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

179 Pages·2011·3.7 MB·English
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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

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Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd , which suggests that 'absurd' plays purport the meaninglessness of life, this book uses the works of five major playwrights of the 1950s to provide a timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre 'movements' o
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