Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd
Absurdist theatre
The distance between the viewer and whatever is occurring upon stage is maintained by an irrational narrative and an emphasis on formal elements of the performance. This seems pretty naff now, but I get it:
“Emotional identification with the characters is replaced by a puzzled, critical attention. For while the happenings on the stage are absurd, they yet remain recognisable as somehow related to real life with its absurdity, so that eventually the spectators are brought face-to-face with the irrational side of their existence. Thus, the absurd and fantastic goings-on of the Theatre of the Absurd will, in the end, be found to reveal the irrationality of the human condition and the illusion of what we thought was its apparent logical structure” (5)
the definite rejection of language as the main vehicle of the dramatic action, the onslaught on conventional logic and unilinear conceptual thinking […] constitutes an earnest endeavour to penetrate to deeper layers of meaning and to give a truer, because more complex, picture of reality in avoiding the simplification which results from leaving out all the undertones, overtones, and 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.” (12-13)
Language and the absurdity of narrative authority
[What] is sometimes labeled the absurd is only the denunciation of the ridiculous nature of a language which is empty of substance, made up of cliches and slogans. (10-11)
Lucky’s much vaunted philosophical wisdom [in Waiting for Godot] is revealed to be a flood of completely meaningless gibberish that values resembles the language of philosophical argument.” (11; cf. documenta 14’s writings)
The most sacred principle of his clan: J’adore les pommel de terre au lard [“I love potatoes with bacon”] (5; similar to the titles of my paintings)
[Wittgenstein] 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 clichés and of finding reality through the break-up of language (12)
[With the Nightown episode of Joyce’s Ulysses] being one of the earliest examples of the Theatre of the Absurd: exuberant mingling of the real and the nightmarish, its wild fantasies and externalisations of subconscious yearnings and fears [and also] Joyce’s experimentation with language, his attempt to smash the limitations of conventional vocabulary and syntax” (10)
Ionesco in an essay on Artaud:
As our knowledge becomes increasingly divorced from real life, our culture no longer contains ourselves (or only contains an insignificant part of ourselves) and forms a “social” context in which we are not integrated. The problem thus becomes that of again reconciling our culture with our life by making our culture a living culture once more. But to achieve this end we shall first have to kill the “respect for that which is written” … it becomes necessary to break up our language so that it may become possible to put it together again and to reestablish contact with the absolute, or as I should prefer to call it, with multiple reality. (11)
Black and white and red all over
This is problem I’ve been encountering in framing my work:
Conventional narrative, based on “a known framework of accepted values and a rational view of life, always starts out by indicating a fixed objective towards which the action will be moving or by posing a definite problem to which it will supply an answer. [...] In the conventional theatre the action always proceeds towards a definable end. The spectators do not know whether that end will be reached [they do, really] and how it will be reached. [...] In the Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, the action does not proceed in the manner of a logical syllogism. It does not go from A to B but travels from an unknown premise X towards an unknowable conclusion Y. [...] They are not, therefore, so in suspense as to what is going to happen next [...] as they are in suspense about what the next event to take place will add to their understanding of what is happening. (14)
Given that the titles and sub-titles of my paintings don’t answer any question, though do go some way towards presenting the work in a ‘natural’ context, I think I should continue naming them as such without any worry that I’m explaining them or limiting an interpretation:
The action supplies an increasing number of contradictory and bewildering clues on a number of different levels, but the final question [or is the first question?] is never wholly answered. Thus, instead of being in suspense as to what will happen next, the spectators are [...] put into suspense as to what the play may mean. (14)
This relates nicely to Camus’ description of Kafka’s narrative structures:
Merely to announce to us that uncommon fate is scarcely horrible, because it is improbable. But if its necessity is demonstrated to us in the framework of everyday life, society, state, familiar emotion, then the horror is hallowed. In that revolt that shakes man and makes him say: ‘That is not possible,’ there is an element of desperate certainty that ‘that’ can be (124)
Subjectivity within absurdity
[The audience is so requited to] school their critical faculties, to train themselves in adjusting to reality (13; haha)
Brecht's postulate of a critical, detached audience, who will have to sharpen their wits on the play and be stimulated by it to think for themselves” (14; Brecht sounds relevant to me)
[He] will probably find his own, personal meaning, which will differ from the solution found by most others. But he will have been forced to make a mental effort and to evaluate an experience he has undergone. In this sense, the Theatre of the Absurd is the most demanding, the most intellectual theatre. It may be riotously funny, wildly exaggerated and oversimplified, vulgar and garish, but it will always confront the spectator with a genuine intellectual problem, a philosophical paradox, which he will have to try to solve even if he knows that it is most probably insoluble. (14)