Interdisciplinary Roots of the Theater of the Absurd

INTERDISCIPLINARY ROOTS OF THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD MOST CRITICISM OF THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD pays little or no attention to the intrinsic aspect of absurdity. The point generally overlooked is that absurdity perennially has been almost an inherent property of the thought and action of mankind. The scope of the absurd and the variety of its manifestations are the concern of what follows. I The label, the theater of the absurd, may be interpreted as an ellipsis of the phrase: the theater which has its center in the representation of human existence and human viewpoints as absurd. In this representation traditional norms and values have crumbled. Man is at the mercy of oppressive and arbitrary forces and institutions. His life is stupid, his efforts are aimless and bootless. He is stranded and blind, a bare item of existence. He is not a man of action who conquers his environment, he is a patient of an inscrutable agent. Altogether , a two-way absurdity appears. Man's predicament, when viewed by the codes and conventions of society, is absurd. Laws, written and unwritten, have made him an outlaw. In turn, these erstwhile dogmatic codes and conventions become absurd in the light of man's estate as flotsam of the currents of nature and of history. Recent history has influenced the artist to release his impulses in new directions. The changes in which he is immersed have experiment superseding imagination, statistics substituted for vision, prose supplanting poetry, the state nullifying individuality, wage slavery replacing serfdom, urban life blighted by industry, and the links holding man to nature and to society broken. Scattered pieces have the day, cosmos is gone. In the field of literature, the contemporary dramatist's inheritance prepared him for this pass. Nietzsche had inveighed against established values and morality and had announced the arrival of a new day. Ibsen and Shaw supported his position. Chekhov, Strindberg, Pirandello, and O'Neill followed with respective variations, but were alike in pointing to a new ambiance for man. Before the reaction of absurdity took place, there was one of despair and it was embodied in much work of the second quarter of the twentieth century, including that of T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Williams, and Henry Miller. Blue skies, utopias, and doctrines of the perfectibility of man, still present in some areas of the thought of the nineteenth 72 1971 ROOTS OF THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD 73 century, had disappeared. America, often envisioned as a land of opportunity, whatever the field, became a complex of gadgets, conformity , and frustration. In the pages of representative novels and dramas,! powers inimical to man are in the ascendant. The individual is struggling blindly, aristocracy is decaying, and characteristic themes are: perversions, disease, slums, drug addiction, neglected children, sadism, thwarted obsessions, and maladjustment. The gestures of the protagonist are forlorn. He plods along in glum resentment or in hollow abeyance, lives as in a nightmare, and ends, as T. S. Eliot says, "with a whimper and not with a bang." Dramatic literature now is ready for the emergence of its latest species, the theater of the absurd. II In the expreSSIOn, the theater of the absurd, the word "absurd" invites confusion· because it may be interpreted as no more than ridiculous, bizarre, or nonsensical, thereby casting a pejorative light on the theater for which it is a labe1.2 Or, in contrast, it may be interpreted as a crucial category prevailing for centuries and often found among the dichotomies of relative and absolute, essence and existence, and experience and the experiencing mind. Historically seen, the word "absurd" has senses which are far from suggesting anything trivial and which are fundamental in such diverse fields as mythology, natural science, theology, and philosophy. In Greek mythology the dominion of the Arcadian Pan is the absurd as seen in various perturbations in nature and in sudden- and indefinable fears. In the Olympian Dionysus the absurd appears as an irrationalaffirmation of intoxication and a denial of prevailing norms for behavior by unconventional dancing or by wanton demolition, usually aimless butchering of animals or impulsive slashing of assorted objects. In Tantalus the absurd is associated with the futility of desire...