Absurdism

Background

It was French philosopher Camus who introduced the term absurdism and
its philosophy to the world of criticism and scholarship. Martin Esslin in his book
Theatre of the Absurd coined the phrase theatre of the absurd in 1961 to refer to a
number of dramatists of the 1950s whose works evoke the absurd by abandoning
logical form, character, and dialogue together with realistic illusion.

Rationale of the absurd movement

The movement of the absurd emerged in France after the horrors of World
War II. It was a rebellion against basic beliefs and values in traditional culture and
literature. This tradition had included the assumptions that human beings are fairly
rational creatures who live in an at least partially intelligible universe, that they are
part of an ordered social structure, and that they may be capable of heroism and
dignity even in defeat. After the 1940s there was a widespread tendency to view a
human being as an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe; to conceive
the human world as possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning; and to
represent human life as an existence which is both anguished and absurd.

Main Features

1. The universe in which we humans live is alien and incomprehensible.

2. This universe has no ties and harmonies with the humans to make their life
pleasant.
3. The modern humas find but purposelessness in this strange universe that is
without any values.
 4. The world is meaningless world therefore not livable for the mankind.
5. Life accounts for the futility of human action or behavior.
6. Lack of meanings in the universe and the life produces the overwhelming
anguish.
7. Humans do not have any inherent truth, value, or meaning.
8. Absurdity of life can be adequately represented only in those works of
literature that are themselves absurd.
9. There are also affinities with this movement in the numerous recent works
which exploit black comedy or black humor: baleful, naive, or inept
characters in a fantastic or nightmarish modern world play out their roles in
what Ionesco called a “tragic farce,” in which the events are often
simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd.

Writers of absurdism

In Europe, Sartre, Ionesco, Fo and Beckett are the chief exponents of the
movement of absurdism. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot revives some of the
conventions of clowning and farce to represent the impossibility of purposeful
action and the paralysis of human aspiration. The novels and stories of Franz Kafka,
in which the characters face alarmingly incomprehensible predicaments belong to
the movement of the absurd. Occasionally Harold Pinter has been included under
such a rubric.

In the 1950s a group of playwrights created a new form of drama, which the
critic Martin Esslin named “the theatre of the absurd,” to describe plays that
abandoned traditional construction and conventional dialogue. These plays were
notable for their illogical structure and the irrational behavior of their characters.