IMPACT OF JEAN PAUL SARTRE ON ABSURD TH

IMPACT OF JEAN PAUL SARTRE ON THE THEATRE OF ABSURD

Gaurav Singh M. A English I ENGL 403 Elizabethan Drama
Jean Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905 – 1980 ) is perhaps the most well known existentialist and played a key role in 20th century French philosophy and Marxism. Existentialism was formally introduced in the works of philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger and can be traced to the late nineteenth / early twentieth century writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka. Though existentialism as a movement became popular in the mid-twentieth century through the works of Jean – Paul Sartre and prominent feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir with whom he was openly in a relationship. Sartre’s version of existential philosophy developed under the influence of the German philosophers Husserl and Heidegger. His Being and Nothingness is a seminal work on existentialism. Sartre’s No Exit ( Huis – clos), written in 1944, foresees the Theatre of the Absurd. The Existentialist Theatre differs from the Theatre of the Absurd in the sense that the existentialist theatre expresses the incomprehensibility and the irrationality of the human condition in the form of a comprehensible and logically constructed reasoning, whereas the Theatre of the Absurd abandons the old dramatic conventions and goes on to invent a new form to express the new content. In the Absurdist plays, incomprehensibility and irrationality are reflected even in the form. Sartre’s No Exit establishes the philosophy of existentialism as he perceived it. However, Martin Esslin notes that many Absurdist playwrights demonstrate the existential philosophy better than Sartre and Camus did in their own plays.
Sartre in a lecture delivered in 1945, described existentialism as “the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism”. Sartrean existentialism argues that existence precedes essence implying man is born in this world without a purpose and it is he who defines the meaning of his existence in his own subjectivity. The individual consciousness constructs an identity for itself, independent of any guidance from any external agency, including God. For Sartre, the individual consciousness is responsible for all the choices he /she makes, regardless of the consequences; and because our choices are exclusively ours, we are condemned to be responsible for them.
Thus, existentialism proposes that man is full of anxiety and despair, with no meaning in his life; he simply exists until he makes a decisive choice about his own future. Since individuals are free to choose their own path, the existentialists argue that they must accept the risk and responsibility of their actions. For instance, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Estragon and Vladimir choose to wait without any guidance from anyone else, as Vladimir says — “ He didn’t say for sure he’d come” but decides to “wait till we know exactly how we stand ”. Also, much of their inactivity stems from the fear of the consequences of their actions. For example, Estragon says — “Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer.”
A contradiction that surfaces in the context of the existentialist idea of freedom of choice is that although existentialism emphasizes action, freedom, and decision as fundamental to human existence, it argues against the capability of human beings to take a rational decision. Existentialism asserts that people arrive at a decision based on their subjective interpretation of the world. The existential thought thus concerns itself with the rejection of reason as the source of meaning, while focusing on feelings of anxiety, dread, awareness of death, and freedom of choice. This freedom to choose leads to the notion of non- being or nothingness and the natural corollaries of this theme of nothingness are the existentialist themes of alienation and death. These themes are evident in the Absurdist plays like Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (1958) which presents the predicament and the plight of Jerry, the outcast in a dehumanizing commercial world, who towards the end of the play provokes Peter into drawing a knife and then impales himself on it.
Sartrean existentialism states that the search for a rational order in human life is a futile passion. In Waiting for Godot, Estragon and Vladimir attempt to create some order in their lives by waiting for Godot who never arrives or perhaps who does not even exist. Thus, they continually resign to the futility of their situation, reiterating the lines — “Nothing to be done ”, “ Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful! ” This proves as true as the existentialist view that human beings exist in an indifferent and “absurd” universe in which meaning is not generated by the natural order, but an unstable, provisional meaning to life is provided by human beings’ actions and interpretations.
The Theatre of the Absurd, thus draws heavily on the existential philosophy, of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, which lays emphasis on the absurdity of the human condition and on the incapability of thought to provide an explanation of reality. But this does not mean that the dramatists of the Absurd simply translated the contemporary philosophy into drama. In fact, they responded to the same cultural and spiritual situation and reflected the same preoccupations as did the philosophers.
The plays grouped under the label the Theatre of the Absurd express a sense of shock at the absence as well as the loss of any clear and well- defined systems of belief. Such a sense of disillusionment and collapse of all previously held beliefs is a characteristic feature of the post- World War II era. Suddenly man confronted a universe that was both frightening and illogical — in a word, absurd. Thus, the main idea of the Theatre of the Absurd was to point out man’s helplessness and meaningless existence in a world without purpose. The Absurdist plays present a disillusioned and stark picture of the world. They are also quite ‘realistic’. The realism of these plays is a psychological and inner realism — they explore the human subconscious rather than simply describing the outward appearance of human existence. There is no one –to –one correspondence between the existential philosophy and the Theatre of the Absurd, nevertheless the existential thought is subtly woven into the Absurdist plays. The goal of the Absurdist drama is not to depress the audience with its pessimism, but an attempt to bring them closer to reality and help them understand their own meaning in life or the meaning of their own existence That is why the Theatre of the Absurd transcends the category of comedy and tragedy and juxtaposes laughter with horror. Beckett has, for example, very aptly called his play Waiting for Godot — ‘A Tragicomedy in Two Acts ’.