Download The Theatre of the Absurd: An Analysis of Beckett, Adamov, and Ionesco and more Exercises Theatre in PDF only on Docsity!
The Theatre of the Absurd
By
MARTIN ESSLIN
The
plays
of Samuel Beckett,
Arthur Adamov,
and Eugene
Ionesco
have been
performed
with astonishing
success in France, Germany,
Scan-
dinavia,
and the
English-speaking
countries. This
reception
is all the
more
puzzling
when one considers that the audiences concerned were
amused
by
and
applauded
these
plays
fully
aware that they
could not
understand
what
they
meant or what their authors were
driving
at.
At first sight
these plays
do, indeed, confront their public
with a be-
wildering experience,
a veritable barrage
of wildly
irrational, often non-
sensical goings-on
that seem to go
counter to
all
accepted
standards
of
stage
convention. In these plays,
some of which are labeled "anti-plays,"
neither the time nor the place
of the action are ever clearly
stated.
(At
the
beginning
of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano
the clock strikes seventeen.)
The characters hardly
have any individuality
and often even lack a name;
moreover, halfway through
the action they
tend to change
their nature
completely.
Pozzo and Lucky
in Beckett's Waiting for
Godot,
for exam-
ple, appear
as master and slave at one moment only
to return after a
while with their respective positions mysteriously
reversed. The laws of
probability
as well as those of physics
are suspended
when we meet young
ladies with two or even three noses (Ionesco's Jack
or the Submission),
or
a corpse
that has been hidden in the next room that suddenly begins
to
grow
to monstrous size until a giant
foot crashes through
the door onto
the stage
(Ionesco's
Amedee).
As a result,
it is often unclear whether the
action is meant to represent
a dream world of nightmares
or real hap-
penings.
Within the same scene the action may
switch from the night-
marish poetry
of high
emotions to pure
knock-about farce or cabaret,
and above all,
the dialogue
tends to get
out of hand so that at times the
words seem to go
counter to the actions of the characters on the stage,
to
degenerate
into lists of words and
phrases
from a
dictionary
or traveler's
conversation book,
or to get bogged
down in endless
repetitions
like a
phonograph
record stuck in one groove. Only
in this kind of demented
world can strangers
meet and discover,
after a long
and polite
conversa-
tion and close
cross-questioning,
that,
to their immense surprise, they
must be man and wife as they
are living
on the same street,
in the same
house, apartment,
room, and bed
(Ionesco's
The Bald Soprano). Only
here
can the whole life of a
group
of characters revolve around the pas-
sionate discussion of the aesthetics and economics of pinball
machines
(Adamov's
Ping-Pong).
Above all, everything
that
happens
seems to
be
beyond
rational motivation, happening
at random or through
the de-
mented caprice
of an unaccountable idiot fate. Yet, these wildly
extrava-
gant tragic
farces
and farcical tragedies,
although they
have suffered their
The Tulane Drama Review
share of protests
and scandals,
do arouse interest and are received with
laughter
and thoughtful respect.
What is the
explanation
for this curious
phenomenon?
The most obvious,
but
perhaps
too facile answer that
suggests
itself
is that these plays
are
prime examples
of
"pure
theatre."
They
are
living
proof
that the magic
of the
stage
can
persist
even outside,
and divorced
from, any
framework of
conceptual rationality. They prove
that exits
and entrances, light
and shadow,
contrasts in costume, voice, gait
and
behavior, pratfalls
and embraces,
all the manifold mechanical interac-
tions of human
puppets
in
groupings
that
suggest
tension, conflict,
or the
relaxation of tensions,
can arouse laughter
or
gloom
and
conjure up
an
atmosphere
of poetry
even if devoid of logical
motivation and unrelated
to recognizable
human characters, emotions,
and
objectives.
But this is only
a
partial explaration.
While the element of
"pure
theatre" and abstract
stagecraft
is
certainly
at
work in the
plays
con-
cerned, they
also have a much more substantial content and
meaning.
Not only
do all these
plays
make sense, though perhaps
not obvious
or
conventional sense, they
also give expression
to some of the basic issues
and problems
of our
age,
in a
uniquely
efficient and
meaningful
manner,
so that they
meet some of the
deepest
needs and
unexpressed yearnings
of
their audience.
The three dramatists that have been
grouped together
here would
probably
most energetically deny
that
they
form
anything
like a school
or movement. Each of them,
in fact,
has his own roots and sources, his
own very personal approach
to both form and
subject
matter. Yet they
also clearly
have a good
deal in common. This common denominator
that characterizes their works might
well be described as the element of
the absurd. "Est absurde ce
qui
n'a
pas
de but..."
("Absurd
is that which
has no
purpose,
or goal,
or
objective"),
the definition
given by
Ionesco
in a note on Kafka, certainly applies
to the
plays
of Beckett and Ionesco
as well as those of Arthur Adamov
up
to his latest
play,
Paolo Paoli,
when
he returned to a more traditional form of social drama.
Each of these writers, however,
has his own
special type
of absurdity:
in Beckett it is melancholic,
colored by
a
feeling
of
futility
born from the
disillusionment of old age
and chronic
hopelessness;
Adamov's is more
active, aggressive, earthy,
and tinged
with social and
political
overtones;
while lonesco's absurdity
has its own fantastic knock-about flavor of tragi-
cal clowning.
But they
all share the same
deep
sense of human isolation
and of the irremediable character of the human condition.
As Arthur Adamov put
it in
describing
how he came to write his first
play,
La Parodie (1947):
I
began
to discover stage
scenes in the most
common-place
everyday
events. [One day
I
saw]
a blind man
begging;
two girls
went by
without
seeing him, singing:
"I closed
my
eyes;
it was marvelo.us!"This gave
me
the idea of showing
on stage,
as crudely
and as
visibly
as possible,
the
loneliness of man, the absenceof communication among
human
beings.
The Tulane Drama Review
fate and meaningless
circumstance, do we, in fact,
in our
overorganized
world, still possess any genuine
initiative or power
to decide our own
destiny?
The spectators
of the Theatre of the Absurd are thus confronted
with a grotesquely heightened picture
of their own world: a world with-
out faith, meaning,
and genuine
freedom of will. In this sense,
the
Theatre of the Absurd is the true theatre of our time.
The theatre of most previous epochs
reflected an
accepted
moral order,
a world whose aims and objectives
were clearly present
to the minds of
all its public,
whether it was the audience of the medieval
mystery plays
with their solidly accepted
faith in the Christian world order or the audi-
ence of the drama of Ibsen, Shaw,
or Hauptmann
with their
unquestioned
belief in evolution and progress.
To such audiences, right
and
wrong
were never in doubt, nor did they question
the then
accepted goals
of
human endeavor. Our own time,
at least in the Western world, wholly
lacks such a generally accepted
and completely integrated
world
picture.
The decline of religious faith,
the destruction of the belief in automatic
social and biological progress,
the discovery
of vast areas of irrational
and unconscious forces within the human psyche,
the loss of a sense of
control over rational human development
in an
age
of totalitarianism
and weapons
of mass destruction,
have all contributed to the erosion of
the basis for a dramatic convention in which the action
proceeds
within a
fixed and self-evident framework of generally accepted
values. Faced with
the vacuum left by
the destruction of a
universally accepted
and unified
set of beliefs, most serious playwrights
have felt the need to fit their work
into the frame of values and objectives expressed
in one of the contem-
porary ideologies: Marxism, psychoanalysis, aestheticism,
or nature wor-
ship.
But these, in the eyes
of a writer like Adamov, are nothing
but
superficial
rationalizations which try
to hide the
depth
of man's predica-
ment,
his loneliness and his
anxiety.
Or,
as Ionesco puts
it:
As far as I am concerned,
I believe
sincerely
in the poverty
of the poor,
I
deplore
it; it is real; it can become a subject for the theatre; I also believe
in the anxieties and serious troubles the rich may
suffer from; but it is
neither in the misery
of the former nor in the melancholia of the latter,
that I, for one,
find my
dramatic subject matter. Theatre is for me the
outward projection
onto the stage
of an inner world; it is in my dreams,
in
my anxieties,
in my
obscure desires,
in
my
internal contradictionsthat I,
for one,
reservefor myself
the
right
of
finding my
dramatic
subject
matter.
As I am not alone in the world, as each of us, in the depth
of his being,
is at the same time part
and parcel of all others, my
dreams, my desires,
my anxieties, my
obsessionsdo not
belong
to me alone. They
form part
of
an ancestral heritage,
a very
ancient storehousewhich is a portion
of the
common property
of all mankind. It is this, which, transcending
their out-
ward
diversity,
reunites all human beings
and constitutes our profound
common
patrimony,
the universal language....
In other words, the commonly acceptable framework of beliefs and val-
ues of former epochs
which has now been shattered is to be replaced by
MARTIN ESSLIN
the community
of dreams and desires of a collective unconscious. And,
to
quote
lonesco again:
... the new dramatist is one... who tries to
link
up
with what is most
ancient: new language
and subject matter
in a dramatic structure which
aims at being clearer,
more
stripped
of inessentials and more purely
theatri-
cal;
the rejection
of traditionalism to rediscover tradition; a synthesis
of
knowledge
and invention,
of the real and
imaginary,
of the particular
and
the universal,
or as they say now,
of the individual
and the collective ... By
expressingmy deepest
obsessions,
I
express my
deepest humanity.
I become
one with all others, spontaneously,
over and above all the barriersof caste
and different
psychologies.
I
express my
solitude and become one with all
other solitudes....
What is the tradition with which the Theatre of the Absurd-at first
sight
the most
revolutionary
and radically
new movement-is trying
to
link itself? It is in fact a very ancient and a
very
rich
tradition,
nourished
from many
and varied sources: the verbal exuberance and extravagant
inventions of Rabelais,
the
age-old clowning
of the Roman mimes and
the Italian Cornmedia dell'Arte, the knock-about humor of circus clowns
like Grock;
the wild, archetypal symbolism
of English
nonsense verse,
the
baroque
horror of
Jacobean
dramatists like Webster or Tourneur,
the
harsh, incisive and often brutal tones of the German drama of Grabbe,
Biichner, Kleist,
and Wedekiind with its delirious language
and grotesque
inventiveness;
and the Nordic
paranoia
of the dreams and persecution
fantasies of
Strindberg.
All these streams, however, first came together
and crystallized
in the
more direct ancestors
of the present
Theatre of the Absurd. Of these,
undoubtedly
the first and foremost is Alfred
Jarry (1873-1907),
the crea-
tor of Ubu Roi, the first play
which clearly belongs
in the
category
of
the Theatre of the Absurd. Ubu Roi, first performed
in Paris on Decem-
ber 10, 1896,
is a Rabelaisian nonsense drama about the fantastic adven-
tures of
a fat, cowardly, and brutal figure,
Ic pere Ubu, who makes him-
self
King
of Poland, fights
a series of Falstaffian battles, and is finally
routed. As if to
challenge
all accepted
codes of
propriety
and thus to open
a new era of irreverence, the play opens
with the defiant expletive,
"Merdre!" which immediately provoked
a scandal. This, of course, was
what Jarry
had intended. Ubu, in its rollicking
Rabelaisian
parody
of a
Shakespearean history play,
was meant to confront the Parisian bourgeois
with a monstrous portrait
of his own greed, selfishness, and philistinism:
"As the curtain went
up
I
wanted to confront the public with a theatre
in which,
as in the
magic
mirror ... of the fairy
tales... the vicious man
sees his reflection with bulls' horns and the body
of a dragon,
the
projec-
tions of his viciousness...." But Ubu is more than a mere monstrous
exaggeration
of the selfishness and crude
sensuality
of the French bour-
geois.
He is at the same time the personification
of thle
grossness
of hu-
man nature,
an enormous belly walking
on two legs.
That is
why
Jarry
MARTIN ESSLIN
To photograph
what is called a slice of life
But to bring
forth life itself and all its truth ...
Accordingly,
in Les Mamelles de Tiresias the whole population
of Zanzi-
bar,
where the scene is laid,
is represented by
a single actor;
and the
heroine, Therese, changes
herself into a man by letting
her breasts float
upwards
like a pair
of toy
balloons. Although
Les Mamelles de Tiresias
was not
a surrealist
work in the strictest sense of the term,
it
clearly
fore-
shadowed the ideas
of the movement led
by
Andre Breton. Surrealism in
that narrower,
technical sense found little
expression
in the theatre.
But Antonin
Artaud
another
major
influence in the devel-
opment
of the Theatre
of the Absurd,
did at one time
belong
to the Sur-
realist group, although
his main
activity
in the theatre took
place
after
he had broken
with Breton. Artaud was one of the most
unhappy
men
of genius
of his
age,
an artist consumed
by
the most intense
passions; poet,
actor, director, designer, immensely
fertile and
original
in his inventions
and ideas, yet always living
on the borders of
sanity
and never able to
realize his ambitions, plans,
and
projects.
Artaud, who had been
an actor in Charles Dullin's company
at the
Atelier, began
his venture into the realm of
experimental
theatre in a
series of productions characteristically sailing
under the label Theadtre
Alfred Jarry
But his theories of a new and
revolutionary
thea-
tre only crystallized
after he had been deeply
stirred
by
a
performance
of
Balinese dancers at the Colonial Exhibition of
He formulated his
ideas in a series of
impassioned
manifestoes later collected
in the volume
The Theatre and Its Double
(1938),
which continues to exercise an im-
portant
influence on the
contemporary
French theatre. Artaud named the
theatre of his dreams Theatre
de la Cruaute,
a theatre of cruelty,
which,
he said,
"means a theatre difficult and cruel above all for myself." "Every-
thing
that is
really
active is
cruelty.
It is around this idea of action car-
ried to the
extreme that the theatre must renew itself." Here too the idea
of action larger
and more real than life
is the dominant theme. "Every
performance
will contain a
physical
and
objective
element that will be
felt by
all. Cries, Wails, Apparitions, Surprises, Coups
de Theatre of all
kinds,
the
magical beauty
of costumes
inspired by
the model of certain
rituals...."
The
language
of the drama must also undergo
a change:
"It
is not a matter of
suppressing
articulate speech
but of giving
to the
words something
like the
importance they
have in dreams." In Artaud's
new theatre "not
only
the obverse side of man will appear
but also the
reverse
side of the coin: the
reality
of
imagination
and of dreams will
here be seen on an equal footing
with
everyday
life."
Artaud's only attempt
at putting
these theories to the test on the stage
took place
on
May
1935 at the Folies-Wagram.
Artaud had made his
own adaptation ("after Shelley
and Stendhal")
of the story
of the Cenci,
that
sombre Renaissance
story
of incest and
patricide.
It was in many
ways
a beautiful and memorable
performance,
but full of imperfections
The Tulane Drama Review
and a financial disaster which marked the beginning
of Artaud's eventual
descent into despair, insanity,
and
abject poverty. Jean-Louis
Barrault
had some small part
in this venture and Roger
Blin, the actor and
direc-
tor who later played
an important part
in bringing
Adamov, Beckett,
and Ionesco to the stage, appeared
in the small
role of one of
the hired
assassins.
Jean-Louis
Barrault,
one of the most creative figures
in the theatre of
our time,
was in turn, responsible
for another venture which
played
an
important part
in the
development
of the Theatre of the Absurd. He
staged
Andre Gide's
adaptation
of Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial,
in 1947
and played
the
part
of the hero K. himself. Undoubtedly
this
perform-
ance which brought
the dreamworld of Kafka to a triumphant unfolding
on the stage
and demonstrated the effectiveness of this particular
brand of
fantasy
in practical
theatrical terms exercised a profound
influence on
the practitioners
of the new movement. For here, too, they,
saw the exter-
nalization of mental processes,
the acting
out of nightmarish
dreams by
schematized figures
in a world of torment and absurdity.
The dream element in the Theatre of the Absurd can also be traced,
in
the case of Adamov,
to Strindberg, acknowledged by
him as his inspira-
tion at the time when he began
to think of writing
for the theatre. This
is the Strindberg
of The Ghost Sonata,
The Dream Play
and of To Da-
mascus. (Adamov
is the author of an excellent brief monograph
on Strind-
berg.)
But if Jarry,
Artaud, Kafka, and Strindberg
can be regarded
as the de-
cisive influences in the development
of the Theatre of the Absurd, there
is another giant
of European
literature that must not be omitted from
the list-James Joyce,
for whom Beckett at one time is supposed
to have
acted as helper
and secretary.
Not only
is the Nighttown episode
of
Ulysses
one of the earliest examples
of the Theatre of the Absurd-with
its exuberant mingling
of the real and the nightmarish,
its wild fan-
tasies and externalizations of subconscious yearnings
and fears, but
Joyce's
experimentation
with language,
his attempt
to smash the limita-
tions of conventional vocabulary
and syntax
has probably
exercised an
even more powerful impact
on all the writers concerned.
It is in its attitude to language
that the Theatre of the Absurd is most
revolutionary.
It
deliberately attempts
to renew the language
of drama
and to expose
the barrenness of conventional stage dialogue.
Ionesco
once described how he came to write his first play. (Cf.
his "The Tragedy
of Language,"
TDR,
Spring, 1960.)
He had decided to take English
les-
sons and
began
to
study
at the Berlitz school. When he read and repeated
the sentences in his phrase book,
those petrified corpses
of once living
speech,
he was suddenly
overcome by
their tragic quality.
From them he
composed
his first play,
The Bald Soprano.
The absurdity
of its dialogue
and its
fantastic
quality
springs directly
from its basic ordinariness. It
exposes
the
emptiness
of
stereotyped language;
"what is sometimes la-
The Tulane Drama Review
rationalization of subconscious emotional impulses.
Not everything
we
say
means what we intend it to mean. And likewise,
in present-day Logi-
cal
Positivism a
large proportion
of all statements is regarded
as devoid
of conceptual meaning
and
merely
emotive. A
philosopher
like Ludwig
Wittgenstein,
in his later
phases,
even tried to break through
what he
regarded
as the
opacity,
the misleading
nature of language
and grammar;
for if all our thinking
is in terms of language,
and language obeys
what
after all are the arbitrary
conventions of grammar,
we must strive to
penetrate
to the real content of thought
that is masked by grammatical
rules and conventions. Here, too,
then is a matter of getting
behind the
surface of linguistic
cliches and of finding reality through
the break-up
of language.
In the Theatre of the Absurd, therefore,
the real content of the play
lies in the action. Language may
be discarded altogether,
as in Beckett's
Act Without Words or in lonesco's The New Tenant,
in which the whole
sense of the play
is contained in the incessant arrival of more and more
furniture so that the occupant
of the room is,
in the end, literally
drowned in it. Here the movement of objects
alone carries the dramatic
action,
the language
has become purely incidental,
less important
than
the contribution of the property department.
In this,
the Theatre of the
Absurd also reveals its anti-literary character,
its endeavor to link up
with the pre-literary
strata of stage history:
the circus,
the performances
of itinerant jugglers
and mountebanks,
the music hall, fairground
bark-
ers, acrobats,
and also the robust world of the silent film. lonesco,
in
par-
ticular, clearly
owes a great
deal to Chaplin,
Buster Keaton,
the Keystone
Cops,
Laurel and Hardy,
and the Marx Brothers. And it is surely sig-
nificant that so much of successful popular
entertainment in our age
shows affinities with the subject
matter and preoccupation
of the avant-
garde
Theatre of the Absurd. A sophisticated,
but nevertheless highly
popular,
film comedian like Jacques
Tati uses dialogue merely
as a barely
comprehensible
babble of noises, and also dwells on the loneliness of
man in our age,
the horror of overmechanization and overorganization
gone
mad. Danny Kaye
excels in streams of gibberish closely
akin to
Lucky's
oration in Waiting for
Godot. The brilliant and greatly
liked
team of British radio (and occasionally television)
comedians, the Goons,
have a sense of the absurd that resembles Kafka's or Ionesco's and a team
of grotesque singers
like "Les Freres Jacques"
seems more closely
in line
with the Theatre of the Absurd than with the conventional cabaret.
Yet the defiant rejection
of language
as the main vehicle of the dra-
matic action, the onslaught
on conventional logic
and unilinear con-
ceptual thinking
in the Theatre of the Absurd is
by
no means equivalent
to a total rejection
of all meaning.
On the contrary,
it constitutes an
earnest endeavor to penetrate
to deeper layers
of meaning
and to give
a
truer,
because more complex, picture
of reality
in avoiding
the simpli-
fication which results from leaving
out all the undertones, overtones, and
MARTIN ESSLIN
inherent absurdities and contradictions of any
human situation. In the
conventional drama every
word means what it says,
the situations are
clearcut, and at the end all conflicts are tidily
resolved. But reality,
as
Ionesco points
out in the passage
we have quoted,
is never like that;
it is
multiple, complex, many-dimensional
and exists on a number of different
levels at one and the same time. Language
is far too straightforward
an
instrument to express
all this by
itself. Reality
can only
be conveyed by
being
acted out in all its complexity. Hence,
it is the theatre,
which is
multidimensional and more than merely language
or literature,
which is
the only
instrument to express
the bewildering complexity
of the human
condition. The human condition being
what it is,
with man small,
help-
less, insecure,
and unable ever to fathom the world in all its
hopelessness,
death,
and absurdity,
the theatre has to confront him with the bitter
truth that most human endeavor is irrational and senseless,
that com-
munication between human beings
is
well-nigh impossible,
and that the
world will forever remain an impenetrable mystery.
At the same time,
the recognition
of all these bitter truths will have a
liberating
effect: if
we realize the basic absurdity
of most of our
objectives
we are freed from
being
obsessed with them and this release
expresses
itself in
laughter.
Moreover,
while the world is
being
shown as
complex,
harsh, and ab-
surd and as difficult to interpret
as
reality
itself,
the audience is yet
spurred
on to
attempt
their own
interpretation,
to wonder what it is all
about. In that sense they
are
being
invited to school their critical facul-
ties,
to train themselves in
adjusting
to
reality.
As the world is being
represented
as
highly complex
and devoid of a clear-cut purpose
or de-
sign,
there will
always
be an infinite number of possible interpretations.
As Apollinaire points
out in his Preface to Les Mamelles de Tiresias:
"None of the
symbols
in
my play
is
very
clear, but one is at liberty
to see
in it all the symbols
one desires and to
find in it
a thousand senses-as in
the
Sybilline
oracles." Thus,
it
may
be that the pinball
machines in
Adamov's
Ping-Pong
and the
ideology
which is developed
around them
stand for the futility
of
political
or
religious ideologies
that are pursued
with equal
fervor and
equal
futility
in the final result. Others have in-
terpreted
the play
as a
parable
on the
greed
and sordidness of the profit
motive. Others again may give
it
quite
different
meanings.
The mysteri-
ous transformation of human beings
into rhinos in Ionesco's latest play,
The Rhinoceros,
was felt
by
the audience of its world premiere
at Dues-
seldorf (November
to
depict
the transformation of human beings
into Nazis. It is known that lonesco himself intended the play
to express
his feelings
at the time when more and more of his friends in Rumania
joined
the Fascist Iron Guard and,
in effect,
left the ranks of thin-
skinned humans to
turn themselves into moral pachyderms.
But to
spec-
tators less intimately
aware of the moral climate of such a situation than
the
German audience,
other
interpretations might impose
themselves:
if the hero, Berenger,
is at the end left alone as the only
human being
in
MARTIN ESSLIN
In this respect,
the Theatre of the Absurd links up
with an older
tradition which has almost completely disappeared
from Western cul-
ture: the tradition of allegory
and the symbolical representation
of ab-
stract concepts personified by
characters whose costumes and accoutre-
ments subtly suggested
whether they represented Time, Chastity, Winter,
Fortune, the World,
etc. This is the tradition which stretches from the
Italian Trionfo
of the Renaissance to the English Masque,
the elaborate
allegorical
constructions of the Spanish
Auto sacramental down to Goe-
the's allegorical processions
and
masques
written for the court of Weimar
at the turn of the eighteenth century. Although
the living
riddles the
characters represented
in these entertainments were by
no means diffi-
cult to solve,
as everyone
knew that a character with a scythe
and an
hourglass represented
Time, and although
the characters soon revealed
their identity
and
explained
their attributes,
there was an element of
intellectual challenge
which stimulated the audience in the moments be-
tween the
appearance
of the riddle and its solution and which
provided
them
with the
pleasure
of
having
solved a
puzzle.
And what is more,
in
the elaborate allegorical
dramas like Calder6n's El Gran Teatro del
Mundo the subtle
interplay
of
allegorical
characters itself presented
the
audience
with a
great
deal
to think out for themselves. They
had, as it
were,
to translate the
abstractly presented
action into terms of their
everyday experience; they
could
ponder
on the deeper meaning
of such
facts as death having
taken the characters representing
Riches or Poverty
in a Dance of Death equally quickly
and equally harshly,
or that Mam-
mon had deserted his master Everyman
in the hour of death. The dra-
matic riddles of our time present
no such clear-cut solutions. All they
can
show is that while the solutions have evaporated
the riddle of our exist-
ence remains-complex,
unfathomable,
and paradoxical.
NOTES
Ionesco, "Dans les Armes de la Ville," Cahiers de la Compagnie
Madeleine
Renaud-Jean-Louis
Barrault, No. 20
(October, 1957).
2Adamov, "Note Preliminaire,"Thedtre II, Paris, 1955.
aIbid.
It
may
be significant
that the three writersconcerned, although they
now all
live in France and write in French have all come to live there from outside
and must have experienced
a period
of adjustment
to the country
and its
language.
Samuel Beckett (b. 1906)
came from Ireland;
Arthur Adamov (b.
from Russia,
and Eugene
lonesco (b. 1912)
from Rumania.
5
Ionesco, "L'Impromptu
de l'Alma,"Thddtre II, Paris,
6
lonesco, "The Avant-Garde Theatre," World Theatre, VIII,
No. 3
(Autumn,
1959).
7Jarry, "Questions
de The6tre,"
in Ubu Roi,
Ubu Enchaind,and other Ubu-
esque
writings.
Ed. Rene Massat,Lausanne,
8Apollinaire,
Les Mamelles de Tiresias,
Preface.
9
Ionesco,
"The Avant-Garde Theatre."
Ilonesco, "Ni un Dieu, ni un Demon," Cahiers de la Compagnie
Madeleine
Renaud-Jean-Louis
Barrault, No. 22-
(May, 1958).
