I want to write a defense of absurdist theater, an essay which I could show to my friends who hated Waiting for Godot and decided Absurdism is boring and pointless, and maybe change their minds. I believe that there is an aesthetic component to absurdist work, something which is either liked or disliked based on subjective feeling. I know you probably won't like my use of that word "aesthetic"; let me try again. Does the reader enjoy having to work hard in order to understand the plot? Does the reader find nonsensical things amusing, fascinating, or irritating? If they find absurdism irritating, then maybe I'd be inclined to think that it's just not for them, that they are missing out but to each their own.
I am a little unsatisfied because I also think there is an aesthetic, a set of artistic values which are often combined to form a cohesive feeling which permeates the experience of reading absurdist plays. But I'll let that rest.
Absurdism, though, claims to reflect the actual world by refusing to make sense. If we want to see the world undistorted, it claims, we have to take off our magic glasses which force our expectations onto everything around us. People who are irritated by absurdism, then, are maybe in greater need of its message.
The central purpose of absurdism is to "do literature" in a more free and honest way. It might be a little heavy-handed at times, and several of the plays we read explore this very directly: the oppression of language, the impossibility of true communication, the emptiness of character, etc. What absurdist theater can do that realism cannot is push away some of our convictions, assumptions, and attachments, and make us look at the stage with open eyes.
A start
George Esslin wrote of absurdist theater in 1965:
The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.
Esslin is right to say that absurdist authors challenge their readers and audiences to accept the human condition as it is, to shed illusions which may be comforting but ultimately cause pain, and find a sense of freedom and relief that comes with simple realism. They go beyond attacking the orthodoxy, however, by disputing the most fundamental assumptions which go into storytelling. Absurdism claims to be the true realism, portraying events not in the structured comprehensible way we interpret them, but as they truly are. Some authors, like Handke in Kaspar, depict distilled versions of absurdist truths like the inevitable failure of language. Others, like Gertrude Stein, put bits and pieces of many things together in one work without forcing them to all fit together in a logical manner.
The Oxford English dictionary defines "aesthetic" to mean, among other things, "the distinctive underlying principles of a work of art or a genre". It is clear then that the Theater of the Absurd can be said to have an aesthetic. George Esslin listed many of these qualities in his 1961 book "The Theater of the Absurd," but they include the absense of narrative arc, the ommission of exposition, and experimental use of language. While these structural choices may be philisophically motivated, they combine to form a cohesive aesthetic feeling which is recognizable in slightly different variations throughout the works of Absurdist Theater.
It is this aesthetic which I think is most fundamental to the genre, and it is the subjective response to the aesthetic which determines whether the reader or audience member ever comes to engage with Absurdist works beyond a surface level. This is not to say that nothing of value comes from a surface level engagement; in fact, some authors like Marinetti and Handke explicitly seek to create an unpleasant and aesthetically repellent experience for some or all of their audience members (see The Pleasure of Being Booed and Offending the Audience). Engaging an audience in this way inevitably leads to the exclusion of many people from the artistic experiences which Absurdist writers create.
The Absurdist aesthetic is not a direct result of the philosophy of the artists who create it, although it does express that philosophy. Rather, the aesthetic, pursued in part on instinctual subjective grounds, influences the philosophy of the author and creates a feedback loop. It is so central that in many cases the form is the content instead of merely an appropriate vehicle for the content. The Bald Soprano by Ionesco and Kaspar by Peter Handke are some of the best examples of this, where language becomes stripped of its meaning but retains its structure and ability to convey aesthetic feelings while revolting against both pragmatics and semantics.
In The Bald Soprano, Mr. and Mrs. Smith's conversations have a familiar pattern and flow, with properly connected sentences and even ideas within sentences, but ultimately amount to nothing:
MR. SMITH: A conscientious doctor must die with his patient if they can't get well together. The captain of a ship goes down with his ship into the briny deep, he does not survive alone.
MRS. SMITH: One cannot compare a patient with a ship.
MR. SMITH: Why not? A ship has its diseases too; moreover, your doctor is as hale as a ship; that's why he should have perished at the same time as his patient, like the captain and his ship.
MRS. SMITH: Ah! I hadn't thought of that . . . Perhaps it is true . . . And then, what conclusion do you draw from this?
MR. SMITH: All doctors are quacks. And all patients too. Only the Royal Navy is honest in England. (Ionesco pg. 11)
This is a remarkably sound conversation. Mr. Smith says that just like a captain of a ship must go down with his boat, a doctor should die with his patient. Mrs. Smith is initially skeptical of her husband's analogy, she challenges him, and he explains. She comes around, asks him to tell her more, and he makes a conclusion and a political statement. This is in part a parody of married life, but also an analysis of the most basic workings of communication. We see meaning and structure here in the absence of logical connections not because it is really contained in the language, but because we expect to find it, and Ionesco gives us just enough linguistic flags (in words such as "conclusion" and by using semantically related words like "ship" and "Navy") for us to find the structure we are looking for.
In Kaspar, this structure without meaning or stucture as meaning is even more explicit, as Kaspar is learning language. He says:
But the snow falls contentedly.
The fly runs over the water but not
excessively. The soldier crawls
through the mud but pleasurably.
The whip cracks on the back but
aware of its limits. The fool runs
into the trap but at peace with the
world. The condemned man leaps
into the air but judiciously. The
factory gate squeaks but that
passes away. (pg. 92)
Here, we do not have a conversation. Instead, we have a series of semantically meaningful but unrelated sentences, all with the same structure. (As an interesting sidenote, it's funny that Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano inspired by a book on learning language, and Kaspar is doing just that.) These sentences have no direct meaning to Kaspar, however, and the play itself is about how the structure of language impresses meaning and thought onto its speakers independently of the meaning which it is meant to convey. Here and in The Bald Soprano, the form of language carries meaning, rather than the words themselves.
Harold Pinter's play The Birthday Party functions the same way, but its nonsensicality is on a larger scale. Individual sentences often have more meaning and relevance to the story, but the aesthetic of nonsense is expressed through the actions and social relations of the characters. Like Ionesco, Pinter provides what might be called "faux exposition" in which he pretends to provide background on the characters but incorporates so many contradictions and vagaries that we are left feeling unsure whether or not there is anything to be understood by what was said. The lives and the social interactions of the characters are distinctly irrational, and McCann and Goldberg's power over Stanley in Act 2 to bring him to a state of complete collapse is a product of Stanley's expectations and the fear induced by their stream of rhetorical questions. He seems to know that McCann and Goldberg are coming for him:
STANLEY (advancing). They're coming today.
MEG. Who?
STANLEY. They're coming in a van. ...
STANLEY. They're looking for someone.
MEG. They're not.
STANLEY. They're looking for someone. A certain person. (24)
When McCann and Goldberg are able to take Stanley away by defeating his will, Stanley's expectations have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maria Irene Fornes' opera Promenade has a similar theme, exploring how much of social interaction and power dynamics is determined by performance and costume, which are tools used (like language) to structure and understand the world.
In The Pleasures of Being Booed, Marinetti wrote that "It is absolutely necessary to eradicate all logic from shows in the Variety theater" (190). While this is certainly an extreme manifestation, Marinetti expresses a sentiment which was shared by the Absurdist writers who came after him. Logic in theater is often the creation of an illusion, a false depiction of the kind of order, predictability, and structure which helps us believe that we understand the world.