THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD .

AND JEAN GENET

Do. Dr. Yusuf ERADAM A New Theatre: Theatre of The Absurd The years after the Second World War are the fruit1ess years for the theatre.But interests were carried to~ards new subjects and' to those of actuality sometimes disguised in the traditional forms and uses. By and by though, without any showy manifestation, anather theatre appeared. In 1950s it ~as imposed upon large audiences, which consisted of intellectuals and students searching for something new, in Theatre des Noctambules, Theatre de Poche, Theatre de la Huchette, Theatre de Babylone, and Theatre de Lutece. The development of this theatre owes 'much to the successful performance ofIo.nesco's Rhinoceros at l'Odeon-Theatre de Franc~, and Arthur Adamov's second play I' Invasion, by Vilar, at Palais de ChaiHot. Some of the known directors f these new plays are Georges Vitaly, Andre Reybaz, Roger Blin, J ean-Marie Serrau, and J aques Mauclair. The actors like Lucien Raimbourg and TsiHa Chehon, and the decorators like Jacques Noel, Rene Allio and Ande Acquart are same of the people equally important in the history of this theatre. Theatre of the absurd is atfirst characterized by a deliberate refusal of realism. Although there are moments which carry the traces of the realistic works, realism is never the basic principle. The main principle is to search, ,on the contrary, in a fundamental unreality which manifests itself as muchin the Tramework as in the intrigue or the characters who osciHate between lack of feeling and nullity and the improbability of the most fantastic sort. The main interest of the playwright is neither to reveal a so_ciety,and its problems, nar a psychological study, and their refinement is none of their concem either. To qeate a spectacle they usually tend to constitute an effect of totality which reveals its obsessional interior world through 'gests, songs, light and colors. Thus, it has some

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YUSUF

ERADAM

affinities with the mime, the downeries (down-plays), improvisation, the cabaret, and it is like the ritualistic performances of the old Greek plays, such as those of Aristophanes. Besides the comedy and parody of Aristophanes, Commedia dell'arte and vaudville lies in its background. This new theatre ma)' be called the 'Theatre as Ritua!' which 'necessarily seeks a collectilve experience, because in ritual everyone participates'!. But it is mainly called as the ,Theatre of the Absurd', a term which was first wred.for the production of Ionesco's La Gantatrice Ghauve (The Bald Soprano) in Paris, in i 950. The Theatre of the Absurd is an expression of inelividual vision. The spectator may experience that visian too, but what matters is the artist's expression of his vision'.2 The Theatre of the Absurd originated in France; Jean Genet from France, Arthur Ade,mov bom in Russia, Fernando Arrabal from SpanishMofocco, Samuel Beckett from Dublin and Eugene Ionesco from Rumania were the leading figures. it took some of its nourishment from AlfredJarry's Ubu Roi and Apollanaire's Mamelles de Tiresias which carry same metaphysical implications. Surrea1ism is considereel as the father of the Theatre of the Absurd.3 Antonin Art;'md, the actor, director, theoretician, and poet is known a s the prophet-directr of the theatrc of the absurd. His production The Genci, and his secretary Jean-Louis Barrault's productiol1 of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial, dramatized by Andre Gide, are perhaps the first and important examples of this theatre. In Barrault's production a 'nameless hem is accused of some never-stated erime, caught up in the machinery of anonymous bureaucracy, and finally executed'.4 Beckett's Waiting for Godot is also a landmark. What is 'Absurd'? Its dictionary meaning (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) is as follows: against reason or comman sense; dearly false or foolish;. funny because dearly unsuitableor impossible. Martin Esslin, in the intraduction to his book The Theatre of the Absurd, adds some other adjectivfs: 'out of harmony with reason r propriety; incongruous, ... illogical'. He continues as follows:
1 Barnard p.- 167. 2 Hewitt, Hewitt, History of the Theatre from p. 167-68. and in 1800 to the Present (New York, 1970),

3 It also carries traces from futurism, 'cubisrn, dadaisn and expressionisrn, the 1930s Artaud atternpted to g:ive form in his Theatre of CrueIty.

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In common usage, 'absurd' may simply mean 'ridieulous', but this is not the sense in which Camus used the word, and in which it is used when we speak of the theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, loneseo defined his understanding of the term as follows: 'Absurd is that which purpose ... cut off from his religious, metaphysical, is devoid of and trancendental roots, man is lost; all his a.ctions become senseless, absurd, useless'.4
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lonesco once defined the absurd as anti-idea, and for this reason some call his theatre 'anti-theatre'. lonesco's definition quoted by Mr. Esslin reveals a metaphysical anguish at the incongruity, uselessness and senselessness of the human ccndition, and this anguish is the core of the absurdist plays, mainly of Beekett, Adamov,lonesco, and Genet. This is why theirs is an experimental drama that has attacked timeless issues and problems forever insoluble, 'served by antirealistic production techniques developed for symbolist, expressionistie, theatricalist, and epic theatre.'5 The definition alsa displays tha.t absurdity is an existentialist coneept, and this clarifies Sartre's interest in and appreciation of the 'crimes' of the absurdists, especially those of Genet. 6 The Theatre of the Absurd, while trying 'to ~xpress its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought', 7 never argues about the subject, but 'it nerely presents it in being-that is, in terms of concrete stage images'.8 The radical but poetic language of it alsa emerges from these images, 'but what happens. on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters'.9 it finds its most shocking, incantatious, or even devilish expressian in Genet's theatre of social protest.
4 Martin Renaud-Jean-Louis Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London"1964), from Dans les Armes de la Vie', Paris, No. 20, October, Barraault, 1957. more p. 17. Esslin has taken Madeleine

Ionesco's definition

Cahiers de la Compagnie

5 Hewitt, p. 178. 6 Sartre is equay serious in dealing with absurd issues, but he is technicay conventional. 7 Esslin, p. 17. 8 Esslin, p. 18. 9 Esslin, p. 18.

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YUSUF ERADAM

Jean Genet: The Villain Or The Saint Jean Genet is, 'biographically, the most spectacular author of the twentieth century'.10Be was bom n Paris in 1910. His mother, Gabrielle Genet, was a pros:itute;.and his father is not known. Genet was abandonel by his mther to an. orphanage, then he was sent near his' peasant foster parents and was brought up by them. Genet leamt a:>outhis real family when he go't his birth ,certificate at the age of twenty-one. . He was caught stealing at the age of 10 and was put in a reformatory .(maison correctionelle) and stayed there unti! he was twentyone. Being accused of thet, he decided to be a thief, and to repudiate a world which repudiated him}1 For. a change, he joined French Foreign Legion, bm later deserted it, and found mal e prostitution more appealing to his 'easygoing ways'. Together with homosexuality he was interested in all sorts of crimes. In his books of confessions, Journal du voleur12 (1949), revealing his world of pimps, craoks and murderers, he :;ays: 'Abandoned by my family, I found it natural to aggravate his fact by the love of ma.les, and that lve stealing, and stealing by erime, or complicity wth crime.'13 He was only twenty when he made his first acquaintance with French prisons .. He was arrested .in Potan.d too, while travelling through Europe. When he came to Hitler's Germany he found. nothing to destroy: In Hit1er's Germany he feh out of place: 'Even on Unter den Linden I had a feeling of being in a camp organized by bandits .... This is anation of thieves, I feh. if I steal here, I accorrtplish n special act that could_ help me to realize myself. I merely obey the habitual order of thing. I do not destroy it.' 14 And so he hastened on into .a country that still obeyed the conventional moral code and therdare cnabled an outlaw to feel himself . , s outside an established order.l ,
10 Harry T. Moore, Twentietl-Century Frendh Literature (London, 1960) p. 148. / II Ainsi refusai-je decidem;nt un monde qui m'avait refuse.' For Sartre this was

his existential choice. 12 Sartre calIed this book Genet's most beautiful work, and ,the Dichtung and Warheit' of homosexuality, that is Goethe's work meaning Literature and Truth". 13 Esslin, p. 152. 14 Jean Genet, (Journal de ro{eur (Paris: Gaillimard,

194.9), p. 131.

LS Esslin, p. 153.

THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD AND JEAN BENET

19

Genet was made a poet in Fresnes prison while France was under German invasion in 1940. The poem he wrote was 'Condamne a Mort' (-Condemned to Death). He also started his first novel Notre-Dame des Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers) in 1942 in prison, published in Lyon in 1943. It is a long prose poem, or an epic of the homosexual underground. it has a very fine prose style. it was, written like the poem to Roger Pilorge, who killed his male lover and went to guillotine for that. His second prose work Miraele de la rose (dated from La sante and Tourelles prisons, 1943) is also about a prisoner talking abo:ut his love for a young boy, and the book is a teal poetics of homosexuality and burglary. In Pompes funebres (Funera1 Rites, 1945) Genet dea1s with his own lover who was a member of the resistance against the Nazis. He left his last prose Querelle de Brest (1946) unfinished. His hero, Querelle, is a murderer who engages in a love affair with the detective trying to solve one of his m'i.rders. So 'all these books are in the form of stories set in a world of ho'mosexual outlaws')6 Genet was finally sentenced to life imprisonment because he could not give up his burglaties, but he was set free after the rise of France's literary. world against the sentence. In 1947 he decided to turn to the theatre and 100k for 'the logie of the theatre' and aehieved his greatest fame in the theatre. His plays are coneerned with expressing his own feeling of helplessness and solitude when confronted with the despair and loneliness of man eaught in the hall of mitrors of the human eondition, inexorably trapped by an endless progression of images that are merely his own distorted reflection-lies eovering lies, fantasies battening upon fantasies, nightmares'nourished by nightmares within nightmares)? His first play Haute Surveillance (Deathwateh) was staged at the Theiltre des Mathurins in 1949. Les 'Bonnes (The Maids) his second play was staged by Louis Jouvet at the Athenee. In the next play Le Balcon (The Bakony, 1957) Genet brought 'the theatre to the the16 Esslin, p. 153. 17 Esslin, p. s.

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YUSUF

ERADAM

atre', when it had its premiere on April 22, 1957 in London at the Arts Theatre C1ub. The plot tak es place in Madame Irma's brothel, a house of.mirrors a temple of' illusion, where things are truer than life. Madame Irma':; brothel is one 'of noble dimensiori'. Here we have the possibiUty of experiencing our illusions, of indulging in secret perversiollS. All the theatrical props are available. Customers can play the parts of abishop, a sado-masochist judge, and others. Thereis a revolutian outside, during which the Queen has been assassinated. George the Chief of Police persuades Mme Irma to play the part of the Queen, and chooses the othe'r members of the Establishment among her customers. 'Thus from playing out their fantasies realit}, intrudes.' 18 Revolution fails, George is dissatisfied with his image. '~Then a new revolution breaks Irma refurns to her old task a:; brothel-keeper. 'What the brothel does is give men a presentment oftheir dreams in their essential meaning.'19 It is a play which strips away the mask of the society itself, by giving a dose analysis of it. This analysis .reflects the workings of the society as false.' He projects the feeling of impotence of the individual caught up in the meshes of society, he is dramatizing the often suppressed and subconscios rage of the 'I' alone and terrified by the anonymous weight of the nebulous 'they'. it is this helplessness, this impotence, that seeks an outlet in the substitute explanation of myth and daydreams.'2o The characters try to brg back the reality of the universe but they always fail, for Genet's message is that reality is unattainable for he has no controlover it.. The play represents 'a world of fantasy about a world of fantasy'Zl which seems absurd. Genet's The Balc01Z..)l is an example of the Theatre of the Absurd as well as the the at re as ritua!. The ritual in the play is 'the regular repetition of mythical events and, as such, dosely akin to sympathetic magic'22. This' is Genet's basic dilemma. Genet calls The Blades (Les Negres) a 'down show'. it presents a 'true picture born of a distorted image'. The play was first performed
18 Frederick 19 Harold Lumley, New'Trends Clurman, in.Twentieth-Century Drama (New York, 1972), p.216. The Naked Image (New YOlk, 1958), p. 72.

20 Esslin, p. 167. 21 Esslin, p. 166. 22 Esslin, p. 169.

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by a group of Negro actors, Les Griots, under the direction of Roger Blin, at the Theitre de Lutece on October 28; i 959. Genet uses splendid colors provoking frightened laugh, and avoids the emergence of sentiment. The play is usually considered as a perfect crime. The blacks are the symbol of all the scomed, neglected, 0pFessed, ridiculed people thrust out by the society. Thus Genet does not put any plea for an end of racism, or for better treatment of the Negroes, but he projects an elaboration of Negro frantasies about white people. Les Paravents (The Screens, 196i) is a disturbing comment op. the AIgerian war. It was. first staged in Berlin. it is about the battle of Algerians against the powers and authorities. The action takes place in front of a number of screens ten feet high with landscapes and various objects painted on them displaying the scenes for' the action. Genet in the stagt directions wants the actors to wear masks or to be garbed in excessiye elothing wearing false noses or chins. It is a reflection of a concrete brutal world which leaves the authorities and the audience deeply disturbed.

Genet's mind moves from image to image, and not from idea to idea. His genius is anarchic, resisting against intellectual organization. The images pile up, some of them memorable, others merely capricious; meanwhile the argument stand s stilI.. Evi! is sanctified in Genet's works. This is the black magic aspect of Genet's art. 'C'est l'enfer qui est le paradis': In his works hell is reflected as heaven. . Another originality of Genet lies in his fashion to su:ggegt, by the play of mirrors and of reflections all of which are but illusions; the world of appea-ances is always purer and more seducing than reality. Genet's reality necessarily includes society by his inversion. of it. He conceals the two great forces which motivate all men: sex and the will to power. They both have the same roots for Genet, and sex to him is, amatter of domination and submission' :23 The Man, the 'Woman, the attitude and the word which in real life seem abject,' in the theatre must fill the audience with wonder, without exception, must always astonish by their elegance and their obviousness.24
23 Esslin, p. 166. 24 Jean Genct, l.ettes lo Roger Biint: (;'\ew York, 19(9), p. 36. Reflectio,s In the Theater. trans. by Riclarcl Seaver

YUSUF ERADAM

To Genet theater should pr~sen.t the vu1gar, the horrib1e and the obscene, through rich and rhythmic language and gestures within the framework of Black Mass., 'The greatest hero for him is the greatest crimina1, the greatest, rebel against society.'25 He uses language as a means to communicate the spectato the harsh facts of this cmel world and his own isolation. For Genet, theatre assumes a religious role, and turns out to be a Dionysian nightmare. He 1ived and died 1ike the hero of such a nightmae, a committed antagonist. IJibHography Dersani, J. and others.: La Litterature en France' depuis 1945. Paris, 1970. Donnefoy, Claude.: Jean Genet. Paris, 1965. Drereton, Goeffrey.: A Short History worth, 1954. Clurman,

~fFrench

Literature. Harmnds-

Darod.: The Naked Image. New York, 1958.

Esslin, Martin.: The Tht~a:treof the Absurd. London, 1964. Genet, Jean.: The Balcoff:-V,Bernard Frechtman (trans). New York, 1966. '
,

~-------.:

The Blacks. Bemard :Frechtmin (trans). New York 1960. Funeral Rightj.

Bernard Frechtman
Rijlections

(trans).

New York,

1969,
----.: -----.: ---Letters to Roger Blin: The The Maids Screens. on the Theatre. Richard

Seaver (trans). New York, 1969.

and Deathwatch.

Bernard Fr~chtmah (trans).

(trans);

New York, 1961. Hemard Freehtman, New York, 1962. Hewitt, Barnard.:' History of. the Theatre from New York, 1970. 1800 to the Present.

Jaquart, Emmanuel.: Le Theate de derision. Paris, 1974. Lumley, Frederick.: New Trends in T wt:ntieth-Century French Litera,ture. London, 1966.
25,Hewitt, p. 163.

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OF THE ABSURD

AND JEAN BENET

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Moore, Harry T.: Twentieth-Century Serrau, Genevieeve.: Histoire ener, Sevda.: Dnde. Stynan,
Bugne

Fhnch Literature. London, 1960.

Sartre, Jean Paul.: Saint Genet: Conedien et Marry~. Paris, 1952.

du "Nouveau theatre".

Paris.

1966. 1982.
Comic

Tiyatro

Dncesi.

stanbul,

J.L.: The Dark Conedy: Tragedy. Michigan, 1961.

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..