Page 221 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes Many of the Absurdists were contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophical spokesman
for Existentialism in Paris, but few Absurdists actually committed to Sartre’s own Existentialist
philosophy, as expressed in being and Nothingness, and many of the Absurdists had a complicated
relationship with him. Sartre praised Genet’s plays, stating that for Genet “Good is only an
illusion. Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of Good”.
Ionesco, however, hated Sartre bitterly. Ionesco accused Sartre of supporting Communism but
ignoring the atrocities committed by Communists; he wrote Rhinoceros as a criticism of blind
conformity, whether it be to Nazism or Communism; at the end of the play, one man remains on
Earth resisting transformation into a rhinoceros Sartre criticized Rhinoceros by questioning:
“Why is there one man who resists? At least we could learn why, but no, we learn not even that.
He resists because he is there”. [55][56] Sartre’s criticism highlights a primary difference between
the Theatre of the Absurd and Existentialism: The Theatre of the Absurd shows the failure of man
without recommending a solution. In a 1966 interview, Claude Bonnefoy, comparing the
Absurdists to Sartre and Camus, said to Ionesco, “It seems to me that Beckett, Adamov and
yourself started out less from philosophical reflections or a return to classical sources, than from
first-hand experience and a desire to find a new theatrical expression that would enable you to
render this experience in all its acuteness and also its immediacy. If Sartre and Camus thought
out these themes, you expressed them in a far more vital contemporary fashion”. Ionesco replied,
“I have the feeling that these writers – who are serious and important — were talking about
absurdity and death, but that they never really lived these themes that they did not feel them
within themselves in an almost irrational, visceral way that all this was not deeply inscribed in
their language. With them it was still rhetoric, eloquence. With Adamov and Beckett it really is
a very naked reality that is conveyed through the apparent dislocation of language”.
In comparison to Sartre’s concepts of the function of literature, Samuel Beckett’s primary focus
was on the failure of man to overcome “absurdity”; as James Knowlson says in Damned to Fame,
Beckett’s work focuses “on poverty, failure, exile and loss — as he put it, on man as a ‘non-
knower’ and as a ‘non-can-er’ .” Beckett’s own relationship with Sartre was complicated by a
mistake made in the publication of one of his stories in Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes.
Beckett said, though he liked Nausea, he generally found the writing style of Sartre and Heidegger
to be “too philosophical” and he considered himself “not a philosopher”.

29.6 History

The “Absurd” or “New Theater” movement was originally a Paris-based (and a Rive Gauche)
avant-garde phenomenon tied to extremely small theaters in the Quartier Latin. Some of the
Absurdists were born in France such as Jean Genet, Jean Tardieu, and Boris Vian. Many other
Absurdists were born elsewhere but lived in France, writing often in French: Samuel Beckett
from Ireland; Eugene Ionesco from Romania; Arthur Adamov from Russia; and Fernando Arrabal
from Spain. As the influence of the Absurdists grew, the style spread to other countries–with
playwrights either directly influenced by Absurdists in Paris or playwrights labeled Absurdist
by critics. In England some of whom Esslin considered practitioners of “the Theatre of the
Absurd” include: Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, N. F. Simpson, James Saunders, and David
Campton; in the United States, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Jack Gelber, and John Guare; in
Poland and Tadeusz Kantor; in Italy, Dino Buzzati; and in Germany, Peter Weiss, Wolfgang
Hildesheimer, and Günter Grass. In India, both Mohit Chattopadhyay and Mahesh Elkunchwar
have also been labeled Absurdists. Other international Absurdist playwrights include: Tawfiq
el-Hakim from Egypt; Hanoch Levin from Israel; Miguel Mihura from Spain; José de Almada
Negreiros from Portugal; Mikhail Volokhov from Russia; Yordan Radichkov from Bulgaria; and
playwright and former Czech President Václav Havel, and others from the Czech Republic and
Slovakia.

29.7 Theatrical Features

Plays within this group are absurd in that they focus not on logical acts, realistic occurrences, or
traditional character development; they, instead, focus on human beings trapped in an
incomprehensible world subject to any occurrence, no matter how illogical. The theme of
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