Theatre of the Absurd (eBook)

I SAMUEL BECKETT The search for the self In his last will and testament, Murphy, the hero of Samuel Beckett's early novel of that name, enjoins his heirs and executors to place his ashes in a paper bag and take them to 'the Abbey Theatre, Lr Abbey Street, Dublin ... into what the great and good Lord Chesterfield calls the necessary house, where their happiest hours have been spent, on the right as one goes down into the pit . . . and that the chain be there pulled upon them, if possible during the performance of a piece.'1 This is a symbolic act in the true irreverent spirit of the anti-theatre, but one that also reveals where the author of Waiting for Godot received his first impressions of the type of drama against which he reacted in his rejection of what he has called 'the grotesque fallacy of realistic art--'that miserable statement of line and surface' and the penny-a-line vulgarity of a literature of notations'.2 Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906, the son of a quantity surveyor. Like Shaw, Wilde, and Yeats, he came from the Protestant Irish middle class and was, though he later lost his faith, brought up 'almost a Quaker', as he himself once put it.3 It has been suggested that Beckett's preoccupation with the problem of being and the identity of the self might have sprung from the Anglo-Irishman's inevitable and perpetual concern with finding his own answer to the question 'Who am I?', but while there may well be a grain of truth in this, it is surely far from providing a complete explanation for the deep existential anguish that is the keynote of Beckett's work and that clearly originates in levels of his personality far deeper than its social surface. 1. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, no date), p. 269. 2. Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, no date). p. 57. 3. Beckett, quoted by Harold Hobson, 'Samuel Beckett, dramatist of the year', International Theatre Annual, no. 1 (London: John Calder, 1956). At the age of fourteen, Beckett was sent to one of the Anglo-Irishman's traditional boarding schools, Portora Royal School, at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, founded by King James I, where Oscar Wilde had also been a pupil. It is characteristic of Beckett that he, whose writing reveals him as one of the most tormented and sensitive of human beings, not only became a popular and brilliant scholar but also excelled at games, batting left-handed and bowling right at cricket, and playing scrum--half at rugger. In 1923, Beckett left Portora and entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he read French and Italian, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1927. Such was his academic distinction that he was nominated by his university as its representative in a traditional exchange of lecturers with the famous Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris. Accordingly, after a brief spell of teaching in Belfast, he went to Paris for a two-year stint as a lecteur d'anglais at the Ecole Nomiale in the autumn of 1928. Thus began his lifelong association with Paris. In Paris he met James Joyce and soon became a member of his circle, contributing, at the age of twenty-three, the brilliant opening essay of that strange book entitled Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of twelve articles by twelve apostles, as a defence and exegesis of their master's as yet unnamed magnum opus. Beckett's contribution, headed 'Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce', culminates in a spirited assertion of the artist's duty to express the totality and complexity of his experience regardless of the public's lazy demand for easy...