The Absurd Quest

The most exciting theater of our mid-century is that of the absurdists, particularly Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. They dazzle us, first, with a fine control of craft, with the precisely appropriate setting, stage dynamics, and language. Beckett’s near-empty landscapes; his reduction of physical movement to a minimum; his sparse, austere, and wonderful poetry. Ionesco’s multifarious and imaginative settings; his wild proliferation of persons and things in their snowballing confusion of ceaseless movement; his profusion of words regressing from nonsense to the no-words of syllables and letters. Genet’s elaborate and eye-arresting sets (reaching four distinct levels in one of the scenes of The Screens); his shuttling between appearance and reality as props come and go, as characters shift roles, as play gives way to play-within-play which in tum reverts to play; his poetry which sparkles on occasion with a sensuous, concrete richness. All these qualities make for the finest theater of our day.

But Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet are more than masters of a craft: their artistry is equalled by their vision. From their plays we gain a perceptive composite portrait of the contemporary man for whom God is either dead or dying, of the man who sees himself in that strange twilight land between life and death. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Ionesco’s The Killer, and Genet’s The Balcony form, in this respect, the perfect trilogy. Beckett’s protagonists wait with the flicker of hope that approaches despair. Ionesco’s Bérenger, first spun to ecstasy by his surface view of the radiant city, then leams its utter, death-spawning rottenness, and finally can only surrender to the Killer with the “What can we do … What can we do” which paces the falling curtain. And Genet’s players give Bérenger their heartening and victorious answer. The would-be Bishop speaks for many of them when, at the beginning of The Balcony, he describes his path as “a skilful, vigorous heading towards Absence. Towards Death.” We cannot, as Bérenger learned, battle Death on equal terms; but we can, Genet affirms, beat Death at his own game, by seeking him out and gaining control over him through our very surrender to him. It is no rarity, in the history of political warfare, for conquered peoples to absorb and gain ascendancy over forces they never could have overcome through frontal attack. The three plays do give us a familiar portrait of the contemporary man who, first reduced to the faintest of hopes, asks the question of what he can do, and then resigns himself to the seeming inevitability of cosmic nothingness. Such is not the whole story, and not all men have laid down their arms before the forces, conscious or unconscious, which oppress them. But only the blind can deny that, in the thoughts of many men, it is the prevailing story. And though there are indeed those among us who are convinced that one’s waiting for Godot will be crowned with success—either through supernatural or human intervention, through a divine breakthrough or a reassertion of a nobility and courage and wisdom which man has known—the predominant disposition of our time is toward holocaust. It is this temperament which the theater of the absurd has engraved with precision tooling.