Michael Y. Bennett - The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

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Michael Y. Bennett 2015

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First published 2015

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To my best friend, Eyal Tamir, with whom I laugh at life's absurdities

In memory of

Robert A. Bennett (19412014)

First, I wish to thank the following people for their feedback and help with the manuscript at various stages of the project: The Fellows at the Institute for Research in the Humanities; William W. Demastes (Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge); J. Chris Westgate (California State University, Fullerton); Robert Combs (The George Washington University); The Samuel Beckett Working Group (IFTR/FIRT 2013) most particularly, David Tucker (University of Chester and University of Sussex) and Nicholas Johnson (Trinity College, Dublin); and my research assistant, Frederick Hofstetter (UW-Whitewater), made possible by a generous research grant from UW-Whitewater.

Second, I would like to thank my editor at Cambridge University Press, Dr. Victoria Cooper, for her vision and constant support in seeing this book come to fruition. Also deserving of thanks are the anonymous reviewers, for their detailed and constructive feedback.

Third, a few short sections of this book were previously published and graciously allowed to be reprinted here in a slightly modified version: Michael Y. Bennett, Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension between Empiricism and Rationalism (2012, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 829, 1058, 14955, and 1602, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan).

And finally, fourth and most importantly, I wish to thank those in my life who may not have made a direct contribution to the scholarship, but whose indirect contributions made this work possible: my family. My two sons, Max and Julius, show me how to respond to absurdities with love and laughter, and my wife, Kelly, dissolves all absurdities with her love. Kelly is the one thing that always makes sense and where my desires are always fully met by the realities of the world.

Two men have been waiting on a country road for fifty years for a man named Godot. A woman is buried to her waist in the ground, and then buried up to her head, and continually concludes that this is a happy day. The inhabitants of a provincial French town one by one turn into rhinoceroses, until one man, who is by no means a hero, is left to face them. A transient approaches and harasses a well-to-do man sitting alone on a bench in a park and then the transient kills himself by running into a knife the man eventually holds. While still maintaining his love for his wife, an award-winning architect falls in love with a goat. A maybe former concert pianist, who is living at a seaside boarding house, is visited by two maybe unknown men and is interrogated to the point where the pianist is reduced to producing only grunts, at which point, after his supposed birthday party, the men escort the pianist away in a van. An entire novel with no perceivable plot narrated as a fractured and fragmented monologue by an unnamed, possibly immobile man. These are just some of the plots of absurd literature.

What, then, is absurdism? And what does it mean for a literary or dramatic work to be absurd? As some of the most important writers and thinkers of the twentieth century are associated with the absurd writers such as Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Harold Pinter (all three being Nobel Prize winners in Literature), Edward Albee (winner of three Pulitzer Prizes and four Tony Awards), and (tangentially) Jean-Paul Sartre (who also won a Nobel Prize in Literature, but refused to accept it) surely, many readers of this book will have some conception as to what is meant by absurdism or absurd literature. And the fact that absurd literature is thought to be a literary response to WWII brings a whole host of assumptions about what it means for something to be absurd. As The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd , the reader might be expecting an answer to these questions in a relatively simple and straightforward statement. Regarding that expectation, though some attempt will be made, this book will have to disappoint. The fact remains that there is no single answer and certainly not a simple, straightforward answer to these questions: much depends upon who you ask, what decade you asked in, and in what region of the world you posed these questions. But do not lose hope, as this is exactly much of the reason why the absurd has endured and thrived as a movement, if you will, of extraordinary interest over the past six decades. Absurd literature is elusive, complex, and nuanced: it refuses to be pinned down. And this is precisely why these texts associated with the absurd can be studied over and over, reinterpreted over and over, and have spoken for so long (and continue to speak) so powerfully to so many different generations, cultures, creeds, and types of people.