Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter

179 Pages·2011·3.7 MB·English

by  Michael Y. Bennett (auth.)

Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd
Reassessing the
Theatre of the Absurd
Camus, Beckett, Ionesco,
Genet, and Pinter
Michael Y. Bennett
REASSESSING THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD
Copyright © Michael Y. Bennett, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11338-1
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-29520-3 ISBN 978-0-230-11882-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230118829
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bennett, Michael Y., 1980–
Reassessing the theatre of the absurd : Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet,
and Pinter / Michael Y. Bennett.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. European drama—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Theater
of the absurd. 3. Absurd (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title.
PN1861.B44 2011
809.2(cid:2)04—dc22 2010041714
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Transferred to Digital Printing in 2012
To my parents
And in loving memory of
Julius Yudkovitz (1915–2010)
Leah Yudkovitz (1919–2007)
Mark Bennett (1944–2007)
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd 1
Chapter 1 The Parable of Estragon’s Struggle with the
Boot in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot 27
Chapter 2 The Pinteresque Oedipal Household:
The Interrogation Scene(s) in The Birthday Party 53
Chapter 3 The Parable of the White Clown: The Use of Ritual
in Jean Genet’s The Blacks: A Clown Show 71
Chapter 4 Berenger, The Sisyphean Hero 89
Conclusion: Theorizing a “Female Absurd” in Beth Henley’s Crimes
of the Heart as Means of Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd 101
Addendum #1: Defining the Parable 109
Addendum #2: Parables in Drama 125
Notes 135
Bibliography 167
Index 177
Acknowledgments
I
have a number of people I need to thank who helped me over these
past five-plus years with this book project. First, I am indebted to a
number of professors who gave me a lot of their advice, support, and
time: my dissertation committee (Jenny S. Spencer, James Freeman, and
David Lenson), Joseph Donohue, Nicholas Bromell, Robert Combs, Adam
Zucker, J. Chris Westgate, and Mark Blackwell. I would also like to thank
my friends, who have constantly been there for me (both as friends and as
readers) and inspired me (both intellectually and emotionally) throughout
this long process: Eyal Tamir, Joel Anderson, Colin Enriquez, Shai Cohen,
and Madelyne Camera. And a special thanks to my parents and family: I lit-
erally could not have completed this without all of your love and support.
Introduction:
Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd
I
n 1953, a play premiered that confounded audiences, arguably, unlike
any play that has come before or after it. That play was Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot. One early critic probably summed up the frustrations
of the 1950s theatre audience the best, taking a line from the play: “Nothing
happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.”1 Audiences who were used
to Aristotelian, Shakespearean, melodramatic, and realistic drama, a play
with a clear beginning, middle, and end—exposition, action, climax, and a
dénouement—had a right to be bewildered by a play like Godot. However,
though Godot received the most press, it was not the only play of its kind. A
new avant-garde theatre was taking shape. Though none of its practitioners
claimed they were part of a movement, playwrights such as Beckett, Harold
Pinter, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, and Edward Albee
befuddled audiences in a similar manner. As the 1950s proceeded, these
plays started to gain a following, but, for the most part, the general public
lagged behind.
Then, in 1961, a landmark book—Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the
Absurd—codified this avant-garde movement and demystified the structure
and subject matter of these plays by arguing that the reader or audience mem-
ber must judge these plays not by the standards of traditional theatre, but by
the standards Esslin set forth for what he called the Theatre of the Absurd. If
you are reading this book, you have almost undoubtedly either read or have
heard about the central arguments of Esslin’s now-famous book.
Fifty Years Later
Now it is exactly 50 years after the publication of Esslin’s book and it is
time for the Theatre of the Absurd to receive a thorough re-working. Godot
2 ● Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd
is no longer a mystery. It is even taught in high schools around the world.
However, for the most part, Godot and the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd
have been pigeonholed as absurdist texts by the general public and academia
alike. Since 1960, with Esslin’s introduction of the term in an article by the
same name—the Theatre of the Absurd—the prominent idea of absurdity
expressed in these plays has been largely accepted as a given when under-
standing these plays. I want to be clear here: when I reference the plays of
the Theatre of the Absurd (or “these plays”), I am referencing the plays that
Esslin characterizes as absurd. I argue that Esslin based his understand-
ing of the plays he characterized as absurd on two significant misreadings:
1) Esslin mistranslates and miscontextualizes a quote by Eugene Ionesco,
which Esslin uses to define the absurd,2 and 2) Esslin misread Albert Camus
as an existentialist.3 As such, Esslin posits that the Theatre of the Absurd
contemplates the “metaphysical anguish of the absurdity of the human
condition.”4 I will suggest, instead, that these texts, rather, revolt against
existentialism and are ethical parables that force the audience to make life
meaningful. Ultimately, I argue that the limiting thematic label of Theatre
of the Absurd can be replaced with an alternative, more structural term,
“parabolic drama.”
I argue in this book that these plays that constitute the Theatre of the
Absurd can be read in a new light through a re-examination and re-appli-
cation of Camus’s philosophy. In 1995, 35 years after the death of Camus,
the publication of Camus’s unfinished Le premier homme brought tremen-
dous renewed interest in Camus and led to a reassessment of some of the
basic assumptions about his work.5 I argue that if we read Camus as he is
now understood—not as an existentialist, as he once was understood, but
as someone revolting against existentialism—then our entire understand-
ing of the Theatre of the Absurd can be reconceived. Such plays were first
understood in terms of Camus and existential philosophies, accenting the
meaninglessness of the world and life. Reading them with an up-to-date
understanding of Camus allows us to better gauge the ethical implications
of their work. This book has three purposes: 1) to use an up-to-date reading
of Camus to free the playwrights from the absurdist label placed upon them;
2) to suggest an alternative reading, positing that the playwrights that Esslin
characterized as absurdist write, rather, in a parabolic manner; and 3) to
suggest new readings of canonical Absurd plays. This approach differs from
the thematic approach that Esslin takes; I take a generic, structural approach
that simply offers more tools for reading the plays that Esslin characterized
as absurd.
I begin with Esslin’s argument to provide a common ground. From there,
I will turn to the current conceptions of the absurd: some of which restate
Introduction ● 3
Esslin’s arguments and some of which suggest other readings. Based upon
some of these other readings, I examine Esslin’s two misreadings. Finally, I
argue that the thematic label, “Theatre of the Absurd,” should be jettisoned
and the term “parabolic drama,” which suggests merely a structural reading,
should be offered as one alternative.
“Absurd”: A Note
Before I start, even though this entire Introduction and the book as a whole
appear to be about the absurd, let me preface this by stating that neither
is really about the absurd, per se. The absurd has a long and complicated
lineage, with many different versions and definitions of the word and the
concept.6 I am engaging with Camus’s sense of the word and the concept for
two reasons. First, Camus is the chosen philosopher that Esslin writes about,
and Camus’s quote from The Myth of Sisyphus found in Esslin’s book is cen-
tral to the understanding of the Theatre of the Absurd. Second, Camus was
a stated possible influence of Ionesco and, as will be observed in chapter 1,
Waiting for Godot is a recast myth of Sisyphus. James E. Robinson, though
he makes no attempt to “define a watershed” in Beckett’s change, also sug-
gests that Beckett “takes a Sisyphus-like turn from the absurd struggle in
the mountain to his mastery of the rock.”7 Also, in a new book, Beckett
Before Beckett, Brigitte Le Juez sheds light on Beckett’s early influences and
thoughts on literature through a notebook from a former student at Trinity
College. Beckett was fascinated by René Descartes, who provides a direct
link to the Enlightenment period, where individual reason was used to make
sense of the world.8 Beckett’s understanding of the world in such a man-
ner fits in nicely with Camus. Furthermore, Beckett saw literature as some-
thing not concerned with the unfolding of events, but with an essence that
needs to be acknowledged and contemplated for its complexity. The world
for Beckett was, in some ways, paradoxical, as it was for Camus: life, for
Beckett, was “parfaitement intelligible et parfaitement inexplicable [perfectly
intelligible and perfectly inexplicable].”9
In a sense, though, the “actual” definition of absurd does not even mat-
ter for understanding the Theatre of the Absurd. Whether it comes from a
nihilistic perspective of “nothingness” or more from Camus’s paradoxical
perspective where our desires will not be met by the realities of the world,
the Theatre of the Absurd really is not concerned with this fact. Esslin was
correct in that the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd do not argue
whether the world is absurd or not, and they certainly do not try to define
this sense of absurdity: they merely present it as such.10 Camus, in some
sense, just states absurdity as a given. And in his philosophy, one would