C.U. ENGLISH HONOURS NOTES: Absurdist Theatre

Absurdist Theatre : Modern Period                                         [Short Note]

            The idea of Absurd goes back many centuries and can be found even in the Greek culture. For our purposes we can focus on sources of the Absurd-
1.     The Shakespeare in King Lear, Lear’s last scene’s question flung to God and Man; “Why should a dog, a rat, a horse have life and thou no breath at all?” i.e. we live in a world where dogs, rats, horses have life but the good die horribly. There is no relation between cause and effect- we live in arbitrary, violent, inhospitable, hostile universe.
2.     The German Philosopher Friedshin Nietzsche’s discovery God is dead.(Thus Spake Zarathustra).
3.     Dostoyevsky in ‘Brothers Karamazov’.
4.     Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus, where Sisyphus rolls a rock up a steep hill; the rock rolls back down from the top; and Sisyphus has to start all over again. This goes on throughout eternity. This is Camus metaphor for meaninglessness of life.

The Absurdist writer include playwrights mainly but also the novelists as Franz Kafka, Camus, Musil et al. Playwrights include Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet and later Harold Pinter, Edward Albie et al.

To sum the basic theme and pre-occupation of the Absurdist writer include the violation of traditional beginning, middle and end structures; refusal to tell a straight forward connected story with a proper plot; or disappearance of traditional dramatic forms or techniques. These dramatists were all concerned with the failure of communication in modern society which leaves man alienated. More ever they are all concerned with the lack of individuality and over-emphasis or conformity in our society and they use the dramatic elements of time and plays to imply important ideas. Finally they reject traditional logic for a type of non-logic which ultimately implies something about the nature of the universe. Implicit on many ways of this concern is an attack n a society or a world which possess no set standard of values or behaviour. Essentially, the theatre of Absurd is not a positive drama. It does not try to prove that man can exist in a meaningful world as seen by Camus, Sartre nor does it offer any solution. Instead it demonstrates the absurdity and illogicality of the world we live in.

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