Martin+Esslin+and+The+Theatre+of+the+Absurd

=Martin Esslin, writer of //The Theatre of the Absurd//=

Martin Esslin was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1918 with the name Julius Pereszlényi. While young he moved to Vienna where he was educated before moving to England in 1938 because of Nazi annexation of Austria. In England he became a successful producer for the BBC and worked on the war broadcasting efforts. After the war Esslin became more involved in art theory and published a series of essays and books. In 1961 he published his best known and most influential book: //The Theatre of the Absurd//. He became a professor in the United States at Florida State University and later Stanford and continued writing on theater and art. He died in England in 2002.

Theory of the Absurd
Perhaps the most influential of the work done by Esslin was his writing of the book //The Theartre of the Absurd.// In this book a movement in contemporary theory, to which he gave the title "The Theatre of the Absurd".

As Martin Esslin defines it, The ToA was not a cohesive artistic movement, but was instead a similar style that was shared between individual writers around the same time period and not directly influenced by each others work. Each writer of the absurd views themselves as an outsider from the mainstream of both society and the artistic world. The ideas shared by these writers were that “the basic assumptions of the former ages” such as religious faith, no longer have meaning in a modern world. Each writer attempted to express the “metaphysical anguish” of the disconnection of the individual from any higher purpose or meaning in life; the “absurdity of the human condition”. The reason this is separate from existentialism is the manner by which the artists executed this expression. The artists of existentialism discussed the lack of meaning and the feeling of disconnection by discussing in coherent logical ways such as done by Giradoux, Anouilh, Satre, Camus. The ToA instead attempts to present the absurdity instead of discussing it. It does this by embracing “the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought”. Esslin also believed that because of its nature as disruptive to the status quo, it was impossible to judge using the assumptions of our current theatrical understanding.

Esslin believed that Absurdism did not just start in the 20th century but had a long history and influences from many art forms and styles of performance. One such influence was the clown in its many forms throughout history //Mimus// and the clowns of Shakespeare in particular. The clown was an absurdist figure because of its inability to comprehend the logic of normal society and their participation is paradoxical stories.

Literary influences of Absurdism include the writers in the realms of dream stories and the writers of nonsense poetry. Nonsense poetry is an early example of one the common themes of Absurdism which is the devaluation of language as an effective mode of communication. These writers included Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Christian Morgenstern and Gustave Flaubert. These writers explored language as an automatic social construction of clichés which no longer possessed meaning.

Antonin Artaud is also cited by Esslin as one of the forbearers of the Theatre of The Absurd. He saw the problems of his time as “rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas that are their representation”. He desired theatre to be used as a tool to reestablish the myth and magical aspects of the human spirit. He sought this by making gesture and movement the center of his performances and to express on stage what was impossible to express anywhere else. Unfortunately he was unsuccessful in his establishment of his “theatre of Cruelty”. Later in his life he did develop a relationship with Arthur Adamov.

Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 in Dublin. In 1923 he attended Trinity College and graduated in 1927. Then moved to Paris where he met and began a lifelong relationship with James Joyce. Around this time he began writing, including an essay about how the artist should never pander to any audience and make his work intentionally accessible. During World War 2 he stayed in France and fought for the French Resistance. Immediately after the war he wrote several plays including //Waiting for G// //odot// and //Endgame//. Beckett always wrote in French rather than his native language of English. He felt that when writing in a native language, it was too easy for a artist to fall into the inherent meanings of the words. Writing in French required him to have deliberate intention behind every word he chose. In looking at his work //Waiting for Godot// Esslin describes how he fits into the Theatre of the Absurd. The central act of waiting. Time is established as a constant, yet completely pointless force. Two characters are present who, while being opposites of each other, are dependent on each other. They interact with a clown like verbal and physical vocabulary. These elements combine to form a very clear depiction of the Absurdist view human experience held by Beckett.

Arthur Adamov
Arthur Adamov was born in Kislovodsk, Russia in 1908 to wealthy parents. He grew up in France, Germany and Switzerland. In 1924 he went to Paris and became deeply involved in the Surrealist movement. He then began to have an existiensial crisis and wrote //l’aveu//. In //l’aveu//, Adamov wrote of his feelings of separation and chronicled his own neurosis. He writes that he felt that the unifying force he was lacking “used be called god, but today it no longer has a name”. He also said he wanted to be humiliated by “the lowest of prostitutes” He also felt that by writing he could share the load of his despair with others and that his neurosis gave him a truer view of the world.

“since the particular is always a symbolic expression of the universal it follows that the universal is most effectively symbolized by the extreme of the particular, so that the neurosis which exacggera tes a man’s particularity of vision defines that much more completely his universal significance” Arthur Adamov

He defined his time period as “//Le tempsde l’ignominie”.// He felt that the degradation of language and the loss of faith were linked together. He felt that the role of the poet was to expose the falseness and the emptiness of the old language and attempt to bring back the sacred. His philosophy was that the true meaning o f existence was real, it simply was inaccessible to humanity, yet we were forced to quest towards it none the less. He felt his philosophy inherently absurd, but in a way even more tragic.

Adamov supported communism, not because he thought the system was b est, but because he thought that it would help people realize that the nature of unhappiness is not an earthly problem.

Soon after World War Two Adamov began to write plays, seeking to show the loneliness and lack of communication in the world. Some of his plays include: //La Parodie, L'invasion, La Grand et la Petite Manouvre, Les Ses de la Marche// and //Professor Taranne. Professor Taranne// is about a professor who is mistaken as someone else and then attempts to convince everyone that he is in fact who he says he is despite the mounting evidence against him. It is based on a nightmare Adamov once had and is a clear example of his neurosis manifesting in his plays.

Esslin feels that while earlier in his career Adamov used the absurdist themes in his work, later in his career his writing seemed to have the desired effect of relieving him of some of his neurosis. Because of this later in his career Adamov shifted his writing to more direct political plays rather than Absurdism

[[image:ionescu1.jpg align="left"]]Eugene Ionseco
Eugene Ionesco was born in Rumania in 1912. As a child he loved the the theater and he wrote a play at age thirteen. After being educated in Bucharest, he wrote poetry and literary critique, including a pamphlet of two directly contrasting arguments meant to show how language can be used to contradict itself so easily. He became a teacher and moved to Paris in 1938 and spent World War Two in France. Ionesco felt that in order for art to have real effect, it must bypass the realism of society, because no real change can be made through those societies, because if it could, it would ave by now. He thought that the problems laid in the human condition and not a specific construct of humanity.

Later in his life Ionesco hated theatre. He said that he felt embarrassed for the actors on the stage. His play //The Bald Soprano// was developed as he was learning English through the method of copying and memorizing samples of English. He wrote the dialogue as the cliches of English he was learning. He thought it was serious representation of the meaninglessness of language, but his friends thought it was funny. The themes in the themes of Absurdism seen in //The Bald Soprano// included an oppresive boredom with a life without meaning and the loss of individuality from language. Though the first production was a failure, Ionesco discovered greatly enjoyed seeing his work staged and continued writing. He realized that he only hated theatre because of the style he had seen. He thought it was only good if he through out reality in his work.

His next play was //The Lesson// written in 1950 and is about a professor and girl student in a lecture hall. The girl and professor play out a clear power relationship and then we see the Professor killing the girl in a highly suggestive manner. Then the next pupil arrives. The play is an example of a difference in style between Ionesco and Beckett. Ionesco tended to show rising action to a moment of chaos and insanity, vs the circular plots seen in Beckett. Ionesco felt that the intensity should build to a release of pressure in the form of laughter, which to Ionesco was the only way of engaging with the horror of existence.

A key part of Ionesco's plays is in the "morals" presented, the intention behind them. Ionesco did not want to simply describe an idea, for instance the inevitability of death. He wanted the audience to experience it have know that it is true in the same way the characters did. He wanted his work to communicate that what was uncommunicateable. He thought that all language could do was illicit that which an audience already knew, through a visceral stage experience you could actually directly convey feeling or ideas. In most his plays, he was trying to convey his view of the world as "mysteryless" and pointless.

Jean Genet[[image:genet_big.jpg align="right"]]
Jean Genet was born in Paris 1910 abandoned by mother and brought up by peasant foster parents in Morvan. At age ten he was accused of being a thief and then he decided to become one. He was in prison for most of his young adult life and while there wrote several books of erotic fiction. All his plays deal with the idea of mirrors and layered reflections, but more on that later

Genet's first two plays were //Deathwatch// and //The Maids.// Though the plays take place in different settings, prison and a manor, the same set of events plays out in each. In //The Maids// two maids take turns pretending to be the mistress while in //Deathwatch// the inmates of a prison set up a structure similar to that of a kings court. In both plays there is a longing for that which is impossible to obtain. Also in both plays the illusion played out is shattered before before the "ritual" of mirroring can be completed. Esslin feels this style fits into the Absurd because it is the impossible desire to make a dream a reality, it is a refusal to accept reality.

Any "reality" presented by Genet is simply a reflection of something else. Any truth is just another layer of fantasy upon fantasy. This is exemplified in his play //The Balcony//. The setting of the play is a brothel where people can pay to live out their fantasies, such as being a priest or a hero. There is a revolution going on in the city and the ruler of the city is eternally unsatisfied because he knows no one goes to the brothel and asks to become him. Genet with this play wanted to show the weakness of the individual in a society. The revolutionaries try to break down the mythic positions of power in society, but simply end up recreating them. Eventually the hero of the revolution winds up going to the brothel and asks to be the ruler of the city.

Paradox?
In linking all these writers together Esslin created the term "theatre of the absurd". Despite significant differences in the motivations of their writing and the style in which they wrote their plays, Esslin still felt that they could be linked together because of the previously mentioned themes that he deemed to be present throughout. But one of the other traits which linked all the writers is their feeling of isolation from society and the other art forms. With this book Esslin has united them together and made them into an "ism" What does it mean for the continuation of the style of Theatre of the Absurd when the inherently disparate writers are grouped together?

Bigger Paradox?
====So through this book we are able to recognize these trends in play writing and identify certain writers as "Absurdist". We are also able to analyze their plays and the plays of others identify these themes and have a greater understanding for what exactly is going on. The issue that arises from this practice is that we are desricibing and attempting to systematically understand that which is intentionally nondescriptive and not understandable by our way of thinking. It raises an interesting question: Do these pieces lose their power if we dissect and decode them according to the societal understandings of the way of thinking they were trying to undermine?====

Esslin, Martin, __The Theatre of the Absurd.__ Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1961

Calder, John "Martin Esslin: Illuminating writer and radio drama producer" __The Guardian__ 27 Feb. 2002