The Absurd and Samuel Beckett

12 Pages·2012·0.25 MB·English

The Absurd and Samuel
Beckett
Marc Chagall’s “Peasant Life” (1925)
--What familiar elements do you recognize in
this painting?
--How has the familiar been distorted?
--What effect does the picture have on you?
Surrealism
Surrealism → dreams, fantasy, detailed style
It does not allow for reason or morality to interfere in the
creation of art.
René Magritte’s “Son of Man” (1964)
Magritte was a Belgian surrealist
who wrote some interesting
aphorisms!
Magritte’s aphorisms
1. It is possible to see a tip of the hat without seeing politeness.
2. An image can sometimes seriously accuse its onlooker.
3. The comprehension of exactitude does not hinder the pleasure of
inexactitude.
4. However far one may be from an object, one is never completely separate
from it.
5. Whatever the features, words and colours scattered on a page may be, the
arrangement obtained always has a meaning.
Theatre of the Absurd
--Shows a “sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the
inadequacy of the rational approach” (Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd).
--Relies upon the image on stage.
--Silences can be as important as speeches in the Theatre of the Absurd.
--Look for emptiness, humor, futility.
The Absurd
In an essay (The Rebel), Camus describes the absurd as "an
experience that must be lived through, a point of departure."
By the absurd, Camus means only one thing: the gentle or
benign indifference of the universe, an indifference towards
human strivings, conflicts, beliefs, aspirations, biology, or
dreams.
As Camus puts it in The Myth of Sisyphus:
"What is absurd is the confrontation between the sense of
the irrational and the overwhelming desire for clarity which
resounds in the depths of men."
Camus on “The Absurd Man”
I have seen people behave badly with great morality.
That everything is permitted is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgment of
a fact.
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does
not mean that nothing is forbidden.
One can be virtuous through a whim.
There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.
Use past experience as a basis for future actions.
Life is both limited and bulging with possibilities.
Everything seems unforeseeable to the Absurd Man except his lucidity.
A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus
happy.
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
Irish novelist, playwright, poet.
Won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1969.
French resistance fighters
in Paris, 1944