Metaphysical Silence in Absurd Drama

METAPHYSICAL SILENCE IN ABSURD DRAMA MELVILLE DEVOTES A CHAPTER OF Moby-Dick to analysis of the color white. He states that white has great terror and power because it is the absence of all color. Into this void each man projects his own significance. The white whale becomes a potent symbol, all the more so because of its ambiguity. Of great importance in contemporary absurd drama is a similar symbol of emptiness with rich but ambiguous interpretations-silence. Silence first became an important theme when the Romantic impulse to make literature transcend itself and reach the absolute led to a frustration with language itself. For such poets as Valery, Rimbaud~ Mallarme, Baudelaire, silence was a means of indicating the radically mysterious, inexhaustible, "unplumbed depths of Being-itself."! The dramatist Maeterlinck wrote that silence lays existence bare. In silence, "two souls would draw near each other; the barriers would fall asunder ... and the life of everyday be replaced by a life of deep earnest. . . . It is because all of us know of the sombre power and its perilous manifestations that we stand in so deep a dread of silence."2 The modern French writers of aliterature~ however, write with a profound distrust of literature born not of frustrated Prometheanism, but from a deep sense of the meaninglessness of life.s The absurdists hold that existence itself is chaotic, and they believe literature must reflect this incoherence. Silence is no longer an indication of mystical possibilities but of absence, lack of meaning, the void. Faced with the silence of the universe, man has always propagated myths to explain and to confer power through magic and manipulation . The absurd experience, as defined by Camus,4 is that moment of lucidity when man sees that the myths are misleading, when he hears again the universal silence. In that moment he realizes that the meaning of his being-in-the-world is not merely unknown, it is unknowable . The pervading sensation o£absurdity is isolation, es1 Nathan A. Scott, Samuel Beckett (New York: Hillary House, 1965), p. 10. 2 Maurice Maeterlinck."Silence," in The Treaesure of the Humble~ trans. Alfred Sutro (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1897), p. 7. S Scott, pp. 20-21. 4 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Knopf. 1961), pp. 6, 30, 35. 423 424 MODERN DRAMA February trangement from one's surroundings and fellow beings, indeed, from one's self. Ingmar Bergman's film The Silence illustrates-by a family traveling in a land whose language is unintelligible to them-the imprisonment of each individual behind his private wall of silence. When a character with complex attributes becomes, in addition, an incarnation of silence, the symbolic potential is enriched beyond the allegory of Bergman's film. Beckett's novels explore this alienation through interior monologues of highly solipsistic individuals who, through their endless discussions, try to establish a unifying principle of self. To present this experience within the framework of the drama,5 playwrights have developed new symbols and techniques. Silence is among the most effective of these devices. Social inter-action and communication is the structural basis of drama, The playwright, by introducing silence, deliberately violates the theatrical canon. Total silence would be death to drama.6 But the silent character (who is, in part, a symbol of death) becomes the play's dramatic focus. He is the anti-hero against whom all other characters pit their strength. Silence operates on many levels in these plays. The authors are concerned with portraying the alienation of individuals, the breakdown of communication and the disintegration of language itself. Underlying the gaps in conversation and the meaningless repetition is the universal, metaphysical silence, the inexplicable abyss. This silence looms behind all plays which fall into the category of the absurd, whether or not they have a specific silent character. Silence has become the metaphor of "a new attitude that literature has chosen to adopt toward itself."7 Through its techniques of evasion, absence,. negative transcendence, violence, apocalypse, self-parody, radical irony (statements which contain their own denial), refusal 5 The best general discussion of absurd drama is, of course, Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New...