother alive but somewhat chastened by his aggressiveness. Has he really broken free during his night out? The question is left unanswered. .. A Night Out is only seemingly simple. It is, in fact, extremely subtly constructed in suggesting Albert's predicament through a series of repetitions. The prostitute^ in nagging Albert, repeats not only his situation with his mother but also, in making advances to him, his embarrassed situation when confronted with the girls at the party. Thus the scene with the prostitute focuses Albert's double predicament as a mother's boy—his inability to resist his mother and his timidity toward the other sex. In going to the prostitute's room, he has run away from both his mother and the party, yet there once again he encounters all he was trying to escape from. The television play Night School returns to another of Pinter's main preoccupations—a room of one's own as a symbol for one's place in the world. Walter, on his return from prison for forging entries in post-office saving books, finds that his two 210 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Parallels and Proselytes 211 old aunts have let his room. He is horrified to learn that it is now occupied by a girl, Sally, who describes herself as a schoolteacher and who goes out at night a good deal—allegedly to study foreign languages at night school. While fetching some things from his room, Walter discovers that the girl is in fact a night-club hostess. Although there is a good chance that he might make friends with Sally and thus regain his bed by having an affair with her or even marrying her, Walter asks a shady businessman friend of his aunts' to trace the night club in which she is working. Solto, the businessman, finds the girl, hopes to have an affair of his own with her, and inadvertently reveals that Walter sent him to spy her out. When Solto reports back to Walter, he conceals the fact that he has found the girl. But Sally, who now knows that Walter wanted to expose her, leaves. In wanting too badly to regain: his room, Walter has lost the chance of winning the girl who might have given him a real place in the world. Night School also touches on the problem of verification and identity—to impress Sally, Walter makes himself out to be a romantic gunman; Sally herself pretends to be a teacher. These pretenses prevent Walter and Sally from establishing a true relationship. The fight for a room of one^ownJs_alsQ-the ..tfaBimp,,of_ ffinfflr'* second full-length stage play, which brought him his first great succBsrwitn the public-pi'Ae^yf^g? (first performed at the Arts Theatre Club, London^orTApril 27, i960). This is a play in three acts, with three characters. The room in question is in a decaying property inhabited;-by Aston, a kindly but somewhat slow-witted man in his thirties. As the play opens, Aston has brought a visitor for the night—Da vies, an old tramp he has rescued out of a fight at some cafe where he had been working. Davies has lost not only his place in the world—he is homeless—but also his identity. He soon confesses that while his real name is Davies, he has been using the name Jenkins for years. To proVe his identity, he would have to get his papers. But he left them with a man, years ago, down in Sid-cup. The trouble is he cannot get down to Sidcup because he has no suitable shoes, and because the weather is never good enough. Davies is vain, irascible, evasive, and prejudiced. He could stay with Aston and his younger brother, Mick, who owns the place and dreams of converting it into modern flats. Davies is almost offered the job of caretaker there. But he cannot resist the temptation to play the two brothers off against each other, to try to gain the upper hand when the kindly Aston has, in a bout of confidence, revealed that he once received electric-shock treatment in a mental hospital. And so Davies is a per-sam^attorirflmman weakness. His need for^pa^Tn^tKe "world ispa&eticai^ he is unable to subdue bis own nature enough to impose upon himself the minimum of self-discipline that would help him obtain it. As Mick says to him when he finally turns him out, "What a strange man you are. Aren't you? You're really strange. Ever since you come into this house, there's been nothing but trouble. Honest. I can take nothing you say at face value. Every word you speak is open to any number of different interpretations. Most of what you say is lies. You're violent, you're erratic, you're just completely unpredictable. You're nothing else but a wild animaL when you come down to it. You're a barbarian."3® It is a measure of Pinter's power as a playwright that the final scene, in which Davies vainly pleads to be given another chance, is almost unbearably tragic. After Davies has been shown in all his abject unreliability, clearly undeserving of the charity offered to him by the brothers,TKE ejection from thert dingy room that could have become his world assumes almostj the cosmic proportions of Adam's expulsion from ParadiseJj Davies's lying, his assertiveness, his inability to resist anuf chance to impose himself as superior, are, after alL)rnar^kn^dJ!s[ orjginaL^JB^-hubris, lack of humility, blindness to our own faults.. The Caretaker achiey^sjhj^cuja^ frai^yw^^ fjoeiicjgrrc^Even Davies's myth of the impossible journey to Sidcup remains within the bounds of strict realism. It represents simply a form of self-deception and grotesque evasion on Davies's part. Anyone can see through it, but Davies is too self-indulgent a character to notice how the rationalization of his apathy and inabihty to help himself deceives no one except perhaps himself. Pinter has revealed that originally he wanted to bring in 212 the theatre of the absurd Parallels and Proselytes 213 violence: "The original idea . . . was ... to end the play with the violent death of the tramp. ... It suddenly struck me that it was not necessary. And I think that in this play . . . I have developed, that I have no need to use cabaret turns and blackouts and screams in the dark to the extent that I enjoyed using them before. I feel that I can deal, without resorting to that kind of thing, with a human situation. . . . I do see this play as merely ... a particular human situation, concerning three particular people and not, incidentally . . , symbols."40 Much in The Caretaker is very funny, and the long ruft' of the play has been attributed in some quarters to the public's laughter over Pinter's devastatingly accurate rendering of lower-class speech^ In~lTTett^i^to"tne^ Pinter takes issue with this and clarifies his own views on the relation between tragedy and farce in the play: An element of the absurd is, I think, one of the features of [The Caretaker], but at the same time I did not intend it to be merely a laughable farce. If there had not been other issues at stake, the play would not have been written. Audience reaction can't be regulated, and no one would want it to be; nor is it easy to analyze. But where the comic and the tragic (for want of a better word) are closely interwoven, certain members of an audience will always give emphasis to the comic as opposed to the other, for by so doing they rationalize the other out of existence. . , . Where this indiscriminate mirth is found, I feel it represents a cheerful patronage'of the characters on the part of . the merrymakers, and thus participation is avoided. ... As far as I'm concerned The Caretaker is funny up to a point. Beyond that point it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote ft.41 In fact, The Caretaker has passages of genuine poetry— Aston's great speech about the shock treatment, or Mick's description of his plans for redecorating the old house, which transmutes the jargon of contemporary brand names into a dreamlike world of wish-fulfillment: You could have an off-white pile'linen rug, a table in . . . afromosia teak veneer, sideboard with matt black drawers, ' curved chairs with cushioned seats, armchairs in oatmeal tweed, beech-frame settee with woven sea-grass seat, white-topped heat-resistant coffee table, white tile surround. . . ,*2 Pinter is one of the first poets to have recognized the potentialities of laminated plastics or power tools. Mick's brother, Aston, is that typical mid-twentieth-century species of Western man, a do-it-yourself mechanic and handyman. He is constantly fixing some electrical appliance. And he too, in his slower way, extracts poetry from technical jargon: davtes: What's that then, exactly, then? aston: A jig saw? Well, it comes from the same family as the fret saw. But it's an appliance, you see. You have to fix it on to a portable drill. davtes: Ah, that's right. They're very handy. aston: They are, yes. davtes : What about a hack-saw? aston: Well, I've got a hack-saw, as a matter of fact. davtes: They're handy. aston: Yes. . . . So's a keyhole saw. . . ,43 The laughter of the audience during the long run of The Caretaker was by no means merely patronizing. It was also the laughter of recognition. It is not often that the theatregoer is confronted with his own language and preoccupations, even though they are exaggerated and heightened to point up the absurdity of the primitive, magical satisfaction most of us derive from being able to name and thus to master the bewildering array of gadgets with which we are surrounding ourselves. In a world that is increasingly deprived of meaning, we seek refuge in being experts in some narrow field of irrelevant knowledge or expertise. In trying to become master of some electrical appliance, Aston is seeking to get a foothold on reality. His breakdown, which led to his receiving shock treatment, was due to a loss of contact with reality and with other people: "They always used to listen. I thought . . . they understood what I said. I mean I used to talk to them. I talked too much. That was my mistake."44 Because he suffered from hallucinations, because he felt he £14 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD could see things with a strange clarity, he was subjected to the horror of the mental hospital. He tried to retain his super-lucidity, he appealed to his mother, "but she signed their form, you see, giving them permission." Aston is the poet whom society crushes underjhe^ weight oF^^ma^rn^^^^^l forms arlH bureaucracy. His hallucinations, his clear visions having beenw^eafrom his brain, Aston is reduced to seeking satisfaction in the way most citizens of our affluent society obtain what poetry they can out of life, by tinkering about the house: . . so I decided to have a go at decorating i% so I came into this room, and I started to collect wood, for my shed, and all these bits and pieces, that I thought might come in handy for the flavor around the house, sometime."45 In theradio plaji\fhVTXEarfs)(Brst performed on the Third Programme on December 2, i960), Pinter amplifies Aston's experience. Len, the hero- of The Dwarfs, also suffers from halh^cmations—he sees himself as belonging to a "gang or dwarfs whomhe feeds with tidbits of rat meat, He fears these dwarfs, resents having to work for them, and yet, when the dream world recedes, he feels it a loss to be deprived of the warmth and the cozy litter of their squalid yard: "They've cut me off without a penny. And now they've settled down to a wide-eyed kip, cross-legged by the fire. It's unsupportable. I'm left in the lurch. Not even a stale frankfurter, a slice of bacon rind, a leaf of cabbage, not even a mouldy piece of salami, like they used to sling me in the days when we told old tales by suntime. . . . Now all is-bare. All is clean. All is scrubbed. There is a lawn. There is a shrub. There is a flower."46 Len has two friends who are invading his room^ Pete and Mark, each of whom is trying to play him off against the other. Len's room, like his sense of reality, is subject to constant change: "The rooms we live in . . ■ open and shut. ... Can't you see? They change shape at their own will. I wouldn't grumble if only they would keep to some consistency. But they don't. And I can't tell the limits, the boundaries which I've been led to believe are natural."47 The Dwarfs, based on Pinter's unfinished novel, is_j^pjay. without a plot: it is a set of variationsjonjjlieihfim and_.ianlas& As Pet^tSTlTcnT^The ^p^rehensiOTTof expe-rience must obviously be dependent upon discrimination if itts Parallels and Proselytes ^jg to be considered valuable. That's what you lack. You've got no idea how to preserve a distance between what you smell and what you think about it. . . . How can you hope to assess and verify anything if you walk about with your nose stuck between your feet all day long?"48 And yet Pete, who makes this plea for realism, follows it up by telling Len about a dream of his own—people's faces peeling off them in a panic on the underground. The Dwarfs, although outwardly simple and without any of Pinters earlier tricks and mystifications, is a complex and difficult play. It is also one of his most personal statements. Len's WGjjy^aiUhe^dwMfsfetiiat of Aston, or Stanley inThe^rtJi-i^ day Party^f^ tney"r5ave Be^^e^eBecTlromSieir ]prr^Ite^^M"r^^SG^Ju)t| ^^^^^^^^^^^ES^^^Sjan- Stanley-is camedoflnsy force in the midst of highly allegorical happenings; Aston and Len Ipse their vision in a process of healing that is also a catastrophic loss of a dimension of their lives— the dimension of fantasy or poetry, the ability to look behind the scenes of the commonplace, everyday world. Pinter's theatre is essentially a poetic theatre, more so than the euphuistic verse drama of some of his contemporaries. Pinter, who acknowledges the influence of Kafka and Beckett, is, like these two writers, £f^nci^Biedj^ of his being. As Len says in The Dwarfs, "The point is, who are you? Not why or how, not even what. . . . You are the sum of so many reflections. How many reflections? Whose reflections? Is that what you consist of? What scum does the tide leave? What happens to the scum? When does it happen? I've seen what happens. ... The scum is broken and sucked back. I don't see where it goes, I don't see when, what do I see, what have I seen? What have I seen, the scum or the essence?"49 It is this preoccupation with the problem of the self that separates Harold Pinter from the social realists among the young British playwrights of his generation with whom he shares the ability to put contemporary speech onto the stage. When Kenneth Tynan reproached him in a radio interview for writing plays unconcerned with ideas and showing only a very limited aspect of the life of their characters, omitting their 216 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD politics, ideas, and even their sex life, Pinter replied that he was dealing with his characters, "at the extreme edge of their living, where they are living pretty much alone";80 at a point, that is, when they are back in their rooms, confronted with the basic problem or being. We see Pinter s characters m the process ol their essential adjustment to the world, a*J}m pojnj; T^^+frffiYnfrayP to sfo6 their basic problem—whettey.tfaev wffl lye able to confront, and come to terms with, reality at all. It is only after they have made this fundamental adjustment that they will be abje-.to become part of society and share in the games of sex or politics. Pinter repudiates the suggestion that in so presenting them he is unrealistic. After all, he maintains, his plays deal with a short, if climactic, period in the lives of lus characters, a few days or, in the case of The Caretaker, a fortnight, "We are only concerned with what is happening then, in this particular moment of these people's lives. There is no reason to suppose that at one time or another they did not listen at a political meeting ... or that they haven't ever had girl friends"51 or been concerned with ideas. It is the inWguing paradox of Pinter's position that he_crjn=. siders himself a more uncompromising, ruthless jeahstthan the cliarnpions of "social realism" could ever be. For it is they who water down the reality of their picture of the world by presupposing that they have solutions for problems that have not yet been solved—and that may well be insoluble—or by implying that it is possible to knpw the complete motivation of a character, or, above all, by presenting a slice of reality that is less essential, and hence less real, less true to life, than a theatre that has selected a more fundamental aspect of existence. If life in our time is basically absurd, then any dramatic representation of it that comes up with neat solutions and produces the illusion that it all "makes sense," after all, is bound to contain an element of oversimplification, to suppress essential factors, and reality expurgated and oversimplified becomes make-believe. For a dramatist of the Absurd, like Harold Pinter, the political, social, realist play loses its claim to realism by focusing its attention on inessentials and exaggerating their importance, *as though, if only some limited objective were reached, we could live happily forever after. And by choosing Parallels and Proselytes 217 the wrong slice of life altogether, it falls into the same error as the drawing-room comedy that ends when boy gets girl—at the very point when their real problems, marriage and the process of aging, begin. After the social realist has established the need for his reform, the basic problems of existence re-mam—loneliness, the impenetrable mystery of the universe, death. On the other hand, Pinter was indignant when a critic took him to task for introducing a character whose antecedents are clearly stated in the television play Night School, arguing that a true Pinter character should come from nowhere rather than from prison. Pinter considers Night School an experiment in a lighter vein and resents being told by others that a true Pinter play must deal exclusively in mysterious and wholly unmotivated events. Pinter has been writing plays only since 1957. The quantity of his output and his rise to success are truly astonishing, but he is far too young to allow anything like a summing up of his achievement or a final verdict on his place in British drama. Yet it is possible, even on the basis of what is still an early phase of his development, to say that he has already won himself an important place among the playwrights of this century. His mastery of language, which has opened up a new dimension of English stage dialogue; the economy of his technique; the accuracy of his observation; the depth of his emotion; the freshness and originality of his approach; the fertility of his invention; and, above all, his ability to turn commonplace lower-class people and events into a profoundly poetical vision of universal validity justify the very highest hopes for his future development. Pinter's plays transmute realism into poetic fantasy, the work of Cfforman F ]{born in 1919) is phil- osophical fantasy strongly based" on reality. N. F. Simpson, an adult-education lecturer who h^gs_i,r^ I.nndnn, first came into prominence by winning one of the prizes in the Observer's 1957 playwriting competition with A Resounding Tinkle (first performed in a much shortened version at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on December 1, 1957). Although Simpson's work is extravagant fantas.orj.,^ Carroll, and is al8 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD ^ I compared by the author himself to a regimental sergeant- | major reciting "Jabberwocky" over and over again through I a megaphone,52 it is nevertheless firmly based in the English I class system. If Pinter's world is one of tramps and junior | elerks^JimDSon's is unmistakably suburban, 1 ^^^^^^^^^^^takss place in the living room of the I bungalow inhabited by Mr. and Mrs. Paradock (the Para- I docks, in fact), and the action, howeverwiloLand extravagant 1 it becomes, always remains n™iy„J^H^i5-J^J£HM^|_^? 1 ^rtgfeh^orJ[irban"lo^ver The Parado^Tm^or- | dereaTlmlsIe]^ they don't like it be- I cause it is several sizes too large for a private house ("Its big I enough for a hotel"), so they exchange it for a snake ("You 1 can have them lengthened but we shan't bother")—two trans- J actions only slightly more absurd than the pointless buying J and exchanging of furniture practiced in these circles. I The Paradocks invite some comedians to entertain them at 1 home—which is only slightly more extravagant than getting | them on the television. Their son Don comes home, but has turned into a young woman ("Why, you've changed your sex")—but then sex is not all that important in the restrained ] world of the suburbs. The Paradocks and their guests, the two \ comedians, get drunk on nectar and ambrosia. They listen to a religious service on the radio which comes from "the Church 8 of the Hypothetical Imperative in Brinkfall"63 but is delivered in "a voice of cultured Anglican fatuity"54 while enjoining listeners to "make music, water, love, and rabbit hutches"86 and making them pray: "Let us laugh with those we tickle. . . . Let us weep with those we expose to tear gas. Let us throw back our heads and laugh at reality, which is an illusion caused by mescalin deficiency; at sanity, which is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency; at knowledge, which is an illusion caused by certain biochemical changes in the human brain structure during the course of human evolution. . . . Let us laugh at thought, which is a phenomenon like any other. At illusion, which is an illusion, which is a phenomenon like any other. . . ."B8 Nonsense and satire mingle with parody, but the serious philosophical intent is again and again brought into the open., The two comedians learnedly discuss Bergson's theory of * Parallels and Proselytes 2,19 laughter ("We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing"), and Mr. Paradock promptly puts the theory to the test by having himself plugged into the electricity supply and converting himself into a mechanical brain, which, however, in spite of being fed with data, fails to produce the correct results—because of a short circuit. The author appears from time to time, apologizing for the shortcomings of the play, which came to him in Portuguese, a language that unfortunately he does not know too well. "I lay claim," he announces, "to no special vision, and my own notions as to what I have in mind here may well fall pitifully short of your own far better notions. No. I am the dwarf in the circus—I give what scope I can to such deficiencies as I have."67 And in the final summing up of "an odd evening," the author draws the attention of the public to the comforting fact that "the retreat from reason means precious little to anyone who has never caught up with reason in the first place. It takes a trained mind to relish a non sequitur."58 And so it does. I^J\Jjjn^^ ments. They lack the dark obsessiveness of Adamov, the manic proliferation of things in Ionesco, or the anxiety and menace of Pinter. They are spontaneous creations that oftenjely on free associatiorilarS small oTmyl5ack 'is too big, Doctor") and lack the formal discipline of Beckett. As Simpson himself put it in one program note, "From time to time parts of the play may seem about to become detached from the main body. No attempt, well Mentioned or not, should be made from the audience to nudge these back into position while the play is in motion. They will eventually drop off and are quite harmless."58 But for all this looseness of construction and spontaneity, Simpson's world bears the mark of the fantasies of an eminently sane, intelligent man with deep learning and a delicious sense of humor. "I think life is excruciatingly funny," he once said. "People traveling every day on the tube and doing things which are a means to an end but become ends in themselves, like buying cars to get about at weekends and spending every weekend cleaning them."*0 The prayers and responses in the short, one-act version of 220 the theatre of the absurd A Resounding Tinkle seem to sum up the purpose of Simpson's endeavors: prater: Give us light upon the nature of our knowing. For the illusions of the sane man are not the illusions of the lunatic, and the illusions of the flagellant are not the illusions of the alcoholic, and the illusions of the delirious are not the illusions of the lovesick, and the illusions of the genius are not the illusions of the common man; response: Give us light that we may be enlightened. prayer: Give us light that, sane, we may attain to a "distortion, more acceptable than the lunatic's and call it truth: response: That, sane, we may call it truth and know it to be false. prater: That, sane, we may know ourselves, arid by knowing ourselves may know what it is we know. response: Amen.*1 There could hardly be a better statement of the objectives not merely of Simpson himself but of the Theatre of the Absurd. The exploration of the relativity of our vision of the world, according to the mdrvidual's preoccupations, obsessions, and circumstances, is the subject of Simpson's second play, '^Sfe-^performed in a double bill at the Royal Court, with the shortened version of A Resounding Tinkle, in December, 1957). Here a group of characters congregates around a hole in the street, discussing what it might be, each of them in turn seeing different things happening in its dark opening. The crowd gradually congregates round a "visionary" who has settled down on a campstool with blankets and a supply of food to watch for an unspecified event of religious connotation, which he says is imminent down there—the solemn unveiling of a great window whose many-colored glass will stain the white radiance of eternity. The visionary admits that it was once his ambition "to have a queue stretching away from me in every direction known to the compass,"62 but he has now toned down his expectations; he will be satisfied if he be^ comes the nucleus of a more modest queue. Other, more "commonplace characters arrive and watch the hole, projecting in turn their preoccupations—the whole content of their minds—onto the blank darkness of the mysterious * Parallels and Proselytes 331 opening. Thediscusacmjroimd&ejiole thus becomes a survey of the fantasy lire oi an English suburBriOtaM-'withrsporls, ranging Trom dominoes to cricket, boxing, and golf; proceeds to nature, turning the hole into an aquarium housing a variety of species of fish that can be discussed with expertise; then turns to crime and punishment and violent demands for torture, execution, and revenge; and, having aroused the emotions of all concerned, culminates in fantasies of a political nature— the violence of both chauvinism and revolutionary action. After all this, a workman emerges from the hole and informs the bystanders that it contains a junction box of the electricity supply. The intellectual among the crowd, Cerebro, is ready to accept this sobering fact and consoles himself with the thought that, after all, something is positively known about junction boxes. But his antagonist, Soma, who plays Stalin to Cerebro's Marx, seeing the potentialities of power and mass emotion, accuses him of wanting "to take away all the mystery, all the poetry, all the enchantment." Gradually the sober, positive truth is reinvested with metaphysical significance. Even Cerebro indulges in pseudo-logical speculations on whether one should speak of the cables' going in, or coming out, of the junction box, while Soma turns the crowd into a meeting celebrating the religious rites of a cult of electrical generation. The technological facts have been turned back into vague emotional mumbo-jumbo. The visionary alone remains on the scene, still waiting for the colored glass that will stain the white radiance of eternity. The Hole is a philosophical fable. In his third play,rj0ni "W^^Pe^^T^j Simpson combines this theme with the su^urr^n**nonsense world of A Resounding Tinkle. When asked for the meaning of the title, he is reported to have replied that it is merely a name, like London or Simpson. In fact it is a kind of signpost indicating that the contents of the play are paradoxical. During its first run at the Royal Court Theatre, where it opened (after a tryout in Brighton) on December 22, 1959, the play was subtitled "An Evening of High Drung and Slarrit." When it was transferred to the West End, this somewhat esoteric description was replaced by the more readily understandable "A Farce in a New Dimension." 222 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD As in The Hole, a group of characters is presented, each of whom is preoccupied with a private world of fantasy. As Simpson himself put it in a radio interview, "In these plays each man is an island. The whole point about the relationship in the family is that everyone is in fact preoccupied with his own interests and makes very little contact, except superficially, with the other characters in the play."*3 The family in question are the GroomMrbys, Arthur Groomkirby, the father of the family, earns his living as a private-enterprise keeper of parking meters, a highly appropriate profession to choose in present-day Britain. Like all good suburban fathers he has a hobby. He combines an interest in the law with a passion for do-it-yourself carpentry, and constructs, in the course of the play, a very lifelike replica of the court at the Old Bailey in his own living room. Arthur's son, Kirby Groomkirby, who has trained himself by the Pavlov method and is unable to have a meal without having heard first the bell of a cash register, is engaged on a gigantic educational enterprise—he wants to teach five hundred "speak-your-weight" weighing machines to sing the "Hallelujah" chorus from the Messiah. Being of a logical mind, he argues that if these machines can speak, they must be capable of learning to sing as well. And he is making progress. Once he has taught the machines to sing, he hopes to transport them to the North Pole, where they would attract large crowds of people eager to hear them. These multitudes might then be induced to jump all at the s,|me moment, thereby tilting the axis of the earth, and causing an ice age in Britain, which would lead to the death of many people. Kirby needs many deaths, for he likes to wear black, but, being logical, he needs deaths to give him an opportunity to don his mourning attire. The teen-age daughter of the family, Sylvia, is also preoccupied with death, or rather she wants to be, having been given a skull as a memento mori. But she finds that the skull does not work; it fails to remind her of death. On the other hand, Sylvia is deeply dissatisfied with the human condition. She cannot understand why her arms are not long enough to reach her knees; she cannot see the logic of the construction of human bodies. There is an old aunt who sits in a wheel-( chair and is, on Bg^sonian principles, treated, as a thing rather Parallels and Proselytes 223 than a human being. Only the mother of the family, Mabel, is wholly matter-of-fact, not surprised by anything that goes on around her, and herself highly eccentric in her sanity. The charwoman she employs, Myra Gantry, is used by her to eat up surplus food, which is hard work, since much is left over. In the second act, the homemade Old Bailey at the Groom-lorbys' house suddenly fills with judge, prosecutor, and defense counsel, and while the household goes on with its routine, a trial develops, Arthur Groomkirby is called as a witness and subjected to a fantastic cross-examination, which undermines his alibi by proving that there are millions of places he has not been to at a given moment, making the probability that he has not been in a particular place so small as to be negligible. After a nightmare game of three-handed whist with the judge, Arthur Groomkirby returns to the proceedings. Only now is it announced that the accused is his own son, who has killed forty-three people in order to be able to wear mourning for them. Although it is proved that he has committed these murders, he is acquitted because, as a mass murderer could be sentenced for only one crime, this would mean cheating the law of its retribution for the others. Hence he is discharged. The play ends with Arthur Groomkirby preparing himself to act as the judge in his own courtroom—apparently with little chance of success. One Way Pendulum owed its considerable^sjjccess. with the £uT5Jic]^^ nonsense jnd,Jn particular, to the brflKanJLparocfy ^J§t^^^L.VXOSSSsSSU Itadlanguaffe in the court scene, which occupies almost the whole of the second act. La fact, however, the play is far less amiable than it appears at first sight. What seems little more than a harmless essay in upside-down logic is essentially a ferocious comment_on 9^£tej^o^a£yBritish life. The play portrays ajmbjrrbanfemly^^ in its private fanrasieT=5aTeacTTofits memBers~might be in-*°naTffiS3^rs^ara^e^lanet. It also hints at the connection between the reticences—the mutual tolerance that allows each of the Groomkirbys to plant his weird preoccupations in the middle of the living room—and the deep undercurrents of cruelty and sadism that lie behind such a society. Kirby's Pavlovian self-conditioning is a key image of the play; it stands j 3a* THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD for the ^automajtfsmjndu^^^ ccmmm^ig^prM,rjesJs. To lead an emotional life, Kirby has to stun himself into unconsciousness; only then can he indulge in sex. When waked out of one of these stupors by his Pavlovian cash-register bell, he angrily exclaims, "I might have been dreaming. . . . Might have stopped me stone dead in the middle of an orgasm!"84 Habit and social convention are the great deadeners of the mauthentic society. To End a social justification tor wearing black, Kirby turns into a mass murderer. Repression and habit, however, are always accompanied by guilt, hence the appearance of the courtroom in the middle of the Groomkirbys' suburban world. The proceedings may be hilarious parody, but the trial that is being conducted has its affinities with Kafka's trial of another guilty petty bourgeois. In the eerie three-handed whist game during the recess, the judge assumes an almost satanic tinge. Mr, Groomkirby faces him with earplugs in his ears. When sent out by the judge to see if it is fight, he reports back that he kept his eyes shut,, as he does not intend "to be blinded suddenly by the sunrise.'* At one point he loses the power of speech, and when the judge savagely asks him, "Are you dentally fit?" he has no answer. No wonder that after this nightmare orgy of guilt, he greets the dawn with "monumental relief." The actual proceedings of the court are, in comparison, reassuring. They may express ctepp feelings of guilt, but at the same time they provide a hghtning conductor in their total irrelevance to life through the formalism of reasoning in a vacuum. Here Simpson needed only a minimum supply from his rich fund of comic invention one level, his bKrBafley"is™a fantasy of guilt in a suburban world of respectability; on another level it is a powerful satirical image of tradition nmning down in fonnah'stic irrelevance. On^W^^Pen^ ahsurdjj^ ings intoF^kjy^n^ai|to^ia^, In that sense, Simpson is a more powerful social critic than any of the social reaHsts^His work is proo^hat the Theatre of the Absurd is by_no means unable" ' to provide highlyefiecttve^oraaLcomment. Parallels and Proselytes 22g The work we have surveyed in this chapter shows that the Theatre of the Absurd has had its impact on writers in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, and Great Britain. The ralatiy»ab6eBcfeofand died. The missing member of the family arrives in the shape of a gorgeous young man, the embodiment of the American dream, who admits that he consists only of muscles and a healthy exterior, but is dead inside, drained of genuine feeling and the capacity for experience. He will do anything.for money—so he will even consent to become a member of the family. The language^pf The American Dream, resembles.Jthjrt _pf_ Ionjgšeo^jnjte masjterly combination of cliches. But these cliches, in their eurAemistic, baby-tafiTtone, arels°*characteristically American as lonesco's are French. The most"aisag^eärjíe ventiés^äfelndden behind the corn-fed cheeriness of advertising jingles and family-magazine unctuousness. There are very revealing contrasts in national coloring of different versions of the absurd cliche—the Parallels and Proselytes 227 mechanical hardness of Ionesco's French platitudes; the flat, repetitive obtuseness of Pinter's English nonsense dialogue; and the oily ghbness and sentimentality of the American cliche in Albee's promising and brilliant first example of an American contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd. JackGelber's The Connection (1959) skillfully blends jazz with Beckett's theme of waiting. The image of the drag addicts waiting for the arrival of the messenger carrying their drug is a powerful conception. The presence of a jazz quartet improvising onstage lends the play a fascinating element of spontaneity, and the dialogue has a lyricism of pointlessness that equals much of the best writing in the Theatre of the Absurd. But the play is marred by a laborious superstructure of pretense at realism. Author and director appear, and go to great lengths to convince the audience that they are seeing real drug addicts; two film cameramen who are supposed to record the events of the evening are involved in the action, and one is actually seduced mto drug-taking. And, finally, the strange, spontaneous, poetic play culminates in a plea for a reform of the drug laws. The Connection, brilliant as it is in parts, founders in its uncertainty as to which convention it belongs to—the realist theatre of social reform or the Theatre of the Absurd. How difficult it seems va America to use the convention of the Theatre of the Absurd is also illustrated by Arthur L. Kopit's intriguing play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad (i960), which takes the oblique approach of parody. Described as "A Pseudo-Classical Farce in a Bastard French Tradition," the play projects a young man's feelings about a dominating mother who tries to deprive him of contact with the outside world. But by treating the horrible mother, who travels with her stuffed dead husband in a coffin, and the retarded son, who finally strangles the girl who is ready to make love to him, with a parodistic snigger that deprives the playwright of the possibility of introducing genuine tragicomic effects (like those used by lonesco in Jacques, or Adamov in As We Were), the author merely underlines the painfully Freudian aspects of his fantasy. In seeming to say, "Don't take this seriously, I am only piling on the horror for the sake of funl" Kopit spoils his opportunity to transmute his material into a grotesque poetic 228 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD image. On the other hand, there is enough evidence of his genuine concern with the problem of the play to prevent it from being a mere parodistie joke, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, written while its author was still an undergraduate at Harvard, shows considerable promise. Only time will show whether Kopit will take the plunge into the Theatre of the Absurd or revert to the psychological thrillers of Broadway. Chapter Six THE TRADITION OF THE ABSURD It may seem strange that the chapter that tries to trace an outline of the tradition on which the Theatre of the Absurd is based should follow rather than precede the account of its present exponents. But the history of ideas, like most other history, is essentially a search for the origins of -the present, and hence changes as the configurations of the present alter its shape. We cannot look for the germs of a current phenomenon like the Theatre of the Absurd without first having defined its nature sufficiently to be able to discern which of the recurring elements that combine and recombine in the kaleidoscopic patterns of changing tastes and outlooks it is made up of. Avant-garde movements are hardly ever entirely novel and unprecedented. The Theatre of die Absurd is a return to old, even archaic,^rraaitions. Its noveltyTies in its somewhat unusual combination of such antecedents, and a survey of these will show that what may-strike the unprepared spectator as iconoclastic and incomprehensible innovation is in fact merely an expansion, revaluation, and development of procedures that are familiar and completely acceptable in only slighdy different contexts. It is only from the set expectations of the naturalistic and narrative convention of the theatre that the man in the stalls will find a play like Ionesco's The Bald Soprano shocking and incomprehensible. Let the same man sit in a music hall, and he will find the equally nonsensical cross-talk of the comedian . and his stooge, which is equally devoid of plot or narrative content, perfectly acceptable. Let him take his children to one of the ever-available dramatizations of Alice in Wonderland, and he will find a venerable example of the traditional Theatre 23° the theatre of the absurd of the Absurd, wholly delightful and not in the least obscure. It is only because habit and fossilized convention have so narrowed the public's expectation as to what constitutes theatre proper that attempts to widen its range meet with angry protests from those who have come to see a certain closely defined kind of entertainment and who lack the spontaneity of mind to let a slightly different approach make its impact on them. The age-old traditions that the Theatrejrfjhe Absurd dis;, plays in says, "I have suffered a grievous loss; when my donkey had learned the art of going without food, it died."4 Another such moronic character dreams that he stepped on a nail and hurt his foot. Thereupon he puts a bandage round his foot. His friend asks him what has happened and, when told that he had only dreamed he stepped on a nail, he replies, "Indeed, we are rightly called fools! Why do we go to sleep in bare feet?"6 Such grotesque characters appeared in the mimus within a crudely realistic convention, but, characteristically, these plays, which were often half improvised, werjejaoiiCboundby any of the strict rules of the regul^ttajec^^^cornerjy^ Tliere-was no ilrrSatiorT^orTT^ of characters; women ap- peared and played leading parts; the unities of time and place-were not observed. Apart from plays with prearranged plots (hypotheses), there were shorter performances that remained. wjttoulyMot and consisted or animal mutations, dances, or juggling tricks (paegnia). In later antiquity, fantastic plots with dreamlike themes became prevalent. Reich quotes Apuleius as saying, "Mimus haUucinatur," and adds, "We shall have to think not only of the lower meaning of hallucinari as 'talking at random, talking nonsense,' but also of its more elevated meaning of 'dreamipg, to talk and think strange things/ Indeed, with all its realism] the mimus not infrequently contained curious dreams and hallucinations, as in the plays of Aristoph- s The Tradition of the Absurd 233 anes. In a gloss to Juvenal, the mimes are called paradoxi. And in fact everything fantastic is paradoxical, as are also the mimicae ineptiae, clowning and foolery. The expression probably refers to both these aspects. Thus, in the mimus, high, and low,_serious,^vejaJxorrifying matters are miraculously mingled with theMitoj^oggjuid humorous; flat realism with highly fantasticated and magics elements."6 Little of the mimus has been preserved. Most of its plays were improvised and even those that were written down were not thought respectable enough to be copied and handed on. In the dramatic literature of antiquity that has come down to us, only the jfartreof^*^^ 1 dom of imaginatiojij^ "characterized &e wflo^a^vu^^n^r^ysj /TetTfoTSuTO^^ plays of Arisfepa- anes have had httkjrnjjaet on the development of at least the regular, literary drama, iftheir spirit lived on, it did so in that other stream of the tradition of the meatre-tth^ntiliterary, mipro^js^folktl^a^j which was always equ^uTy unfettereo' in its topicidcorQment7equally irreverent and extravagant. It is this stream of tradition that was kept alive throughout the Middle Ages—while the schoolmen copied the comedies of Plautus and Terence—by itinerant ioculatores and clowns, who were the direct descendants of the Roman mimes. Their clowriing and fooling reappear in the comic characters, often as Devils and personified vices, of French and English mystery plays; in the numerous farces of French medieval literature; and in the German Fastnachtsspiete. Anotherjie^c^ndarit of the mimus of antiquity was tb&mmb*. jMli&rrhe long stick he carries was the wooden sword ot the cornic actor in ancient times."7 And both clowns and court jesters appear in the comic_chi(iactei5_oL,Sliakespeare^,. theatre. This is not the placefor a detailed study of Shakespearean clowns, fools, and ruffians as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd. Most of us are too familiar with Shakespeare to notice how rich his plays are in precisely the same type of inverted logical reasoning, false syllogism, free association, and the poetry of real or feigned madness that we find in the plays of Ionesco, Beckett, and Pinter. This is not to make any claim that these latter-day playwrights should be compared to the theatre of the absurd 334 Shakespeare, but merely to point out that both the fftip^flfii _and—felj©-^iOBSeiisical^^ and generally accepted i These elements in Sjiakespeajre are merely parts of the whole, embedded in a rich amalgam of the poetic and literary, the popular and the vulgar, but they are present nevertheless —in the earthy vulgarity of the low type of moron like Bernar-dine in Measure for Measure who refuses to attend his own execution because he has a hangover; in the naive stupidity of Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona; in the childishness of Launcelot Gobbo, or the melancholy madness of Feste, or the Fool in King Lear, There is ^oJaJihakesp.ejJ£jh£^ cation of me_subco^nscigji5-..part-of-man in great archetypal ) characters like Falstaff or Caliban, and the exalted madness of Ophelia, Richard II, and Lear—rear descents into the realms of the irrational. Again,.in a play like A Midsummer Night's Dream, there is the savage parody of conventional poetic language in the artisans' play, and Bottom's transformation into an ass is used to reveal his true animal nature. But, abgye_all, / y ttiereis in Shakespeare_a very strong sense of the futility and T> ^^^^^^eZS^m,fion^UonJThis is particularly appar- f ent in the tragicomic plays like Troilus and Cressida, where both love and heroism are cruelly deflated, but it underlies most of Shakespeare's conception of life: As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport. If in Shakespeare's theatre' elements of a vulgar, spontaneous, and in many ways irrational folk tradition broke into literature (though the presence of these very elements delayed Shakespeare's acceptance as a serious, regular poet for a very long time), the tradition of spontaneons_dn^^ realm of HteratwJ£c|>n§n^ dfthlftSSffi^deTfarie. .Whether Reich's contention that there is iTdh^cTTm^lEe^e^nthe wimtts and the improvised commedia deU'arte^-with the Roman Sannio appearing as Zanfai (in Eng'-lish popular drama—Zany) and Scapin—is correct or not, the deep affinity between the two genres is evident. They .meet the same very hmnan, demand.for fooling, the release of inhibitions, in spontaneous laughter. Many of the haditional /ozss—the ver- *t The Tradition of the Absurd S35 bal and nonverbal gags of the commedia dett'arte—bear a close family resemblance to those of the mimus. Here again we have thestiipjd shnpletoa who cannot understand the meaning of the most common tenns and bj^conT^entangled in endless ^semantic^ * tjjges of the sly and lecherous servant, the braggart, the glutton, the senile old man, and the spurious scholar Pjojectjhe basic urges of the human subconsciousonto-the staeein im-ages.ai^g^ejfulas^they are coarse^Basically simple, mis-fiie^ atre depends a great 3eafy.fne. sneer professional skilfof the ^erformersfAr]^sepn~Gregor pointsnut, "Only^r^imagme'' these, in themselves hackneyed, motifs presented in an almost superhuman confusion; the jokes, in themselves stupid enough, delivered with superhuman dexterity of tongue; the acrobatics performed with superhuman skill, can we get an idea of this theatre."8 So strong was the appeal of the commedia deWarte that it has, in various guises, survived into the present. In France it was absorbed into legitimate drama through the work of such dramatists as Mohejre^and.MariYaux, But, in an unliterary form, it also persisted in the pantomime^^the^^mfcuifes, where Debureau created hiF a"reHctypaI_figure.. pf, the" silent, -pale, lovesick Pierrot, fei England, it was theJiajjsimiBade. thajJsept l^rflditinir^tiTfi rn^mggift ffcH^rfe ^live wefl intothe nine., teenth century, when it reached a peak in the inspired clown-mg^oTTjffiSaalai. The harlequinade formed th^asis^jrfjAie^ later English pantomime, which, in a somewhat modified sliape7 contimies TdTms^day as an irrepressible form of truly vulgar folk theatre. I^Other elements of the harlequinade merged into the tradi-j ftion of the EnghsLmusicuhall and Americaojaudeville, with] its cross-talk comedians, tap-dancers, and comic songs. The' greatest performers of this genre reached heights of tragicomic pathos that left much of the contemporary legitimate theatre far behind. One of the greatest of these was Dan Leno, of whom Max Beerbohm wrote, "That face puckered with cares . . . that face so tragic, with all the tragedy that is writ on the face of a baby monkey, yet ever liable to relax its mouth into a sudden wide grin and to screw up its eyes to vanishing point over some little triumph wrested from Fate, the tyrant; that 336 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD pour little personage, so 'put upon' yet so plucky with his squeaking voice and his sweeping gestures; bent but not broken; faint but pursuing; incarnate of the will to live in a world not at all worth living in—surely all hearts went always out to Dan Leno."8 Dan Leno's patter sometimes contained passages of almost philosophical nonsense strongly reminiscent of the Theatre of the Absurd, when, for example, he asked, "Ah, what is man? Wherefore does he why? Whence did he whence? Whither is he withering?"10 And so the line from the mimus of antiquity, through ihe clowns and jesters of the Middle Ages and the Zanni and Arlecchini of the commedia delYarte, emerges in the comedians of music hall and vaudeville from which the twentieth century derived what will in all probability be regarded as its only great achievement in popular art—d^sflent^mcomedy^of the Keystone Cops, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and a host of other immortal performers. The type of gag and the fast-and-furious timing of the grotesque comedy of the silent cinema stems directly from the clowning and acrobatic dancing of music hall and vaudeville. But the superhuman dexterity of movement of which Gregor spoke in describing the effect of the commedia delFarte is even further and more miraculously enhanced by the magic of the screen. I Thejaenfcfflm^ doubt^one ofthe decisive A \ m^^^^q^^^eatre of th^JJjsurd. It has me^eimh^e strangenessMTww^leaa^rronT outside with the uncompre-1 bending eyes of one cut off from reality. It has the quality of nightmare and displays a world in constant, and wholly pur-: poseless, movement. And it repeatedly demonstrates the deep poetic power of wordless and purposeless action. fThe great performers of this cinema, Chajr^m^ndPiuj5tejL^SSw> are the perfect embodiments of the stoicism of man when faced with a world of mechanical devices that have gone out of hand. The coming of sound in the cinema killed the tempo and fantasy of that heroic age of comedy, but it opened the way for other aspects of the old vaudeville tradition. Lajur^Laxid Hardy, W. C. Fields, and^hp Mary Brothers ajai exercjse(i tEeirinfluence on the Theatre of the Absurd. In Ionesco's The Chairs the old man impersonates the month of February by "scratching his head like Stan Laurel,"11 and Ionesco himself The Tradition of the Absurd *37 told the audience at the American premiere of The Shepherd's Chameleon that the French Surrealists had "nourished" him but that the three biggest influences on his work had been Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx.12 1 With the speed of their reactions, their skill as musical j clowns, Harpo's speechlessness, and the wild Surrealism of I their dialogue, digJ^arxJ^t^eKL^^^ between the commedia delVarte and yaudev^^ jmjflre„ojgLe> hand, and thTTTeati^e^TthTATsurd, on"the other, A scene "like the famous one iiTA^igWWfheOpera in which more and more people stream into a tiny cabin on an ocean liner has all the mad proliferation and frenzy of Ionesco. Yet the Marx Brothers are clearly recognizable representatives of the.. ancient and highly skilled tribe of itinerant clowns. They belong to the same Category as the great W. C. Fields, also a brilliant Surrealist comedian and at the same time a skilled juggler, and the equally great Grock, who was both an acrobat and an astonishingly accomplished musician. In the cinema at present, only one worthy representative of this art is still active, and he, if anything, is too conscious and sophisticated an artist and thus lacks some of the glorious naivete and vulgarity of his predecessors. Still, Jacjqnes..,Ta|i's Monsieur Hulot is a figure helplessly enmeshed in the heartless mechanical civilization of our time. Tati's approach is closely; related to that of the Theatre of the Absurd, particularly ini his deflation of language by using dialogue mosdy as an in-1 distinct background murmur, and his subtle introduction of] highly charged symbolical imagery, as in the masterly final scene of Mon Oncle, where his departure from an insanely mechanized and busy airport is subdy raised into an image of death. The tradition of the comme^iajdeKatt&JSspveeits in a number of other guises. Its_oharacters have survived in the puppet\ theatre and the Punch and Judyjshjjws, which also, in their "TiwTvrayrftave^^ of the Theatre of the Absurd. In Central Europe, the tradition of the commedia deWarte merged with that of the clowns and ruffians of Elizabethan England to produce a long line of Pickemerrings, Hans Wursts, 238 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD and other coarse comic characters who dominated the folk theatre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Austrian folk theatre, this tradition fused with another line of development, that of the baroque spectacle play and the allegorical drama of the Jesuits, to produce a geru^jiosftfeHang' clowning with allegorical imagery that forel^aoows many elements of the Theatre TStVMTRBsurd. This is the genre of which Schikaneder's libretto for Mozart's The Magic Flute is an undistinguished example, and which found its greatest master in the Viennese actor-playwright^erdinand Raimund {1790-, i8367TTnT3ain-H^^ has remained relatively unknown outside Austria, owing to the strongly local color of its language, we find scenes in which broad comedy merges into naive poetic allegory. In Der Bauer ah MMionar (The Peasant as Millionaire), the vulgar, broadly comical new-rich millionaire Wurzel is confronted with his own youth, in the shape of a lovely boy who ceremoniously takes leave of him, whereupon Old Age is heard knocking at the door and, when refused entry, breaks it down. Here, as in the best examples of the Theatre of the Absurd, the human condition isjpresented^ to us as a conerete_p_oettcta flesh on the sfago^anoTtriat is at the same time broadly comic and deeply ""Raimund's successor as the dominant figure of the Viennese folk theatre. TohanixJSIestroy Y1801-1862). also wrote allegori-|eal tragicomediesmthisvein, but he excelled as a master of hn-; guistic absurdity and as a rjrjhless parochs^^f^wtenM^ ■:drama,fousaEo anticipating some of tJitTcnaracteristics of the I Theatre of the Absurd. Most of Nestroy's dialogue is untranslatable, since it is in broad dialect, full of local allusions, and based on elaborate multiple puns. But in a short passage like the following from his Judith und Holofernes (1849—a parody of Hebbel's Judith), it might be possible to get a glimpse of his Surrealist quality: I am nature's most brilliant piece of work [boasts the great warrior Holof ernes]; I have yet to lose a battle; I am the virgin among generals. One day I should like to pick a fight with myself, just to see who is stronger—I or I?13 On a more literary level, the traditions of the commedia The Tradition of the Absurd 239 deWarte and that of Shakespeare's dojKns^mj^ejrLanother forebear of-theTheatre of the Absurd^Georg Buchner](i8Í3-1837), one of the greatest dramatists of^řt^řmán-speaking world. Buchner's delightful comedy Leonce undLena (1836), which is inscribed with a motto from As You Like It: 0 that I were a fool, 1 am ambitious for a motley coat, . M deals with the .futility of .human, existence, that can be re-jteved,onIyJb!^^ oneself as absurd. As Vaierio says, in language derived from that of Shakespeare's fools: The sun looks like an inn sign and the fiery clouds above it like an inscription—Tavern of the Golden Sun. The earth and the water below are like a table on which wine has been spilled, and we fie on it like playing cards with which God and the Devil play, out of boredom, and you are a playing-card king and I a playing-card knave, and all that is lacking is a queen, a beautiful Queen with a gingerbread heart on her breast.15 The same Jgjichner^who wrote this gently resigned comedyt of autumnal clowning is also oneofthe pioneers of another | type of the Theatreoj^ J mental aběrraí§^ he left un- finished whon he died, at the age of twenty-three, in 1837, is cme, nf the first plavsjlaaarld-literatitrf. to. make a tormented creature, alroost feeble-minded and beset bjjfj^hjcmatimsTtne^ lierpjatjnra^ figures that tor- turethe helpleššTWoyzeck (above all the doctor who subjects him to scientific experiments), and in the violence and extravagance of its language, Woyzeck is one of the first modern plays —the germ of much of Brecht, German Expressionism, and of the dark strain of the Theatre of the Absurd exemplified by Adamov's early plays. Buehner's contemporary, Christian Dietrich iGjabj3eJ{ 1801-1836), may not have had Buchner's genius, but he too belongs in the group of the poětejs.maj^šts,. who have in- y fhienced the Theatre of the Absurd. His comedy Scherz, Satire, Ironie und Tiefere Bedeutung (Joke, Satire, Irony and Deeper 1203 240 THE THEATEE OF THE ABSURD Meaning), in which the Devil visits the earth and is mistaken for a maiden-lady novelist, is a masterpiece of humour noir and was translated into French by Alfred Jarry himself (under the title LesSMnes). I From Grabbe and Büchner, the line of development leads \ straight to Wedekind, the Dadaists, German Expressionism, ^ and the early Brecht. But before we turn to these and other direct antecedents of the Theatre of the Absurd, we must take up the storytf-of another of the strains that have contributed to the peculiar /~T quality of its plays—the hterature of verbal .nonsense. ' -'-" "Delight in Nonsense," says Freud in his study of the sources \oi the comic,16 "has its root in the feeling of freedom we en- , ijoy when we are able to abandon the strait jacket of logic." At the time Freud wrote his essay, more than fifty years ago, he hastened to add that this delight "is covered up in serious life almost to the point of disappearance," so that he had to find evidence for it in the child's delight in stringing words together without having to bother about their meaning or logical order, and in the fooling of students in a state of alcoholic intoxication. It is certainly significant that today, when the need to be rational in "serious, adult life" has become greater than ever, hteratureand the theatre are giving room in increas-Jng measure to that TmeraSm^^ Tet^onsenseTIt^rure'and nonsense poetry have provided | lustful release from the shackles of logic for many centuries?)! Robert Benayoun opens his fascinating Anthologie du Non- ' sense with French scholastic nonsense poetry of the thirteenth century. And so we read in the Fatrasies of Philippe de Remi, Sire de Beaumanoir (1250-1296), of a sour herring that laid siege to the city of Gisor, and of an old shirt that wanted to plead in court: Une vieille chemise Avait pris d tdche De savoir plaider, Mais une cerise The Tradition of the Absurd 241 Devant elle s'est mise Pour la tnlipender. Sans une vieille cuiUěre Qui avait repris haleine En apportant un vkAer, Toute I'eau de la Tamise Put entree en un panier.17 Though this may be among the earliest preserved examples of nonsense verse, We can be sure that nonsense rhymes have been sung to children and chanted by adults since the earliest times. There is a magic about nonsense; and magic formulas often consist of syllables that still have rhyme or rhythm but have lost any sense they may originally have contained. The nursery rhymes of most nations include a large number of nonsense verses. In their Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, lona arid Peter Opie produce evidence for versions of that great nonsense rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" from as far afield as Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, Switzerland, and Finland. And in their study The Lore and Language of School Children, the same authors have collected nonsense rhymes still being handed on by word of mouth among British school children-proof that thenee^ constraints of logjc^jQ^ě^ful^^JLlLw^fa Fl60^'8 ^ or in the tinrteenjbjsenjbiry. - ■~"~™^ "The literature of verbal nonsense expresses more than mere 1 playfulness. In trying to: burst the bounds of logic and language, it batters at the enclosing walls of the human condi- J tion itself. This is the impulse behind the exuberant vision of | perhaps the greatest of the masters of nonsense prose and \ ^^^^^^^^^Bgtij^s, a world he dé&raoela^m language so^řich^ndextraivagant that it transcends the relative poverty of the real world and opens up a glimpse into the irdinite|Tq^s Jjhe_rjioverJy^ visionj)finfitóe^ goes far5 beyond the rule of "Hiilrámanist Abbeyé de Thelěme, "Fay ce que vouldras," but mdh^s-ihajr££dom^ of.tíiejmaginati.on. i ť' Verbal nonsense, fa ftV a^fjft_ftjm^physfcál^ en- 242 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD 1 deavor, a striving to enlarge and to transcend tte.lim^s material universe and its logic: Like to the mciwing tones of unspoke speeches Or like two lobsters clad in logick breeches; Or like the gray fleece of a crimson catt, Or like the moone-calf in a slipshodd hatt; Or like the shadow when the sun is gone, Or like a thought that nev'r was thought upon: Even such is man who never was begotten j , Untill his children were both dead and rotten. . . ,18 sang Richard Corbet (1582-1635), Ben Jonson's friend and at one time Bishop of Oxford. And it is precisely the desire to grasp the shadow when the sun is gone, or to hear the tones of the unspoken speeches of mankind, that lies behind the impulse to speak nonsense. It is thus no coincidence that the greatest masters of English nonsense should have been a lo-/ gicianjmj^ EcrwW Eear. These two^scmating writers offer faibiite material Fofaesthetie, philosophical, and psychological inquiry. In our context here, it will be enough if attention is drawn to the connection between language and being in their work. f Both Leár and Carroll are great inventors of unheard-of \ creafaKes.ťhat reTOÍTO^ťh^rjx^ence from tEělr namesTh^eaxs nonsense Botany, for example, con tarns flowers like the "Tickia Orologica^ with blossoms in the form of pocket watches; or the "Shoebootia Utilis," which grows boots and shoes; or the "Nasticreechia Krorluppia," which consists of a stem up which nasty creatures crawl. Yet these inventions pale before the poetry of Lear's greatest nonsense songs, like "The Dong with a Luminous Nose," who lives by the great Gromboolian Plain and was once visited by the Jumblies, who went to sea in a sieve; or the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, who inhabits the "Coast of Coromandel where the early pumpkins blow," or the Pobble, who has no toes—all the spontaneous creations of fantasy freed from the shackles of reality and therefore able to create by the act of naming*. There is, of course, also a destructive, brutal streak in Lear. Countless characters in his Limericks are being smashed, devoured, killed, burned, and Otherwise annihilated: The Tradition of the Absurd 243 There was an Old Person of Buda, Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder; Till at last, with a hammer, they silenced his clamour, By smashing that Person of Buda. In a universe freed from the shackles of logic, wish-fulfillment will not be inhibited by considerations of human kindness. Yet here too the fate of the characters is ruled by the names of the places they inhabit. If the old person of Buda had to die because of rudeness, this was entirely a geographical accident. For There was an Old Person of Cadiz Who was always polite to all ladies, . which, incidentally, did not prevent him from being drowned in the exercise of his good manners. As in the Theatre of the Absurd, and, indeed, as in the vast world of the human subconscious, poetry and cruelty, spontaneous tenderness and de-structiveness, are closely linked in the nonsense universe of EjlwajjiJLear. But is the arbitrariness of a world determined by the assonance of names less cruel than the real world, which determines the fate of its inhabitants by the accidents of birth, race, or environment? There was an old man of Cape Horn Who wished he had never been bom; So he sat on a chair, till he died of despair, That dolorous Man of Cape Horn. That is why, nil^gwjsjGarri^'s^ tures that try to break the determmsm^f_meaningjmd^signifi- "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all." 244 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD This mastery over the meaning of words can be lost when the inexpressible is encountered. That is what happened to the Banker in The Hunting of the Snark when he met a Bander-snatch: To the horror of all who were present that day He uprose in full evening dress, And with senseless grimaces endeavoured to say What his tongue could no longer express. Down he sank in his chair-ran his hands through his hair-r And chanted in mimsiest tones Words whose utter inanity proved his insanity, : While he rattled a couple of bones. The Hunting of the Snark is an expedition into the unknown -to the limits of being. When the hero of the poem, the Baker, finally encounters a Snark, it is & Boojum, and contact with a Boojum means that one vanishes away into nothingness. There igiSX™ Carroll, a curious yearning for the void where both bgmg and fepguage^cease. —" As Miss Elizabeth SeweU suggests in her fascinating study of Lear and Carroll, The Field of Nonsense, one of the most significant passages in Through the Looking-Glass is Alice's adventure in the wood where things have no names. In that wood, Alice herself forgets her own name: "Then it really has happened, after all! And now, who am I? I uM remember, if I can! I'm determined to do itl'^But she has forgotten her name and thus her identity. She encounters a fawn that has also forgotten its identity and "so they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. Tm a fawnl' it cried out in a voice of delight. "And, dear mel You're a human child!' A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed." f Miss Sewell comments, "There is a suggestion here that to | lose your name is to gain freedom hi some way, since the name-I less one would be no longer under control. . . .It also suggests • that the loss of language brings with it an increase in loving The Tradition of the Absurd 245 unity with living things."19 In other words, Jncjy^uaJ_Mentit^ defined_byjapguage,-h,ivujg-a name, is the source of'"our scpliniteness.ajjtd.the.origm.of thc.restrictions imposed on our '^k^^m^jp^Mii^S- Hence it is through the destruction™ of language-through nonsense, the arbitrary rather than the contingent naming of things-that the mystical yearning for . unity with the universe expresses itself in a nonsense poet likej Lewis Carroll. _^hjs3>me^ohysjcalimpulse is even more clearly visible in ^^aH^^S^^S^.(1871-1914), tf16 German nonsense pISerTTtlore openly philosophical than Lear or Carroll, Mor-genstern's nonsense verse is frequently based on his taking all conce£te^s_equally^eal. In "Der Lattenzaun" ("The Wooden Fence"), for example, an architect takes the spaces between the boards of the fence and uses this material to build a house: The fence was utterly dumfounded: Each post stood there with nothing round it. A sight most terrible to see. (They charged it with indecency.)20 There is also a strong streak of humour noir in Morgenstem's Galgenlieder (Songs from the Gallows), with their grotesque mixture of purn^gj^oosmic^fsaj-a knee wandering through trleworTcTonl^ the man to whom it once belonged was destroyed all around it in some war; a dead man's shirt crying in the wind; or a piece of sandwich paper that, lying in a lonely wood in the snow, ... Commenced, from fright, there is no doubt, To think, commenced, began, set out To think, just think, what here combined, Received (by fear)—a thinking mind . , .21 thereby anticipating Heidegger's philosophy of being (the poem was first published in 1916) but being eaten by a bird in the end. Like Edward Lear, Morgenstern was an inveterate inventor of new species of animals; like Lewis Carroll, he attempted to write poetry in a language wholly his own: 246 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Kroklowafzi? Semememil Seiokronto—prafriplo: Bifzi, bafzi; hulalemi: quasti, bast, bo . . . Lalu lalu lalu la!22 I" Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Christian Morgenstem are \ the most important among a host of poets who have found an ;__outlet in nonsense. A surprising number of major, otherwise wholly serious, poets have occasionally written nonsense verge; they range from Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb to Keats and Victor Hugo. The limits of nonsense verse are fluid. Do the outrageously witty rhymes of Byron's Don Juan belong to nonsense, or the fantastic puns and assonances of Thomas Hood? Do the brilliantly illustrated verse stories of Wilhelm Busch, that static anticipator of the cartoon film, rank as nonsense? Or the cruel verses that accompany Struwwelpeter? Or Hilaire Belloo's Cautionary Tales? All these contain some of the elements of the true nonsense universe—its exuberance or its cruelty, which is also an outstanding feature of Harry Graham's Ruthless Rhymes or Joacliim Ringelnatz's Kutteldad-deldu and Kinder-Verwirr-Buch, The field of nonserise^QjSie-is equally large, extending from Laurence Sterne to the aphorisms of Lichtenberg, from Charles Nodier to Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, There are also the delightful nonsense playlets of Ring Lardner (1885-1933), which Edmund Wilson has compared to the work of the Dadaists but which nevertheless basically belong to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of nonsense prose. Though written in dramatic form, and even occasionally performed, these miniature masterpieces of the art of gentle non sequitur are^notjgaJO^pbvj. Some of their funniest lines occur in the stage directions, so that the little plays become more effective when read than when seen. How, for example, is a stage direction like the following, inClemo UM (The Water Lilies), to be acted? (Mama enters from an exclusive waffle parlor. She exits as if she had had waffles.) f For all its amiable inconsequence, the dialogue of these , \ short plays, like most writing based on free association, has I The Tradition of the Absurd 247 I its ps^doj^aLjB^teSBHaCft.fri whiffling'agftj^ajjdjtgam to \ ■ basic human relations. In The Tridget of Grim, one ol"the 1 characters^ifwho are sitting in rowboats pretending to fish) asks another, "What was your mother's name before she was married?" and receives the reply, "I didn't know her then." In Dinner Bridge, one of the characters reveals that his first wife ; is dead. He is asked, "How long were you married to her?" 1 and retorts, "Right up to the time she died." In I Gaspiri (The \ Upholsterers), one stranger asks another, "Where was you ; born?" and is told, "Out of wedlock," whereupon the first i stranger comments, "That's a mighty pretty country around j there." When asked, in turn, whether he is married, he an-i swers, "I don't know. There's a woman living with me, but I I can t place her." J Ring Lardner s nonsense is closely related to the nonsense^ j monologues of Robert Benchley. Another among the large j number of brilliant American practitioners of nonsense prose ! is S. J. Perefejjan, who was responsible for some of the bestj ] dialogue in the Marx Brothers films and who has therefore) I directly influenced the Theatre of the Absurd. (' Mostnonsense-verse and prose a'diieve ffieff Hb'eraung effect by expandmg^jhe limits of sense and opening up vistas of freedom from logic and cramping convention. There is, however, another kind of norisense,.which" relies on a contraction^ j rather than"an aqsansion of the scope of language. This pro- J I cedure, much used in the Theatre of the Absurd, rests on the < \ satirical and destructive use of cliche—the fossilized debris of-j dead language. j The foremost l^neerjrfjtos^^ j JFkubeip who was greatly preoccupied with the problem of i [ nmmvnstupidity and composed a dictionary of cliche and] automatjc^e^aonges, the DietumnaWe^es^ld^Ws'ReQues, which a^eareaas an appendix to his posthumously published novel Bouvard et VScuchet. Additional entries have since come to fight, and the dictionary now contains no fewer than nine hundred and sixty-one articles, listing in alphabetical order the most common cliches, conventional misconceptions, and accepted associations of ideas of the nineteenth-century French bourgeois: "Money-the root of all evil," as well as "Diderot- ! 248 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD always followed by d'Alambert," or "Jansenism-one does not know what it is, but it is very chic to talk about it." Jji£g||LfeyjeJMowed Flaubert in working a whole encyclo-PJ^^^E^ISl1 cliches into ,th^jGertie McDoweT(l-Naus2Sa SfiHSS£«^L£[^^- ^ Tneatre of the Absurd, from Ionesco to Pinter, continues to tap the inexhaustible resources of comedy discovered by Flaubert and Joyce in the storehouse of cliches and ready-made language. 'J,- Equally basic among the age-old traditions present in ttie:, Theatre of the Absurd is the use of myJhical,;:aU^orMal^and ,dreamlike_modes of thought—the projection^^mto^oncrete i^L^Pa^l^Wfeal^ttg^ ^ForTEere is a cj^jroflnagtfoa b^w^orjmj^,and_dream; myths have been can33Se" most entireTy'^sea^to'beelective on a collective plane in most rationally organized Western societies (it was most effectively in evidence in Nazi Germany, and remains so in the countries of totalitarian Communism), but, as Mircea Eliade points out, "at the level of individual experience it has never completely disappeared; it makes itself felt in the dreams, the fantasies and the longings of modem man."23 It is these longings that the Theatre of the Absurd seeks to express. As Ionesco put it in one of his most impassioned pleas for his kind of theatre: The value of a play like Beckett's Endgame . . . lies in its being nearer to the Boolc'of Job than to the boulevard theatre or the chansonniers. That work has found again, across the gulf of time, across the ephemeral phenomena of history, a less ephemeral archetypal situation, a primordial subject from which all others spring. ... The youngest, the most recent works of art will be recognized by, and will speak to, all epochs. Yes, it is King Solomon who is the leader of the movement I follow; and Job, that contemporary of Beckett.24 The literature of dreams, has ralw.ays been strongly linked [egprical dements; afteraU, s^bohc thought is one of the characteristics SFffc&a&fihg. Piers Plowman, Dante's Dp-vine Comedy, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and William Blake's The Tradition of the Absurd 249 prophetic visions are essentially allegorical dreams./The allegorical element can often become mechanically intellectualized and pedantic, as in some of the autos sacramentales of the Spanish baroque theatre, or it can retain its poetic quality while mamtaining its meticulously worked-out correspondences, as does Spenser's Faerie Queene. In the theatre it is not always easy to trace the dividing line between th^.£pftetii^ and the open- ■ "iiTg'u'p of a* dream world,. Shakespeare^'<^^B^^^i|^5^« pream-deah with dreams and delusions, Bottom's metamorphosis, and the lovers' bewitchment, but at the same time, the whole play is itself a dream. The plot of A Winter's Tale appears impossibly labored and mannered if taken as real, but will immediately fall into place and become moving poetry, if the play is seen as a dream of guilt redeemed in. a, glorious fante,sy^twishJulflllment. .In fact, the El^abethan theatre in some ways shares Genet's conception of the hall of mirrors, in : that it sees the world as a stage and life as a dream. If' Prospero says, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep," he himself is part of , a fairy-tale play of dreamlike quality. If the world is a stage, and the stage presents dreams, it is a dream within a dream. The same idea appears in the theatre of Calder6n, not only in a play like La Vida Es Sueno, in which life is equated with a dream, but also in a great allegorical vision like El Gran Teirtro del Mundo, which presents the world as a stage on which each character plays the part assigned to him by the creator, the author of the world. The characters enact their life upon the stage of the world as in a dream from which death is the awakening into the reality of eternal salvation or damnation. Calderon's play is said to be based on a text by Seneca {Epistolae LXXVl and LXXVII) in which occurs the image of the great of this world being no better than actors who have to return their insignia of power after leaving the stage. In another great allegorical drama of the baroque period, the German Jesuit Jakob Bidermann's Cenodoxus (1635), which shows devils and angels fighting for the hero's soul, the choir sings in the hour of death: 250 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Vita enim hominum Nihil est, nisi somnium. '^^^^^^^^s^^^^M^^^^^!^ which the tragedies ofTorra™We^ter7and CyrUTourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy are the best-known examples, are dreamsjjf^ another kind—savage, riightmares ofsuffering.ai^"jršv.enge. ■ 'WitF^jJecho^Lthe fashion for allegory, the element of J fantasy begins to dornmate—msuchT^^ '■XS^^73S&^^^ta~X^ó&B novels'" like Walpole'sThe1 Castle of Ojtranto, in which a mysterious helmet crashes into the castle with the dreamlike inevitability of the growing corpse invading Amedee's apartment in Ionesco's play. If the J Rational, ^Ě^^S^Í^^^^of&^&ghtéeaih^d^^íyl^^" i teenth centiBte5.Mafces mcreasinguse gTESar^SEKesTISSclgi J transformatíflns,,Qf^charjic,E^ nightmarish^h^fš^oí" time 1 and place.'E. T. A. HoffnwnnlGéřařd dé Nerval, and Barb'ey d Aurevilly are the masters of this genre. Tfieir fantastic tales may have appeared to their contemporaries as a kind of science fiction; today they are seen to be essentially dreams and fan-tades. r»»^t^^..agBw^^ll^ni-J OTflJ^ff, The extravagant, orgTasffiTfantasies of th^T^uS '3é"§ij3i|are even more clearly projections of a psYchoíó^^ieaíi^" in the form of literary fantasy. Jn dramatic literature, the dream, motif also appears, in the formor^aleyente that^eniade to look like a dreamJo the simpleton who is^gut thro^^ the lines of Sly s ad- 'ventuTirlrrfne"^^ or in such great and savagely ruthless comedies as Ludvig Holberg's Jeppe paaBjerget (1722). The drunken peasant Jeppe is first made to believe, when waking in the Baron's castle, that he is in Paradise, but later he has another awakening—on the gallows. fGoethejventured into a real dream world in the two W^fcur^s^Night^scenes^ first and second parts of Faust, and there are scenes of-drearnlike fantasy in Ibsen's PeerGynt: Madach's The Tragedy of Man, one of the masterpieces of Hungarian drama, centers on Adam's dream of the coming history and extinction of mankind; but the nretJgput__on the' staj£e^jdream3prM:^ of modern^ pjycholog-1 The Tradition of the Absurd 251 icjl_thmkjn£_y£as_^ three parts of To Damascus (1898-1904), ^^SSSLS^M (19°2)> an^ The Ghost Sonata (1907) arejriasterly ti-anscriptions of dreams and obsessions, and,direct .sour(^..=oi^ie^Thggh;f jp|n,the Absurd.. ^n"fhese* plays the shift from the objective reality of the world of outside, surface appearanceJ»the_ subjective reality of inner s^ej^f^orwcigjisness—a shift that marks the water-" ~shed Between the traditional and the modern, the representational and the Expressionist projection^of^entd^alities—is finally and triuinpnantIy"acco1mpM The central character in To Damascus is surrounded by archetypal figures-the woman, who represents the female principle in his life; the other man, who is his eternal, primordial enemy—as well as by emanations of his own_personality: the tempter, who represents his evil tendencies; the confessor and-the beggar, who stand for the better sides of his self. In the same way, the stage space that encloses these figures is a mere emanation of the hero's, or the author's, mental states—the sumptuous banquet at which he is entertained by the government as a great inventor suddenly turns into an assembly of disreputable outcasts who mock him because he cannot pay the bill. As Strindberg says in the introductory note to A Dream Play: In this dream play, as in his former dream play To I Damascus$£he author has sought to reproduce the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream. Anything can [happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and ' space do not exist] On a slight groundwork of reality, imagination spins and weaves new patterns'made up of memories, experiences, unfettered fancies, absurdities, and improvisations. The characters are split, double and multiply; they evaporate, crystallize, scatter, and converge. But a single consciousness holds sway over them all—that of the dreamer. For him there are no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples and no law. . . .25 While To Damascus leads up to a solution of religious faith and consolation, A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata show a world of grim hopelessness and despair. Indra's daughter, in A Dream Play, learns that to five is to do evil, while the world 252 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD of The Ghost Sonata is a charnelhouse of guilt, obsession, madness, and absurdity. r~ It is a significant and somewhat paradoxical fact that the I development of the psychological subjectivism that manifested itself in Strindberg*s Expressionist dream plays was the direct and logical development of the movement that had led to naturahsm. It is the desire to represent reality, all of reality, !.x that at first leads to the ruthlessly truthful description of sur- J' faces, and then on to the reaBzafiojnJthaL^ real world. This is where the novel takes the leap from the meticulous descriptions of Zola to the even more meticulous j and microscopic description of the world, as reflected in the [ jnind of one observer, in the work of Ffruust. In the same way, Strindberg's development led from his early historical plays to the romantic dramas of the eighties to the ruthless naturalism of obsessive pictures of reality like The Father, and from there to the Expressionistic dream plays of the first decade of the new century. The development of^^^^^epwas analogous on a different plane. In his youth he learned Norwegian to be able to read Ibsen in the original, and in his early play Exiles, and in his meticulously observed Dublin stories, he tried to capture the surface of the real world, until he decided that he wanted to record an even more total reality in Ulttssgs...The Nighttown . episode in this noj^jMiiten in the formi of^adream play, is one. ■Sj^t e^^_examP^es_J^~^£^^^^lH^?e AbsurrL Bloomscirelun oT^ana^ursSH'He^aa^Hon, and Stephens dream of guilt are here merged in swiftly changing scenes of grotesque humor and heartbreaking anguish. It is no coincidence that almost forty years after Joyce completed Ulysses, there should have been several, by no means unsuccessful, attempts to stage Ulysses, and the Nighttown sequence in particular;38 For by that time the success of Beckett and lonesco had made it possible to stage Joyce's scenes, which not only anticipate the Theatre of the Absurd but in many ways surpass it in boldness of conception and originality of invention. T Joyce's FJnne^nsJ^ake_also anticipates the Theatre of the\ >. Absurd's preoccupation with language, its attempt to penetrate | 1 The Tradition of the Absurd 253 to a^deeper layer,of,dje„mind,^clgsejrto the sabconsciQDSjnaatrix pfjkpught. But here too Joyce has in'many respects gone . further and probed deeper than a later generation. If the dream allegories of the Middle Ages and the baroque "j period expressed a stable and generally accepted body of belief ■] and thus concretized the acknowledged myths of their age, ' writers like Dostoevski, Strindberg, and Joyce, by delving into their own subconscious, discovered the universal, collective siMiificancfi of their own private obsessions. This is also true of^Fraflz..Kafka) whose ioigai&jmjheJlJie^^ has been as powerful and direct as that of Strindberg and, Joyce. Kafka's short stories and unfinished novels are essentially meticulously exact descriptions ofjii^hjanjMQS^ in a world of convention and rourine. The images or Katka s own" sense of loss of contact with reality, and his reelings ot guilt at being unable to regain it—the nightmare of K. accused of a crime against a law he has never known; the predicament of that other K., the surveyor, who has been summoned to a castle he cannot penetrate—have become the supreme expression of the situation of modern man. As lonesco observes in a short but iUuminating essay on Kafka: Thisjtoemejrfjoaa^ guiding thread, is basic ... in Kafka's work. Yet if man no longer has a guiding thread, it is because he no longer wanted to have one. Hence his feeling of guilt, of anxiety, of the ab-j surdity of history.27 Although Kafka is known to have been greatly attracted by the theatre, only one short dramatic fragment by him is extant, Der Gruftwachter {The Guardian of the Crypt), the opening scene of an unfinished play, in which a young prince summons the old guardian of the mausoleum where his ancestors are buried, and is told by the old man about the terrifying fight he has each night with the spirits of the departed, who want to leave the prison of their tomb and invade the world of the living. Yet even if Kafka's own modest attempt to write a play came to nothing, the directness of his narrative prose, the concrete 254 THE THEATRE OE THE ABSURD The .Tradition of the Absurd 355 clarity of its images and its mystery and tension, have proved a constant temptation to adapters who felt that it was ideal material for the stage. Perhaps most important among a whole series of such adaptations of Kafka's noyekand stories was TheJTi^Jox^Aji&h Gide and Jean-Louis^ JBarrault, which opened at the Theatre de Mangny on October 10, 1947. This was a production that deeply stirred its public. It came at a peculiarly propitious moment-shortly after the nightmare world of the German occupation had vanished. Kafka's dream of guilt and the arbitrariness of the powers that rule the world was more for the French audience of 1947 than a mere fantasy. The author's private fears had become flesh, had turned into the collective fear of nations; the vision of the world as absurd, arbitrary, and irrational had been proved a highly realistic assessment. The Trial was the first play that fully represented the Theatre of the Absurd in its mid-twentieth-century form. It preceded the performances of the work of Ionesco, Adamov, and Beckett, but Jean-Louis Barrault's direction already anticipated many of their scenic inventions and united the traditions ;;' of clowning, the poetry of nonsense, and the literature of dream I and allegory. As one bewildered critic put it at the time, "This is not a play, so much as a sequence of images, phantoms, hallucinations." Or, in the words of another, "This is cinema, ballet, pantomime, all at once. It reminds one of film montage, or of the illustrations in a picture book."28 In using a free, fluid,,„^uid grptesquely fantastic style of pro-chicticiJL, Jean-Louis Barrault iw^TJSS^^or^v^'a"^^ in which he himself had been nurtured and which is in the di-rect %SCarxjn^jtage lineage of the Theatre of the Absurd-the tradition of the iconoclasts: Jarry, Apollinaire, the Dadaists, some of the German -Exnressis^^J^^^I^'8' and the prorjj^"6l8"wll3 and"ruthless theatre, like Artaucf and Vitrac. This was the movement that began on that memorable evening of December 10,1896, when Jarry's Vbu Roi opened at Lugne-Poe's Theatre de l'CEuvre and provoked a scandal as violent as the famous battle at the first night of Victor Hugo's Hernani, in 1830, which opened the great dispute about-Romanticism in the French theatre. ** FAfiMdJguy^yJ( 1873-1907) is one of the most extraordinary anoreccenrric figures among the poetes maudits of French literature; when he died he was regarded as little more than one of those bizarre specimens of the Paris Boheme who merge their lives and their poetry by turning their own personalities into grotesque characters of their own creation that disappear when they perish, as Jarry did, from overindulgence in absinthe and dissipation. Yet Jarry left an ceuvre that has been exerting a growing influence ever since he died and that still continues to increase. Wild, extravagant, and uninhibited in his use of language, Jarry belongs to the schoolji.Babe]ais, but his imagery also owes much to the dark, brooding, haunted dream world of that other perverse and unhappy poete maudit, Isidore Du-casse, who called himself the Comte de Lautreamont (1846-1870) and was the author of that masterpiece of the Romantic agony, Les Chants de Maldoror, which later became the inspiration of the Surrealists, Jarry also owes much to Verlaine, Rimbaud, and, above all, Mallarme, in whose writings on the theatre there are a number of scattered pleas for a revolt against the rational, well-made play of the fin de siecle. As early as 1885, Mallarme demanded a theatre of myth that would be wholly un-French in its irrationality, with a story "freed of place, time, known characters," for "the century, or our country that exalts it, has dissolved the myths by thought. Let us remake them!"29 I^^Solj certainly created a mythical figure and a world of grotesque archetypal images. Originally the play had been a schoolboy prank aimed at one of the teachers at the lycde in Rennes where Jarry was a pupil. This teacher, Hebert, was the butt of much ridicule and had been nicknamed Pere Heb, or Pere Hebe, and later Ubu. In 1888, when Jarry was fifteen, he wrote a puppet play about the exploits of Pere Ubu and performed it for the benefit of his friends. Ubfl js a. .savage pftrioatare of. .a .stupid, selfish -bourgeois seenjltfj^ghjhe crue![eyes of a schoolboy, but this Raoelaisian character, with"'Kis 'laktaman*^feeXand cowardice, is more than mere social satire. He is a terrifying imagej^n^„§nimal nature of man, his cruelty and rutHes^nesS. Ubu makes himself King ofPolahd, kills and tortures all and sundry, and is finally 256 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD chased out of the country. He is mean, vulgar, and incredibly brutal, a monster that appeared ludicrously exaggerated in 1896, but was far surpassed by reality by 1945, Once again, an intuitive image of the dark side of human nature that a poet had projected onto the stage proved prophetically true. Jarry consciously intended his monstrous puppet play, which was acted by a cast clad in highly stylized, wooden-looking costumes, in a decor of childish naivete, to confront a bourgeois audience with the horror of its own complacency and ugliness: £ ; I wanted the stage to stand, as soon as the curtain went up, before the public like one of those mirrors in the fairy tales of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, where the vicious villain sees himself with bull's horns and a dragon's body, the exaggerations of his own vicious nature. And it is by no means astonishing that the public was stupefied at the sight of its ignoble double, which had never before been presented to it in its entirety, made up, as M. Catulle Mendes has excellently put it, "of the eternal imbecility of man, his eternal lubricity, his eternal gluttony, the baseness of instinct raised to the status of tyranny; of the coyness, the virtue, the patriotism, and the ideals of the people who have dined weJl"so The public was indeed stupefied. As soon as Gemier, who played Ubu, had uttered the opening line, "Merdre!" the storm broke loose. It was fifteen n)inutes before silence could be reestablished, and the demonstrations for and against continued throughout the evening. Among those present were Arthur Symons, Jules Renard, W. B. Yeats, and Mallarme. Arthur Symons has left a description of the decor and production: The scenery was painted to represent, by a child's convention, indoors and out of doors, and even the torrid, temperate, and arctic zones at once. Opposite you, at the back of the stage, you* saw apple trees in bloom, under a blue sky, and against the sky a small closed window and a fireplace ... through the very midst of which . . . trooped in and out the clamorous and sanguinary persons of the drama. On the left was painted a bed, and at the foot of the bed as The Tradition of the Absurd 257 bare tree and snow falling. On the right there were palm trees ... a door opened against the sky, and beside the door a skeleton dangled. A venerable gentleman in evening dress . . . trotted across the stage on the points of his toes between every scene and hung the new placard [with the description of the place where the action was laid] on its nail.81 YeafeJ-rightly sensed that ihe^s^^^sjeMssm^SSJ^S attenaed marked the end of anjraEin_ajJ. In his autobiography, Tf^fTr^ling'Ve^ne'Ht" anexact description of what he felt when confronted with Jarry's grotesque drama, with its stark colors and deliberate rejection of delicate nuances: The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hfitel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say: "After Ste-phane Mallarme, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God."3a Yet Mallarme, whom Yeats invoked as one of the masters of subtle nuance, congratulated Jarry; You have put before us, with a rare and enduring, glaze at your finger-tips, a prodigious personage and his crew, and this as a sober and sure dramatic sculptor. He enters into the repertoire of high taste and haunts me.33 Another among those present on that memorable first night was Jacques Copeau, one of the greatest creative artists of the modern French theatre—he was then seventeen years of age. Almost half a century later he summed up the significance of the event: ... in my view the chief claim of the Theatre de \ 258 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD I'CEuvre to the gratitude of the friends of the art of the theatre [lies in] the presentation of Ubu Roi in a cacophony of birdcalls, whistles, protests and laughter. . . . The schoolboy Jarry, to mock a professor, had without knowing it created a masterpiece in painting that somber and oversimplified caricature with brushstrokes in the manner of Shakespeare and the puppet theatre. It has been interpreted as an epic satire of the greedy and cruel bourgeois who makes himself a leader of men. But whichever sense is attributed to the piece, Ubu Roi ... is "hundred per: cent theatre," what we today would call "pure theatre," synthetic and creating on the margin of reality, a reality based bh symbols.84 And so a play that had only two performances in its first run and evoked a torrent of abuse appears, in the light of subsequent developments, as a landmark and a forerunner. Jarry himself more and more assumed the manner of speaking of Ubu, who makes an appearance in a number of his subsequent works (as indeed he had in the earlier Les Minutes de Sable Memorial and Cisar-Antechrist, a strange cosmic fantasy that mixes mystical and heraldic elements with Ubu s kingship of Poland in its third, terrestrial act). In 1899, 1901, and 1902, Jarry published Almanachs of Pere Ubu, while a full-scale sequel to Ubu Roi, Ubu Enchatnd, appeared in 1900. In this play, Ubu has arrived in exile in France, where, in order to be different in a country of free men, he turns himself into a slave. ■>■'? Some of Jarry's most important works appeared only after his death, notably Gestes et Opinions du Docteur FaustroU (1911), an episodic novel modeled on Rabelais in v^ferTthe hero, whose nature is indicated by his name, is half Faust, half troll (Jarry knew the Scandinavian nature sprite from Ibsen's Peer Gynt), and is the chief spokesman of the science of pataphysics. Originally it was Ubu who professed himself a doctor of rjaljnjhjsste, (in his first appearance in Les Minutes de Sable Memorial), simply because Hebert had been a physics teacher. But what had started as a mere burlesque of science later turnedjntqj%^^ As , definelTin FaustroU, pataphysics is: The Tradition of the Absurd 259 . . . the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.38 La effect, the definition of a snbjectivist and expressionisl: approach that exactly anticipates the tendency of the Theatre oflhe Absurd to express psychological states by objectifying them on the stage. And so Jarry, whose memory is kept green by the College of Pataphysics, of which lonesco, René Clair, Raymond^ueneau, andjacques Prévert are leading members and in which the late Boris Vian played an important part, must be regarded as one of the originators of the concepts on which a good deal of contemporary art, and not only in literature and the theatre, is based. Something of the verve and extravagance of Ubu can be found in, another play that caused an almost, comparable scandal nearly twenty years Iater-^uď^ume*°°^o1!m^^^ Les Mamelles de Tirésias (^tl^^^é^ffl» staged- af'tEe Thé-átre Maubel in Monmartre on June 24, 1917. In his preface to the play, Apolhnaire claims that most of it was written much earlier, in 1903. Apollinaire, who knew Jarry well, was a friend of the young painters of genius who founded the Cubist school and became one of its most influential critics and theoreticians. He labeled Les Mamélles de Tirésias "drame_ surrealisté," and can thus claim to have been the first to invent a term that later became the hallmark of one of the important aesthetic movements of the century. However, Apollinaire's use of the term is quite different from the meaning it was given in the writings of André Breton, which defined Surrealism in its later sense. Here is Apollinaire's explanation of the teim;*"' To characterize my drama, I have used a neologism, for which I hope to be forgiven, as it does not happen often that I do such a thing, and I have coined the adjective "Surrealist," which does not mean symbolical ... but rather well defines a tendency of art that, if it is no newer than anything else under the sun, has at least never been utilized to formulate an artistic or literary creed. The idealism of the dramatists who succeeded Victor Hugo sought likeness to nature in a conventional local color that corresponds to 260 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD , the trompe-Fceil naturalism of the comedies of manner. ... To attempt, if not a renovation of the theatre, at least a personal effort, I thought one should return to nature itself, but without irnitating her in the manner of the photographers. When man wanted to imitate the action of walking, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. He has thus used Surrealism without knowing it. . , ,36 1 j Surrealism for Apollinaire was an art more real than reality, | i expressing essences rather than appearances. He wanteds theatre that would be "modern, simple, rapid, with the shortcuts and enlargements that are needed to shock the spectator."37 Les Mamelles de Tirdsias is a grotesque vaudeville that purports to have a serious political message—it advocates the radical repopulation of France, decimated by war and the emancipation of women. The Tiresias of the title starts out as a woman called Therese, who wants to enter politics, the arts, and a number of other masculine occupations and decides to turn into a man—an operation accomplished by the release of her breasts, which float into the air as colored toy balloons. Her husband thereupon decides to fulfill the function of Therese, who has now become Tiresias. In Act II, he has succeeded in producing forty thousand and forty-nine children, simply by wanting them very hard. In the end, his wife returns to him. All this takes place in Zanzibar, in front of the people of Zanzibar, represented by a single actor who never says a word but sits by a table equipped with all lands of instruments suitable for the production of noises—from guns, drums, and castanets to pots and pans that can be broken with a bang. The play is preceded by a prologue in which the director of the company of actors presenting it sums up Apollinaire's dramatic creed: * For the theatre should not be a copy of reality It is right that the dramatist should use All the mirages at his disposal... It is right that he should let crowds speak inanimate objects If he so pleases And that he no longer should reckon with time Or space ^ His universe is the play The Tradition of the Absurd 261 Within which he is God the Creator Who disposes at will Of sounds gestures movements masses colors Not merely in order To photograph what is called a slice of life But to bring forth life itself in all its truth . . .ss Apollinaire's play Couleur du Temps (The Color of Time), which was in rehearsal when he died of Spanish influenza on November 9, 1918 (the day of the Armistice), though very different from Les Mamelles de Tiresias, also creates its own universe. It is a curious verse play in which a group of aviators escape from the war; arrive at the South Pole, where they want to find eternal peace; discover a beautiful woman frozen into the ice; and kill each other fighting for her—another allegorical dream that, coming from the author of Tiresias, testifies to the close connection between the grotesque nonsense of that play and the atmosphere of myth in this. The_^Pax^JBohěme of Jarry^ and Ap^oUmaire^was a world in wluchpaintiiijr^jjoeg^ and the efforts to finoTamoderriTartoveriapped. The decor for Ubu Roi had been painted by Jarry himself with the aid of Pierre Bonnard,^ Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Sérusier.39 Appjlinaire. was the advocate and propagandist of the Cj^bistmpyement, and a friend and companion of Matisse, Braque, and Picasso. The ti£n,tof.appear,ane^ the Theatre of the Absurd is as much indebted to the collages of Picasso orjuan Gns and me jgaintags^^fjpej, (the titles or'wTucTilu^^ poems) as to the work of its litj^aryjiorebears.,.,,_______ ^Ěhe^^^^mpwment/ which began in Zurich during the war, among French, "German, and other European refugees and conscientious objectors and which thus merged a Parisian with a Central European tradition, also mingled writers, painters, and sculptors. On February 2,-iqifiř!,the Zurich papers announced the formation of the GaharfitJiÍQfeije. On February 5, the first evening's entertainment was provided by Tristan Tzara (born in 1896), the young Rumanian poet, reading his own work. Hugo Ball (1886-1927) and his wife, S62 THE THEATRE OP THE ABSURD Emmy Hermings (1885-1948); Richard Huelsenbeck (born in 1892); Hans Arp, the sculptor and poet {born in 1887); and the painter Marcel Janco, another Rumanian (born in 1895), were the other founder-members of the movement, which owed its name to a lucky dip into a French dictionary. Huelsenbeck and Ball, looking for a name for a singej; in the cabaret, came across the word "dada"—hobbyhorse.JThe aim of the Dadaists was the destruction of art, or at leastthe conventional art of the bourgeois era that had produced the horrors of warn The program of the Cabaret Voltaire at No. 1 Spiegelgassef1 in the old town of Zurich—right opposite house No. 6, inhabited by Lenin, who must have been disturbed every evening by the noisy goings on there-was on a modest scale— ' songs, recitations of poetry, short sketches, an occasional play. Here the tradition of the literary cabarets of Munich, where Wedekmd and his circle had cultivated an impertinent and witty land of chanson, merged with the French tradition of popular song that had produced Yvette Guilbert and Aristide Bruant. Hugo Ball's diary lists readings of poems by Kandin-sky, songs by Wedekmd and Bruant, music by Reger and Debussy. Arp read from Ubu Roi; Huelsenbeck, Tzara, and Janco performed a Vobme Simultan, a simultaneous recitation of three different poems, producing an indistinct and inarticulate murmur, "showing the struggle of the vox humana with a threatening, entangling, and destroying universe whose \ rhythm and sequence of noise is inescapable."40 In June, 1916, the Dadaists published whajtjfemained the only number of a j periodical, Cabaret Voltaire, which included contributions by \. ApoIIinaire, Picasso, Kandinsky, Marineta", Blaise Cendrars, ' and Modigliani. The first playperformed at a Dada soiree, in new and larger | premises^ was'Sphinx wad Strohmann by the Austrian painter f fOskar KflJaagchka7(born in 1886). Marcel Janco w'a>^esprM^' \ sible for directing the play, and he designed the masks. Hugo | Ball, who played one of the leading parts, has described the | strange performance in his diary under the date of April 14, \ 1917: . f The play was acted ... in tragic body-masks; mine was ( | so large that I could comfortably read my part inside it. 1 The Tradition of the Absurd 263 The head of the mask was lit up electrically, and it must have made a rather strange effect in the darkened auditorium, with light coming from the eyes. . . . Tzara, in the back room, was responsible for thunder and hghtning as well as having to say "Anima, sweet Anima" as the voice of the parrot. But he was also looking after entrances and exits, thundered and hghtriinged in the wrong places, and gave the impression that this was a special effect intended by the director, an intended confusion of backgrounds. . . .41 Kokoschka's play, labeled by the author "a curiosity," is a remarkable example of^ earh/ Expressiomsm (it had already been given an impwnsedperfonnance at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts in 1907). Its theme revolves around Mr. Firdusi, who is in love with Anima, the female soul. Kautschuk-mann (Rubber Man), a "snake man" and obviously the embodiment of evil, pretends he is a doctor who can cure Firdusi of his love. Firdusi's head is turned by love, which means that it is actually turned backward on his straw body. So even when he is face to face with Anima, he cannot see her. The cure of love is death. Kautschukmann makes Firdusi jealous by letting the parrot call on sweet Anima, and as he cannot turn his head to see what is really happening, he dies of grief. A chorus of top-hatted gentlemen with holes instead of faces quickly pronounces a series of nonsense aphorisms, and Death, who alone among.all the characters has the appearance and costume of an entirely ordinary human being, leaves with Anima, whom he "attempts to console, with good results."42 Tzara noted in his diary, "This performance decided the role of our theatre, which will leave the direction to the subtle invention of the explosive wind [of spontaneity], with the scenario in the auditorium, visible direction, and grotesque means—the Dadaist theatre."43 But in spite of these high hopes for Dada in the theatre, the movement never produced a real impact on the stage. And this is not surprising, ggd^was essentially destructive and so radical in its nihilism that it could j hardly be exp^t^"m*Df^eative'in¥n K'f6rm-thMmnecesTar-/ ily reueson constructive co-operation. As Georges mbemont-FJe^api^onel^^lSaavg'F^ch exponents of Dada, recognizes in his autobiography, "Dada consisted of opposing, 264 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD incompatible, explosive tendencies. To destroy a world so as to put another in its place in which nothing more exists, that was, in fact, the watchword of Dada."44 The plays the Dadaists produced and largely performed themselves are essentially nonsense .poeiins;,jja djtelogiie form, accompanied by equally nonsensical business anoTa^crjřfifed with bizarre masks and costumes. The Dada manifestation at the Theatre de l'CEuvre in Paris (which had become the center of Dada after the end of the war) on March 27, 1920, presented a selection of plays that included La Premiere Abeň-ture Celeste de M. Antipyrine (The First Celestial Adventure of M. Antipyrine), by Tzara, in which a "parabola" recites verses that contain lines like: This bird has come white and feverish as from which regiment comes the clock? from that music humid as M. Cricri receives the visit of his fiancee at the hospital in the Jewish cemetery the graves rise like snakes Mr. Poet was an archangel—really he said that the druggist resembled the butterfly and our Lord and that life is simple like a bumbum like the bumbum of his heart.*5 Ribemont-Dessaignes's Le Serin Muet (The Silent Canary), which was performed on the same occasionjby André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Mile. A. Valěre, had one of the characters perched on top of a ladder; while another was a Negro who believes he is the composer Gounod and has taught all his compositions to his mute canary, who stags them most beautifully without uttering a sound. Similarly bizarre and largely improvised plays performed at this manifestation were S'll Vous Piatt (If You Please), by Breton and Soupault, and LeVen-triloque Désaccordé (The Out of Tune Ventriloquist), by Paul Dermée. Lugné-Poe, the director of the CEuvre, who had performed Ubu twenty-five years earlier, was so delighted with the succěs de scandale of this Dada manifestation that he asked fór more Dada plays. Ribemont-Dessáignes was the only one who responded to the offer. He composed a play called Zizi de Dada, "of which the manuscript is lost. The Pope was in it, t enclosed in a chalk circle from which he could not leave . , . The Tradition of the Absurd 265 but what happened? Even the memory of it is lost!"46 Lugne-Poe gave the piece careful consideration, but rejected it in the end as being somewhat improper. At a second Dada manifestation at the Salle Gaveau, on May 26, 1920, the program included another play by Tzara, La Deuxieme Aventure Celeste de M. Antipyrine (M. Antipyrine's Second Celestial Adventure); another sketch by Breton and Soupault, Vous M'Oublierez (You W*K Forget Me); a piece by Aragon, Systeme DD; and Vaseline Symphonique, by Tzara, a cacophony of inarticulate sounds, performed by an ensemble advertised as twenty strong, that aroused the protests of Breton, who did not like being reduced to the role of a musical instrument. Among the other participants in that evening's entertainment were Picabia and Eluard. Most succjgsjM.among the Dadaist plays was T^ra^three^ act"prece"Z,e CaeurJlSaz^^^M^^)' ^ performed \ June 10, 1921, at the Studlo^sa^aps-Elys^es» a weird I recitation by clianiGte^.r^piresei^^^bj of the .body-! the ear, the neck7"ffie^ Ribemont-Dessaignes confesses that he cannot remember the performance because, clearly, he did not see it. Yet he appeared in the play in the part of the mouth, together with Soupault, Aragon, Benjamin Feret, and Tzara himself, in the part of the eyebrow. Le Cceur a Gaz is a piece of "pure theatre" that derives its impact almost entirely from the subtle rhythms of its otherwise nonsensical dialogue, which, in the use of the cliches of polite conversation, foreshadows Ionesco. Tzara himself called the play "fhejjiggest swindle of the cen-) tury in three acts," which "will make happy only the indus-( trialized imbeciles who believe in the existence of men of genJ ius. The actors are asked to give to this piece the attention due to a masterpiece of the power of Macbeth or Chantecler, but to treat the author, who is not a genius, with little respect and to note the lack of seriousness of the text, which contributes nothing new to the technique of the theatre."47 A revival of Le Cceur a Gaz with professional actors at the Thidtre Michel on July 6, 1923, led to one of the most memorable battles of the declining years of Dadaism, with Breton and Eluard jumping onto the stage and being thrown out after hand-to-hand fighting. I 1 266 the theatre of the absurd ^orejy^tarrti^aHhan any of these short plays, whose main function was to shock a bourgeois audience, are ..two..;works by BJhemonJ^Dessajgnes that really try to creatT^poetic^uni-verse with vatidity*6n the stage. L'Empereur de Chine (The Emperor of CMnti), written in 1916, and he Bourreau du V&rou (The Executioner of Peru), published in 1928. The first of these deals with the themes of sexuality, violence, and war. The heroine, Onane, Princess of China, is a willful and cruel sex-kitten; her father Espher, who becomes Emperor of China, a sadistic tyrant. Onane is accompanied, by two slaves, Ironique and Equinoxe, who arrive in the opening scene in cages, as presents from the Emperor of the Philippines. They are eccentrically dressed in top hats, kilts, and tuxedo jackets. Ironique has his left eye bandaged, Equinoxe his right eye, so that they have to look at the world together. War and torture play a great part in the action. The Minister of Peace takes up the study of strategy and becomes Minister of War, and scenes of rape and violence follow. Only those women who drink the blood of those already killed will be spared by the soldiers. In the end, the bureaucrat Verdict kills Onane, who is in love with him. The final scene is a duet of nonsense words by the two slaves. The final lines are: ironique: When love dies . . , equinoxe: Urine. voice of verdict (in the shadows): God. dronique: Constantinople. equinoxe: An old woman tiied of starvation yesterday in Saint-Denis.48 jUEmoereur de CMj^i* a powerful play that combinesjdie^, a5fL.SlAS'^fesrrrd' Its weakness lies in the insufficient blending of its elements into an organic whole, and in the length of its somewhat rambling design. - he Bourreau du Pirou expresses preoccupations similar to those of the earlier play. The government abdicates and hands the sacred seals of state to the hangman, and a period of gratuitous murder and execution ensues; Here again, in a-'curi-ous way, the free flow of the imagination and the release of the subconscious fantasies of a poet assume a prophetic con- The Tradition of the Absurd 267 tent. The outbreak of violence in the era of the Second World War is exactly forecast by L'Empereur de Chine and even more drastically by he Bourreau du Pirou, It is as though the destructiveness of the Dadaists were a sublimated release of the same secular impulse toward aggression and violence that found expression in the mass murders of the totalitarian movements. While Dadaism had shifted its center of gravity to Paris after the end of hostilities, other members of the Zurich circle went back to Germany, transplanting the movement to Berliri and Munich, where it merged and coexisted with the powerful stirrings of German^Expresjs^rn^Bi The dramatic products of ] the Expressionist movement were on the whole too idealistic j and politically conscious to rank aft §t^mB^.M^^h»iito \ ofjhgjibsurd, with which, however, they share.tfej jendency! toL,p»jec^mnei^-reaMes.^nd toijo]^&^^^Aioa^A and feeling.' The only major writer among the Expressionists who. definitely belongs to the antecedents "of the Theatre of the Absurd is ^y^GoU,^ 1891-1950), who, borrTin the disputed territory of1 AlsaceSorraine, had gone to Switzerland at the outbreak of the war. There he met Arp and other members of the Dada-ist circle. Later he went to Paris. Goll, who described himself as without a homeland, "Jewish by destiny, born in France by chance, described as a German by a piece of stamped paper,"49 became a bilingual poet who sometimes wrote in French, sometimes in German. ^ Golfs dramatic work during his Expressionist-Dadaist period j was written in German. Clearly under the influence of Jarry / and Apollinaire, Goll was also greatly impressed with the j possibilities of the cinema. Die ChapUnade (1920), which he describes as a "film poem," is a highly imaginative combination of poetry and film images. Charlie Chaplin's little tramp is its hero. Chaplin's image comes to life on a poster, escapes from the billsticker, who tries to pin him back, and floats through a series of dreamlike, filrnlike adventures, accompanied by a doe (which turns into a beautiful girl and is killed by a huntsman). He is involved in revolutions and riots and finally returns to his poster. This is a beautiful work, probably the first to recognize the poetry and poetic potentialities of the cinema. s68 THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD During the same year, 1920, Goll published two plays under the joint tide Die Unsterblichen (The Immortals), which he subtitled Vberdramen, or superdramas, in the sense in which Apollinaire used the term drame surrealisté in his subtitíe for Tirésias. In his preface, Goll explains his conception of a new kind of theatre. In Greek drama, the gods measured themselves against human beings; theatre was a vast enlargement of reality onto a superhuman scale. But in the nineteenth century, plays sought to be nothing but "interesting, challenging in the manner of an advocate [of a cause] or simply descrip-, tive, imitative of life, not creative."50 -Th,ft dramatist ťh|> ^ tow agemust again jBad-'ai, way„feajagB^ate bentod„4a'„sp:^ faceJŠFiéáWfr^™"""" ' .......?■ The poet must again know that there are worlds quite different from that of the five senses: a superworld (Uber-welt), He must come to grips with it. This will by no means be a relapse into the mystical or the romantic or the clowning of the music hall, although it has something in common with all of these—the probing into a world beyond the senses. . . . It has been quite forgotten that the stage is nothing but a magnifying glass. Great drama has always known this-the Greek walked on the cothurnus; Shakespeare spoke with giant spirits of the dead. It has been quite forgotten that the first symbol of the theatre is the mask. ... In the mask there lies a law and this is the law of the theatre-the unreal becomes fact. For a moment it is proved that the most bahal can be unreal and; "divine" and that precisely in this there lies the greatest truth. Truth is not contained in I reason; it is found by the poet, not the philosopher. ... j ^£-SÍ2£e must not only work with "real" life; it becomes [ surreal" when it is jrware of the things behind the things. Pure realism was the^^a^rtap^e^áTaír — The theatre must not be just a means to make the bourgeois..- . comfortable, it must frighten him, turn him into a"chlíd^ again. ,P The simplest means is the grotesque, but without inciting to laughter. The monotony and stupidity of human beings are so enormous that they can be adequately represented only by enormities. Let the new drama be an enormity."62 To create the effect of masks in our technical age, the stage must The Tradition of the Absurd 269 use the techniques of recording, electrical posters, megaphones. The characters must be caricatures in masks and on stilts. This is an impressive manifesto, which accurately describes many of the features and the aims of the Theatre of the Ab-^j surd. Yet the two plays in which Goll sought to translate these ideas into action are disappointing. DetJJngerbliche, in two acts, shows a musician of genius who loses his mistress to a tycoon and sells his soul to him for a large sum of money, His soul is abstracted in the process of filming it, making him immortal. In the second act, the musician's mistress desperately seeks him, but flirts with the bridegroom of a newly married couple who come to be photographed by her tycoon-husband. In the end, Sebastian, the musician, pomes to life again-on film, crying out for her—but she finally departs with an officer. Although the play uses the technique of projected stills and film, and some of the characters appear as grotesque masks, its contents are, after all, the old romantic, sentimental cliches of the artist who loses his soul to commerce and the beloved woman who cannot resist money or power. The second Uberdrama, DerJJngetforbene (The Not Yet ' Dead), deals with the very similar dilemma of the philosopher who wants to improve the world and lectures on eternal peace. This time his wife, who sits at the box office of the lecture hall, is seduced by a journalist who battens on the thinker, and persuades him, for the sake of sensationalism, to die in public, to prove that he is serious about progress. But after his public death for humanity is advertised, the philosopher fails to die. Nevertheless, the newspaper still proclaims that he has died for humanity. In the end, his wife returns and he launches a new series of lectures, this time on "The hygienic conditions of bedbugs in hotels." Again a good many technical devices are used by Goll to translate his ideas into stage reality —the mad dance of modern publicity is expressed in a dance of advertising columns, the public at theTnero's lectures is represented by a monstrous giant figure, a student throws his brain on the floor and later picks it up again and puts it back in his head-^-but again the^SurreaUst devices cannot hide the lajcj^rforighmfity^of thejbasicjdea^tte^cranmerdalizatioh of idealism By TEe"press. 1 j 27° THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD \ The same discrepancy between the modernity of the means ! of expression employed and the lameness of the contents char-l|i acterizes Goll's most ambitious attempt in this genre, the "satirical drama" Methusalem, oder Der Ewige Burger (Methusalem, or The Eternal Bourgeois). Again the theoretical preface is far more original than the play itself; The modern satirist must seek new means of provocation. He has found them in "Surrealism" (Uberrealismus) and in "a-logic." Surrealism is the strongest negation of realism. The reality of appearance is unmasked in favor of the truth of being. "Masks"-rough, grotesque, like the emotions of which they are the expression. . . . A-logic is the most' spiritual form of humor, and thus the best weapon against the. cliches that dominate our whole life. , . . So as not to be a tearful pacifist or Salvationist, the poet must perform a few somersaults to make you into children again. For this is his aim—to give you some dolls, to teach you to play and then to throw the sawdust of the broken doll into the wind.*3 But Methusalem, witty and charming though it is, proves to be little more than the conventional satire against the Spiess-btirger with his shoe factory and his greedy, businesslike son, who instead of a mouth has the mouthpiece of a telephone, whose eyes are five-mark pieces, and whose forehead and hat J consist of a typewriter topped by radio antennas. Again there is the student-idealist who is a