Theater of the Absurd

In a lecture on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Ian Johnston makes this helpful distinction between existentialist drama and the Theater of the Absurd.

“In the Theatre of the Absurd the protagonists are discovered in a world which they do not, indeed they cannot, understand. It has no reliable meaning. Often, it is featureless. The confusion is not a matter of a conflict between competing meanings, but rather the absence of anything that might help one to understand oneself, one’s purpose, or one’s place in the social scheme of things. Even the protagonist’s identity is problematic . . . . A sense of the absurdity of the external world is . . . a legacy of some nineteenth century Romantic thought.

“This, however, is not the only important criterion of this literary style. The other essential component is that the protagonists’ attempts to deal with the world also register as absurd. They become like clowns loose in madhouse or, more appropriately perhaps, in a featureless desert. It is important to grasp this second point, because it separates what we might call existential drama from absurd drama. Existential action also assumes that the world comes to us void of horizons of significance. We have an urgent priority to impose on that world our own projects, freely chosen, and thus become a creator of values for ourselves. The world gives us no fixed priorities for choosing one project over another. But to be fully human, to achieve the dignity of being human, we must act upon our freedom to choose and launch ourselves into the world. This will not bring us happiness (de Beauvoir insists upon that repeatedly); it will, however, confer human dignity upon us.

“The Theatre of the Absurd takes from us that dignity. Its heroes lack whatever it takes to act confidently in the world. They are essentially grotesque clowns, without a sense of purpose and without the courage, energy, wit to forge one for themselves. They spend their time anxiously confronting an incomprehensible world, often desperate for some reassurance that there is something or someone who can help them out, but incapable of helping themselves. What renders their situation all the more helpless is that they have no reliable memory, so they cannot even orient themselves and their present situation to what they once were—they can create no intelligible historical narrative for their lives. Hence, they are radically unsure of who they are. The very idea of a self-initiated energetic project is quite beyond them.”