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COMMENT

Martin Esslin

THE ABSURDITYOF THE ABSURD

A Note on Ward Hooker's essay on "Irony and Absurdity in the Avant-

Garde Theatre." (Kenvon Review, Summer, 1960.)
MR. WARD HOOKER'S ESSAY CONTAINS SOME PENETRATING OBSERVATIONS ON
the comic element in the French theatre from Marivaux to Beckett. His
exegesis of Waiting for Godot in particular is an illuminating piece of
criticism. Yet I should like to take issue with him on his use of the terms
irony and absurditv'. I do not want to suggest that he uses these terms
wrongly. In fact he follows common usage. My point however is that
common usage is different from the meaning given to these terms by the
practitioners of the French avant-garde theatre themselves. There is there-
fore a considerable danger of confusion here between the meaning of these
terms as generally understood in English-speaking countries and the sense
in which they are used by writers like Beckett and Ionesco. And surely in
critical writings about these authors it is dangerous to use the key term of
their theatre in a sense widely differing from their own understanding of it.
Mr. Hooker says: "Dramatic irony is usually defined as speech or action
which is more fully understood, or differently understood, by the audience
than by the speaker." He quotes the example of Malvolio. Another example
would be Schiller's Wallenstein, of whom the audience knows that he is
about to be murdered, and who retires to bed with the words, "I intend to
have a long sleep." Dramatic irony can thus be meant to be funny as well
as deeply tragic. Yet in the course of his essay Mr. Hooker tends to use the
term "ironical" as generally synonymous with "funny."
He regards the meaning of absurd as an intensification, a superlative
of "ironical." "If [the difference in understanding] is great enough, the
resulting phenomenon may be called 'absurdity.'" Mr. Hooker is aware of
the fact that this use of the term is at variance with its use by the French
avant-garde. He says, "This term has acquired a new connotation since
Albert Camus has taught us to find absurdity in actions and institutions
that had been taken seriously before." (My italics.) From the juxtaposition
of absurdity and seriousness it is clear that Mr. Hooker understands
 671

"absurd"as being synonymouswith "very funny" or "grotesquelyfunny."

He goes on to say: "But for the ordinaryplaygoerit may still be taken to
mean the extremelyincongruous,inadequate,or irrelevant."
As I have already said, Mr. Hooker's definition is fully justified by
common usage in the English-speakingcountries.The New English Dic-
tionary, after mentioning the origin of the term from its use in music,
where it means "inharmonious,"defines it as follows: "Out of harmony
with reason or propriety;incongruous,unreasonable,illogical. In modern
use especially plainly opposed to reason and hence ridiculous, silly." In
French, however, the meaning of ridiculous does not arise. The Petit
Laroussedefines absurdemerely as contraire2 la raison, 2 sens commun.
Here seems to me the sourceof the confusion of terms. In English absurd
can mean ridiculous.In French it means merely contraryto reason.
That is the meaning of the term in the French avant-gardetheatre,
which has been called a Theatre of the Absurd. Camus' brilliant essay
"Le Mythe de Sisyphe"ascribesabsurditynot only to "actionsand institu-
tions" but to the human condition itself. And not because the human
condition is funny, but becauseit is deeply tragic in an age when the loss
of belief in God and human progress has eliminated the meaning of
existenceand has made human existenceessentiallypurposelessand hence
plainly opposedto reason.
The "absurdity"of the French avant-gardedramatiststhus does not
spring from their use of irony. It springs from the subjectmatterof their
plays. In fact it is the subject matter of their plays. Both Ionesco and
Beckett are concernedwith communicatingto their audiences their sense
of the absurdityof the human condition. As lonesco puts it in an essay
on Kafka: "Absurdis that which is devoid of purpose . . . Cut off from
his religious, metaphysicaland transcendentalroots, man is lost; all his
actions become senseless,absurd, useless. In another essay Ionesco
describeshis sense of existencefrom his earliestchildhood as one of vertigo
at the thought of the transitorinessof the world: "I have known no other
images of the world apart from those which expressevanescence,hardness,
vanity, rage, nothingness and hideous, useless hatred. That is how existence
has appeared to me ever since . . . " That is why the picture of the human
condition in a play like The Bald Primadonna is cruel and absurd (in the
sense of devoid of meaning). In a world that has no purpose and ultimate
reality the polite exchanges of middle-class society become the mechanical,
senseless antics of brainless puppets. Individuality and character, which are
related to a conception of the ultimate validity of every human soul, have
lost their relevance (hence as Mr. Hooker rightly points out, Professor
Grossvogel's criticisms of these plays as lacking individuality in character-
ization completely miss the terms of reference of this kind of avant-garde
672 COMMENT

theatre). Nor can I see any irony in the example quoted from The Bald
Primadonna.The audience knows no more about the mcaning of the
mechanicallysenseless dialogue than do the charactersthemselves.What
is involved is a savage satire (which is by no means the same as irony)
on the dissolutionand fossilizationof the language of polite conversation
and on the interchangeabilityof charactersthat have lost all individuality,
even that of sex. Such characterslead a meaningless, absurd existence.
Mr. Hooker rightly observes that the audience neverthelessfinds them
extremelyfunny. My contentionis that the source of this laughter is not
to be found in any irony but in the release within the audience of their
own repressedfeelings of frustration.By seeing the people on the stage
mechanicallyperforming the empty politeness-ritualof daily intercourse,
by seeing them reducedto mechanicalpuppets acting in a completevoid,
the audience while recognizing itself in this picture can also feel superior
to the characterson the stage in being able to apprehendtheir absurdity-
and this producesthe wild, liberatingrelease of laughter-laughter based
on deep inner anxiety, as Mr. Hooker has observed it in The Lesson.
This is analogousto the liberatinghystericalhilarityproducedby the release
of aggressionand sadistic impulses in the old silent film comedy by the
throwing of custardpies, or in contemporarycartoonfilms by the hideous
cruelties inflictedon the mechanicallyconceived human and animal char-
acters.Such laughteris purgative-but deep down the things laughedabout
are of the utmostseriousness.
The absurdityof the human condition is also the theme of Beckett's
Waiting for Godot. The play portrayscharactersin the act of purposeless
waiting. It is indeed a religious allegory; it deals with the elusivenessof
meaning in life and the impossibilityof ever knowing the divine purpose,
if it exists at all.
This is the theme of all of Beckett'spublished works. And Beckett
also uses the term absurdityin the sense of purposelessness-asopposedto
necessity.He does so even in those of his works which were originally
written in English. In Watt for example, the chief character,who serves
a masteralmost as elusive as Godot, Mr. Knott, thus meditatesabout his
situation: ". . . he had hardly felt the absurdityof those things, on the
one hand, and the necessityof those others,on the other (for it is rarethat
the feeling of absurdityis not followedby the feeling of necessity)when he
felt the absurdityof those things of which he had just felt the necessity
(for it is rare that the feeling of necessityis not followed by the feeling
of absurdity)."
In the London performance(and I believe even more so in the New
York production) of Waiting for Godot the play was as far as possible
acted for laughs-with great success,for as with lonesco, the recognition
MARTIN ESSLIN 673

of hidden fears causes liberating gusts of hilarity. But it is known that

Samuel Beckett himself preferredthe Paris performancewhich was taken
far more slowly, seriouslyand solemnly. There can be no doubt that for
Beckett the absurdity (i.e., the senselessness)of the human condition is
anything but funny.
Nor, by Mr. Hooker's own definition, can I see any irony at all in
Waiting for Godot. If irony implies that the audience knows more about
the meaningof what is going on on the stage than the charactersinvolved,
then there is a complete absenceof irony in a play in which to the very
last moment the audienceis kept in complete ignoranceof the meaning of
the action as a whole. As Mr. Hooker points out, even the parallelismof
the two acts is designed to show that things do not change for Vladimir
and Estragon.Cunninglythe audienceis led to hope that subtlythe second
act will provide a variationon the first which will reveal the meaning of
the play and the identity of Godot. But this preciselydoes not happen.
If there is any irony involved it is at the expense of the audience, which
is put into the position of Malvolio who is led to expect things which do
not happen.
I do not think that it is possibleto establisha continuityin the use of
irony and absurdityas betweenMarivaux,or even Giraudouxand Anouilh,
and lonesco, Beckett,Adamov and their ever more numerousfollowers in
England, Germany and Italy. For these dramatistsare a real avant-garde
in the sense that they are trying to evolve a new kind of theatre,to establish
a new theatricalconvention,a theatrewhich will no longer deal with moral
problems, social conditions or social conventions but with the human
condition itself. In the view of these dramatiststhe conventionaltheatre
has lost contact with reality by being too rigidly rational in insisting that
every conflict is fully motivated in the first act and neatly solved in the
final scene according to a fixed scale of values of one kind or another.
Their contentionis that life in our age has lost any such readilyidentifiable
rationale,that realityitself has becomemultidimensionaland problematical.
What, they ask in fact, is reality?What is verifiable?What is the meaning
of existence? Can language itself be still used to communicatebetween
human beings? Is there such a thing as character,personality,individuality?
By confrontingtheir audienceswith the senselessnessof the human condi-
tion they are trying to make them awareof the avenuesof liberationfrom
the narrownessof their lives and perceptions.That is why the avant-garde
theatre of our time is concerned with the Absurd-the Absurd in its
metaphysicalsense.