Mukt Shabd Journal ISSN NO : 2347-3150

The ‘Absurd’ as a Way Ahead:

A study of select plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter
Abhinaba Chatterjee
Research Scholar, Gurukul Kangri (Deemed to be University), Haridwar
WZ-20 (F/F), Gali No.-4, Hind Nagar, PO – Tilak Nagar, New Delhi – 110018

Prof. MR Verma
Formerly Professor, Dept of English
Gurukul Kangri (Deemed to be University), Haridwar
T-1, Tulsi Palm, Near Ramdev ki Pulia
Kankhal – 249408, Haridwar

Abstract

The plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter were labelled as belonging
to the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ by Martin Esslin. However, he confessed that it was neither a
conscious ‘movement’, nor has the term been accepted by the playwrights themselves.
Notwithstanding, as Michael Bennett says, the term has stuck and has been the basis of
criticism of the plays by these playwrights. What was it that bound these playwrights under
the common label of the ‘Absurd’? This paper would argue that the label ‘Absurd’ has been
the common denominator that the playwrights used to produce a community of audience that
questioned the value systems associated with modernism and was led to the possible co-
existence with the realisation of ‘multiple modernities’.

Keywords: Theatre of the Absurd, Modern, Multiple Modernities, Nietzsche, Apollonian

& the Dionysian.

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The plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter were labelled as
belonging to the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ by Martin Esslin. However, he confessed that it was
neither a conscious ‘movement’, nor has the term been accepted by the playwrights
themselves. Notwithstanding, as Michael Bennett says, the term has stuck and has been the
basis of criticism of the plays by these playwrights. What was it that bound these playwrights
under the common label of the ‘Absurd’? This paper would argue that the label ‘Absurd’ has
been the common denominator that the playwrights used to produce a community of audience
that questioned the value systems associated with modernism and was led to the possible co-
existence with the realisation of ‘multiple modernities’.

In his paper The Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin referred to the success of the plays of
the playwrights whom he had categorised as belonging to the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ and
observed that “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.” (3) The absurdity of
these plays can be deciphered in their open abandonment of rationality, to quote Esslin, these
are the plays where ‘The laws of probability as well as those of physics are suspended’ (3).
Thus, while Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot presents Lucky and Pozzo as slave and
master in the first Act only to return with their roles swapped in the second act. Similarly, at
the very beginning of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, the clock strikes seventeen and in Jack
the Submission, the ladies have two or three noses and are referred to as beautiful. The
conclusion of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming seems to imply the adoption of the
profession of prostitution by Ruth, who is the daughter-in-law of the family. This open
abandonment of the values of modernism, that Nietzsche had referred to as the ‘Apollonian’
drive in human being, had shocked the audience as, this paper would argue, to bring forth the
oppressed ‘Dionysian’ drive in the human being. The purpose was not to subdue the
Apollonian rational but to uphold the values and illustrate their true potential when compared
in relation to the ‘wild’ and ‘irrational’ Dionysian self to reconsider and reconfigure their
values. Thus, the term ‘absurd’ can be said to refer to the situatedness of the narrative of
these plays, which, according to David Herman, is a mode

“... to use textual cues to reconstruct a storyworld [that] must also draw inferences
about the communicative goals that have structured the specific occasion of the
telling, motivating the use of certain cues in favour of others and shaping the
arrangement of the cues selected.” (17)

The ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ went into oblivion almost as rapidly as it gained
popularity. Historically, this period ranging from the early 1950s to late 1960s, coincide with
the transition from the modernism to postmodernism. Often read against the backdrop of the
two world wars, the plays act as a critique of the modernism as well as the traditional theories
of scientific modernization. According to Lyotard, “[Postmodernism] designates the state of
our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have
altered the game rules for science, literature and the arts.” (xxiii) However, while the term
implies a total rejection of the enlightenment project and the associated modernity, this paper
argues that the plays of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, while conforming to the notions of
postmodernism, leads its audience to a notion of ‘multiple modernities’ which, according to
S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘denotes a certain view of the contemporary world-indeed of the history and
characteristics of the modern era-that goes against the views long prevalent in scholarly and
general discourse.’ (1) In doing so, it envisages that the project of enlightenment has been

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refashioned. While some of its values are still considered significant, the project has been
reshaped – it is no longer the Enlightenment, but enlightenment, and following it, there is not
a single modernity but multiple modernities. The plays of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’
enhance the scope of ‘multiple modernities’ and its relations to the project of enlightenment,
to be inclusive and accommodative of individualities.

Read primarily against Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, the plays of ‘absurd’
theatre tend to be more ‘local’ than ‘global’. Camus has stated it explicitly in his analysis of
suicide: -

There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the
most powerful... But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man
had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one... (5)

While the immediate backdrop of the mass destruction caused by the Second World War
formed the background for the pessimistic tone of the philosophy of Existentialism that
governed the reading of the plays of the ‘Absurd Theatre’, the element of the avant-garde can
be deciphered in these plays’ attempt of ‘pushing the boundaries’ of art (Lara Cox). The
commonly referred theatrical technique of minimalism, when applied to these plays, acts as
instigators for the audience as they are provoked to participate in the process of meaning
formation.

Martin Esslin’s famous book ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ begins with a reference to
Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, which, according to him, ‘bewildered the
sophisticated audience of Paris, London and New York’. (1) The play comprised of almost
two similar acts, with the two characters, Vladimir and Estragon (or Didi and Gogo?) waiting
for Godot, who, according to them, can influence their future. A boy appears in each of the
two acts to announce that Mr Godot will not come this evening but ‘surely tomorrow’; and
when night falls, Vladimir and Estragon contemplate suicide, decide to leave, but do not
move. As Lawrence Graver points it out, “Stripped to its crude outline, Beckett’s play
certainly does sound like an allegory: a dramatic action in which events, characters, and
settings represent abstract or spiritual meanings.” (19) The play has evoked multiple
responses, both by those who admired it as well as those who had objections against it. It is
due to these multiple responses that these plays were considered to be depicting an ‘absurd’
world. The play could be read against several backgrounds, especially against the universal
setting of time and place with the very title of the play referring to the God. The religious
background to the play is further confirmed by the many allusions to events in the life of
Christ as recounted in the New Testament.

VLADIMIR: Did you ever read the Bible?

ESTRAGON: The Bible... [He reflects.] I must have taken a look at it.

VLADIMIR: Do you remember the Gospels?

ESTRAGON: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very
pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty.
That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our
honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy. [Act One, 13]

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Again, there is a conversation between the two about the two thieves as described in the New
Testament:

VLADIMIR: Ah yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story?

ESTRAGON: No.

VLADIMIR: Shall I tell it to you?

ESTRAGON: No.

VLADIMIR: It’ll pass the time. [Pause.] Two thieves, crucified at the same time as
our Saviour. One –

ESTRAGON: Our what?

VLADIMIR: Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and
the other... [He searches for the contrary of saved]... damned.

ESTRAGON: Saved from what?

VLADIMIR: Hell.

ESTRAGON: I’m going.

[He does not move.] [Act One, 14]

This conversation is directed to a community of audience that has lost its faith on
God. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God was never more relevant in the history of
Europe before it witnessed the destruction caused by the two world wars. As he said in The
Gay Science:

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I.
We are his murderers. (181)

The proclamation of the death of God had shattered the religious faith of man that had been
instrumental to the development of Western civilization. Read against Nietzsche’s theory of
the ‘Apollonian and the Dionysian’ propounded in The Birth of Tragedy, it becomes obvious
that he was referring only to a symbolic death of God and thereby the values associated with
Him that were the founding stones of the Western civilization. For Nietzsche, the true
combination of the Apollonian and the Dionysian drives resulted in the great Attic Greek
tragedy. However, the Dionysian drive was suppressed ever since Socrates and subsequently,
has lead to the decline of the western civilization and thereby to nihilism. As Walter
Kaufmann points it out:

Nietzsche prophetically envisages himself as a madman: to have lost God means

madness; and when mankind will discover that it has lost God, universal madness will
break out. This apocalyptic sense of dreadful things to come hangs over Nietzsche’s
thinking like a thundercloud. (97)

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The bleak picture of the timeless world of Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ is a manifestation of
the Nietzschean nihilism as well as a critique of the imbalance caused by the total absence of
the Dionysian drive resulting in excessive Apollonian or the rationalist drive in human being
and the society. However, the conventional theatre-goers were not able to link the play to
any, as Graver points it out, “specific system or structure of thought existing outside the work
itself, as if such systems or structures would explain what this strange work was
fundamentally ‘about’.” (21), despite being set in a very worldly setting.

While most of criticism has based itself on the identity of Godot (sometimes related to
God, in terms of the prevalent existential reading of the play), Beckett himself was of the
opinion that the play was not about Godot but about waiting. Both the acts of the play end
similarly:

ESTRAGON: [...] [He turns to VLADIMIR.] Let’s go.

VLADIMIR: We can’t.

ESTRAGON: Why not?

VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot.

ESTRAGON: [Despairingly.] Ah! [Pause.]

The play presents the conflict wherein the two characters face the conflict between their
realistic desire to leave and their obligation to stay. As Vassilopoulou opines, “this shared
private world (between the two characters) does not accord with the actual world of the play,
in which Godot never arrives, nor is he likely to do so at some point after the end of the play”
(133). This conflict results in the characters’ failure to undertake any action that may
accelerate the plot, resulting in the absurd affect on the audience. What Camus referred to as
“that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that denies” (37), is manifested in
the play as an affect of the absurd that leads the audience beyond a mechanically formal
posture to long for creating a meaning deeply rooted in humanity.

A more avert critic of the degraded state of humanity in the post Second World War,
Eugene Ionesco utilises the affect of the ‘absurd’ to attack what Esslin referred to as ‘the
deadliness of present-day mechanical, bourgeois civilization, the loss of real, felt values, and
the resulting degradation of life’ (157). The mechanical civilization manifests itself as the
Professor in The Lesson (1950), the Orator in The Chairs (1951), Mother Peep in The Killer
(1957) and the Logician in The Rhinoceros (1959). Looked upon from the Nietzsche’s
philosophical perspectives of the ‘Death of God’ and the Apollonian/Dionysian drives, the
plays can be read as a critique of the western modernity that had led it to place the ‘white
European man’ at the centre of the universe and had a two-fold affect on the audience.
Firstly, it created an affect of absurdity to the audience who were yet to come out of the
watertight compartments of the conventional Aristotelian drama. Secondly, it provoked its
audience to question the value-systems of the Enlightenment, thus creating a discourse of
multiple modernities.

Ionesco’s play The Lesson manifests the mechanical nature of education that fails to
justify itself and has ceased to be in sync with the rationality of the enlightenment project.
The play depicts the hollowness of the claim to rationality as the professor fails to teach the

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student, and, in frustration, murders her. The play starts critiquing the knowledge system
from the very outset, as we are shown a pupil who ‘have [her] science diploma and ... arts
diploma, too’ (49), not sure about such elementary stuff as the name of the seasons. As the
play progresses, we find that the pupil is not even sure about the elementary arithmetic. The
affect of the absurd is created when the audience is informed that such a pupil is desirous of
pursuing a career in medicine. Notwithstanding the above, the process of imparting education
to the pupil commences and with the passage of time, the pupil begins to show signs of
physical ailment, beginning with toothache to earache as she finally succumbs to the mental
stress arising out of the education:

PROFESSOR [makes a gesture as though to protest, then refrains, a little helpless.

Suddenly, he remembers]: Ah! [He goes quickly to the drawer where he finds a big
knife, invisible or real according to the preference of the director. He seizes it and
brandishes it happily.] Here is one, young lady, here is a knife. It’s too bad that we
only have this one, but we’re going to try to make it serve for all the languages,
anyway! It will be enough if you will pronounce the world “knife” in all the
languages, while looking at the object, very closely, fixedly, and imagining that it is in
the language that you are speaking.

PUPIL: I’ve got a toothache.

PROFESSOR: [almost singing, chanting]: Now, say “kni,” like “kni,” “fe,” ... and
look, look, look at it, watch it...

PUPIL: What is this one in? French, Italian or Spanish?

PROFESSOR: That doesn’t matter now... That’s not your concern. Say: “kni.”

PUPIL: “Kni.”

Professor:... “fe”... Look.

[He brandishes the knife under the Pupil’s eyes.]

PUPIL: “fe”,,,

PROFESSOR: Again... Look at it.

PUPIL: Oh, no! My God! I’ve had enough. And besides, I’ve got a toothache,
my feet hurt me. I’ve got a headache.

PROFESSOR [abruptly]: Knife ... look... knife ... look ... knife ... look...

PUPIL: You’re giving me an earache, too. Oh, your voice! It’s so piercing!

PROFESSOR: Say: knife ... kni ... fe...

PUPIL: No! My ears hurt, I hurt all over...

PROFESSOR: I’m going to tear them off, your ears, that’s what I’m going to do to
you, and then they won’t hurt you anymore, my pet.

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PUPIL: Oh ... you’re hurting me, oh, you’re hurting me ... (73)

Two conclusions about the education system become obvious. Firstly, that the core of
education is missing; it is imparted without any justification. Secondly, in pursuit of
education, man seems to be losing the element of human compassion. While Ionesco has
studied as a critique of the fascist temperaments, it is important to note that this temperament
arises out of an incomplete assessment of the Apollonian drive of Nietzsche and subsequently
the enlightenment project. The rational of imparting knowledge has been lost. The pupil is
being forced to ‘memorise’ the knowledge rather than making her understand the essence of
the knowledge. According to Nietzsche, the fall of western civilization has been due to an
imbalance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian selves. The deformed Apollonian
rationale of the Professor fails to impart knowledge to his pupil and consequently Dionysian
wilderness ensues as the pupils are ‘murdered’ with the ‘knowledge’ devoid of the
enlightened Apollonian rationale. As the play ends, we are made aware that the Professor had
killed many pupils before and that the action that had unfolded on stage, was only one of the
many that had taken place before and will continue to take place. That the process of the
lesson will continue, as a new pupil enters the stage only to be killed, creates an affect of
absurdity in the audience and leads to a loss of faith on prevailing system of education and to
subsequent nihilism. The audience is provoked to search for an ‘alternative world’, although
a changed world that will conform to the values associated with enlightenment.

This quest for an ‘alternative world’ by means of a struggle for power manifests itself
in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming (1964). Pinter reveals the element of the absurd at
multiple levels. From the very beginning, the audience confronts a father, Max, struggling
hard to retain his dignity and assert his authority over his sons.

MAX. What have you done with the scissors?

Pause.

I said I’m looking for the scissors. What have you done with them?

Pause.

Did you hear me? I want to cut something out of the paper.

LENNY. I’m reading the paper.

MAX. Not that paper. I haven’t even read that paper. I’m talking about last Sunday’s
paper. I was just having a look at it in the kitchen.

Pause.

Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m talking to you! Where’s the scissors?

LENNY (looking up, quietly). Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat? (Act One, 12)

While this conflict between the father and the son in the play is evident from the outset, it is
also significant that the father figure, Max, is performing the role of the mother, as he cooks

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and performs the household activities that has traditionally been associated with women. The
other well-known element of conflict is that of usurpation. While Teddy returns to his
father’s house, numerous critics have asserted that it was Ruth’s homecoming, as she
exercises her sexuality to gain supremacy in the family of males. The conflict ensues between
characters due to their use of language. While the hostile language is very much evident
between Lenny and Max, it is open to debate whether Lenny considers Max as his father or
the oppressed mother figure. The conflict begins to assert itself with the conflict shifting to
Ruth, who begins to assert her authority:

LENNY. ... Excuse me, shall I take this ashtray out of your way?

RUTH. It’s not in my way.

LENNY. It seems to be in the way of your glass. The glass was about to fall. Or the
ashtray. I’m rather worried about the carpet. It’s not me, it’s my father. He’s obsessed
with order and clarity. He doesn’t like mess. So, as I don’t believe you’re smoking at
the moment, I’m sure you won’t object if I move the ashtray.

He does so.

And now perhaps I’ll relieve you of your glass.

RUTH. I haven’t quite finished.

LENNY. You’ve consumed quite enough, in my opinion.

RUTH. No, I haven’t.

LENNY. Quite sufficient, in my own opinion.

RUTH. Not in mine, Leonard.

Pause.

LENNY. Don’t call me that, please.

RUTH. Why not?

LENNY. That’s the name my mother gave me.

Pause.

Just give me the glass.

RUTH. No.

Pause.

LENNY. I’ll take it, then.

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RUTH. If you take the glass … I’ll take you.

Pause.

LENNY. How about me taking the glass without you taking me?

RUTH. Why don’t I just take you? (Act One, 29)

It is this seeming indecent ‘proposal’ by Ruth that shocked the audience leading to the
affect of absurd. However, apart from the presumed role of prostitute, the meek acceptance of
the role by Ruth’s husband, Teddy, is another element that has shocked the audience. This
had lead the audience to question the values of family ties that has been associated with the
enlightenment and by extension to the Apollonian rationality.

Pinter’s play disrupts the enlightenment values as with the progress of the play, Ruth
asserts herself as the new matriarch of the family, so much so that at the end of the play, all
the other male members, except Lenny, succumb to her. The last scene of the play shows
Ruth sitting “relaxed on her chair” as the other male members strives to get her affection.
However, the fact that Teddy is absent in the last scene as also the fact that Lenny keeps on
standing, implying that he has not succumbed to the matriarch Ruth, manifest itself as the
eternal conflict between the Nietzschean Apollonian and the Dionysian drives. While the
male members of the family cling to their individual interpretations of words, Ruth remains
playful with the use of language, not identifying with the labels imposed on her by men,
which enables her to overcome the traditional watertight compartments of feminine as
subservient to the male. As William S. Haney II points it out, “While being human or a
Mensch, as Nietzsche says, will make us think, being an Ubermensch allows you to transcend
the influence of language by witnessing thoughts flowing through the mind without being
subjugated by them.” (109) Ruth’s rise to power is due to her open mindedness, as she is able
to adjust to the circumstances as well as dominate it, as per the qualities of the Nietzschean
Ubermensch.

This notion of fluidity is associated with that of multiple modernities. Jasbir Jain
distinguishes between the terms modern, modernity and modernism:

The modern is always with us, modernity is an attitude, performing an adjectival role
and modernism is a concept which is bound together by the medium of thought which
it expresses itself. (2-3)

The term ‘multiple modernities’, albeit used frequently to refer to the uniqueness of the
colonial cultures, may also be extended to the uniqueness of individuals, especially in
moments of crisis that are portrayed in the ‘absurd’ plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco
and Harold Pinter. That modernism and, by extension, modernity, is not one but many, aptly
manifests itself during moments such as those referred to in the ‘absurd’ plays that the crisis
comes forth due to the confrontation between the collective social values and the individual
priorities. As the analysis of the plays in terms of the conflict between the Apollonian and the
Dionysian impulses reveal, these plays provide an umbrella term to define the behaviour of
the individuals in moments of crisis. Moreover, the conventional notion of the modernity as
being synonymous with progress has already been nullified by the large scale destruction
caused by the two world wars. Subsequently, the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ has come
into vogue since the 1950s and 1960s, which the plays of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’

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promote. In doing so, these plays create a bond between the playwrights; the actors on stage
and the audience, creating a community that will be appreciative of the uniqueness of each
condition and will be more inclusive, thereby evolving as the Nietzschean Ubermensch.

Works Cited

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(2006)

Bennett, Michael Y. Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco,
Genet and Pinter, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2011

---. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2015

Camus, Albert The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays tr. Justin O’Brien, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 2000

Cox, Lara. Afterlife of the Theatre of the Absurd: The Avant-garde, Spectatorship, and
Psychoanalysis, Peter Lang, 2018

Eisenstadt, S. N. Multiple Modernities, Daedalus , Winter, 2000, Vol. 129, No. 1, pp. 1-29

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd, Bloomsbury, London, 2014 (2021)

---. The Theatre of the Absurd, The Tulane Drama Review, May, 1960, Vol. 4, No. 4
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Graver, Lawrence. Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
New York, 1989, 2004

Haney, II, William S.. Integral Drama: Culture, Consciousness and Identity, BRILL, 2008.

Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA Oxford, Chichester: Wiley-

Blackwell, 2009

Hinchliffe, Arnold P. The Absurd, Routledge, London & New York, 1969 (2018)

Ionesco, Eugene. The Bald Soprano & Other Plays tr. Donald M. Allen, Grove Press, New
York, 1958

Jain, Jasbir. Multiple Modernisms, Rawat Publications, Jaipur, New Delhi, Bangalore,
Guwahati, Kolkata, 2022

Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Princeton University

Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2013.

Lyman, Stanford M., Roads to Dystopia: Sociological Essays on the Postmodern Condition.
Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001

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Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff

Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester University Press, 1979

Mueller, William R. and Josephine Jacobsen. The Absurd Quest, The Kenyon Review,
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Nietzsche, Frederich W. The Gay Science, Cambridge University Press, 2001

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Pinter, Harold. Complete Works, (Vol. 3), Grove Press, New York, 1990

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Birth of Tragedy as applied to O' Neill, Pinter, and Shepard”, A Thesis Submitted to
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[Link] 09 March 2023

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during Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and Language
Teaching, Volume 1. Papers from LAEL PG 2006 Edited by Costas Gabrielatos,
Richard Slessor & J.W. Unger

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