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Kenyon Review
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COMMENT
Martin Esslin
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671
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672 COMMENT
theatre). Nor can I see any irony in the example quoted from The Bald
Primadonna. The audience knows no more about the mcaning of the
mechanically senseless dialogue than do the characters themselves. What
is involved is a savage satire (which is by no means the same as irony)
on the dissolution and fossilization of the language of polite conversation
and on the interchangeability of characters that have lost all individuality,
even that of sex. Such characters lead a meaningless, absurd existence.
Mr. Hooker rightly observes that the audience nevertheless finds them
extremely funny. My contention is that the source of this laughter is not
to be found in any irony but in the release within the audience of their
own repressed feelings of frustration. By seeing the people on the stage
mechanically performing the empty politeness-ritual of daily intercourse,
by seeing them reduced to mechanical puppets acting in a complete void,
the audience while recognizing itself in this picture can also feel superior
to the characters on the stage in being able to apprehend their absurdity-
and this produces the wild, liberating release of laughter-laughter based
on deep inner anxiety, as Mr. Hooker has observed it in The Lesson.
This is analogous to the liberating hysterical hilarity produced by the release
of aggression and sadistic impulses in the old silent film comedy by the
throwing of custard pies, or in contemporary cartoon films by the hideous
cruelties inflicted on the mechanically conceived human and animal char-
acters. Such laughter is purgative-but deep down the things laughed about
are of the utmost seriousness.
The absurdity of the human condition is also the theme of Beckett's
Waiting for Godot. The play portrays characters in the act of purposeless
waiting. It is indeed a religious allegory; it deals with the elusiveness of
meaning in life and the impossibility of ever knowing the divine purpose,
if it exists at all.
This is the theme of all of Beckett's published works. And Beckett
also uses the term absurdity in the sense of purposelessness-as opposed to
necessity. He does so even in those of his works which were originally
written in English. In Watt for example, the chief character, who serves
a master almost as elusive as Godot, Mr. Knott, thus meditates about his
situation: ". . . he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the
one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other (for it is rare that
the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity) when he
felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity
(for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling
of absurdity)."
In the London performance (and I believe even more so in the New
York production) of Waiting for Godot the play was as far as possible
acted for laughs-with great success, for as with lonesco, the recognition
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MARTIN ESSLIN 673
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