Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936)
RETURN TO SPAN 4183: Modern Hispanic Theater
A. Robert Lauer's Notes based partially on Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961).
Absurd means “out of harmony,” in a musical context. Hence, it is defined as “out of harmony with reason or propriety, incongruous, unreasonable, illogical, ridiculous, devoid of purpose, cut off from religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, senseless, useless.” The theater of the Absurd tends toward a radical devaluation of language, towards a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the stage itself. What happens on the stage transcends and often contradicts the words spoken by the characters. Plays written in this convention, when judged against the standards of mimetic (Aristotelian, traditional) theater, appear as impertinent and outrageous impostures. Hence, if a mimetic (realistic, imitative) play must have a cleverly constructed story, an absurd play has no story or plot; if a good play is judged by subtlety of characterization and motivation, an absurd play has no recognizable characters and presents the audience with almost mechanical puppets; if a traditional play has a theme which is neatly exposed, developed, and resolved, an absurdist play has neither a beginning nor an end; if a realistic play holds the mirror up to nature and portrays the manners and mannerisms of the age in finely observed sketches, an absurd play seems often to be a reflection of a dream or a nightmare; if an Aristotelian play relies on witty repartee and pointed dialogue, an absurd play may consist of incoherent babblings.
Having said that, the Theater of the Absurd is allegedly a byproduct of the philosophical movement termed “existentialism,” which, although born in the late nineteenth-century (the Danish philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard [Copenhagen, 1813-1855] and the German philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche [Saxony, Prussia, 1844-1900] are its founders), did not achieve world-wide recognition until after the Second European War (WWII) with such luminaries as French philosophers Albert Camus (Mondovi, Algeria [France], 1913-1960) and Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris, 1905-1980). Hence, it is a common Anglo-French bias, when analyzing the Theater of the Absurd, to place people like Samuel Beckett (Ireland, 1906-1989), Arthur Adamov (Russia, 1908-1970), Eugen Ionescu, a.k.a. Eugène Ionesco (Romania, 1909-1994), Jean Genet (France, 1910-1986), Fernando Arrabal (Melilla, Morocco [Spain], 1932- ), Max Frisch (Switzerland, 1911-1991), Günther Grass (Gdansk, Poland [formerly Danzig, Germany], 1927- ), Harold Pinter (London, UK, 1930- ), Edward Albee (Washington, D. C., US, 1928- ), Václav Havel (Prague, Czech Republic, 1936- ), and others in the list of absurdists when other playwrights like Alfred Jarry (France, 1873-1907) and Antonin Artaud (France, 1896-1948) in France and Ramón del Valle-Inclán (Spain, 1869-1936), Miguel Mihura (Spain, 1905-1977), and Enrique Jardiel Poncela (Spain, 1901-1952) in Spain were already using this mode before World War II and before Camus and Sartre had come into the picture.
Robert Wiene's Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari
(The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari),
1919 German expressionist masterpiece
Moreover, it would be an error to place the existentialist theater of rational thinkers like Camus and Sartre into the absurdist camp, for theirs is a logical and philosophical theater while absurdism has nothing to do with logic, reason, rationality, or coherence. It would also be a mistake to place the poetic avant-garde theater of the early decades of the twentieth century alongside the absurdist theater, for the former is lyrical, dream-like, poetic, and imaginative while the latter is nonsensical, violent, incongruous, and grotesque. The absurd, as it were, is anti-literary, in the same way that early modern art is abstract and dehumanized.
Ironically, although the absurd is “modern,” its roots are archaic and para-theatrical. We still see remnants of this kind of “pure” (non- or pre-verbal) theater in the circus or revue, in the work of jugglers, acrobats, bullfighters, or mimes; as well as in processions and spontaneous performance events. Clowns and mime artists participate in pre-verbal theater that includes many elements of the absurd. Even in respectable national theaters one finds the irrational and the absurd in the figure of the clown or the buffoon. At times even the main dramatic personae of serious drama may delve into the irrational and the absurd (think of Falstaff, Caliban, Ophelia, Richard II, and King Lear in Shakespearean drama). In the beginning of the twentieth century, think of silent films characters like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, who must struggle in a fast and furious manner to survive in a mechanical universe devoid of logic or meaning (e.g., Modern Times). The addition of sound to film made possible the many absurdist gags of Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers (cf. the speechless Harpo, who belongs to a previous film moment), the Three Stooges, and, nowadays Ace Ventura. In Europe one finds Jacques Tati, Monsieur Hulot, and the unforgettable Inspector Clouseau. But even in serious modern drama one finds elements of the absurd in the grotesque visions of Georg Büchner (1813-1837), a German playwright who wrote the first proletariat tragedy, Woyzeck, about a mad soldier who is so dehumanized by the institutions surrounding him (the captain, the doctor), and so ridiculed by his wife and her lover that he ends up fabricating a mad universe where he eventually ends up being a victim. Elements of the absurd are also found in other literary genres like the novel (think of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, the Marquis de Sade’s works in general, the Nighttown episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the operas of Jacques Offenbach [The Tales of Hoffmann] and Alban Berg [Wozzeck, Lulu], the stories of Gérard de Nerval, Frank Kafka, and Edgar Allan Poe, atonal music [Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg], and modern art and film in general, since its 20th-century beginnings with Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, etc. [however, medieval Flemish artist Hieronymous Bosch fits neatly into the absurd too]).
The Theater of the Absurd was a means to make the bourgeoisie uncomfortable, to frighten them, to turn them into children again. The simplest way to do this is by the grotesque and the irrational. In a way, also, the absurd was a new form of realism that attempted to capture pure thought at its unconscious level, before manifesting itself in a rational, coherent, and syntactically repressed verbalization. After Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, things could not have been otherwise. Antonin Artaud, in his essays on the “Theatre of Cruelty,” wanted to restore the mythic and magical aspects of early religious theater to the contemporary stage, dominated as it was in the nineteenth-century by the verbosity and social realism of Ibsen (in Norway), Strindberg (in Sweden), Jacinto Benavente (in Spain), and even G. B. Shaw (in Ireland and England). In The Theatre and its Double, Artaud states: “The theatre will never find itself again . . . except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitate of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. In other terms, the theatre must pursue by all its means a reassertion not only of all the aspects of the objective and descriptive external world but of the internal world; that is, of man considered metaphorically.” Language, hence, became secondary to gesture, movement, and shape.
Luis Buñuel's surrealist masterpiece, L'Age d'Or
(The Golden Age)
[1930]
NB: The "absurd" is very much with us; so much so that we may not even realize it. Consider the following statements by no other than President George W. Bush:
- "I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can't answer your question." (in response to a question about whether he wished he could take back any of his answers in the first debate; Reynoldsburg, OH, 4 October 2000).
- "Actually, I--this may sound a little West Texan to you, but I like it. When I'm talking about--when I'm talking about myself, and when he's talking about myself, all of us are talking about me." --Hardball (31 May 2000).
- "Our nation must come together to unite." --Tampa, FL (4 June 2001).
- "There's no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide." --Oklahoma City, OK (29 August 2002).
George W. Bush |
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Consider also the sui generis existential musings of Secretary of Defense (in 2006) Donald H. Rumsfeld below, which now form part of a book of poetry compiled by Hart Seely called Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld (New York: Free Press, A Division of Simon and Schuster Inc., 2003):
- "Stuff happens."
- "Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."
- "As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know" (Department of Defense news briefing, 12 Feb. 2002).
Designed by
A. Robert Lauer
arlauer@ou.edu