Sam Shepard's Chicago
Sam Shepherd’s Chicago: The Drama of Absurd
The term “absurd” is no stranger to the contemporary man. It seems as if for the last seventy years since the beginning of its popularization we haven’t moved away from the same existential philosophy it stems from. Therefore, it could be said that the notion of absurdity is a prevailing element of postmodern art and of postmodern way of thinking in general. Ever since the term “absurd” was used by Alber Camus in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, it attracted a lot of attention (“Absurdism”). Camus was one among the many intellectuals and artists who were, by the end of the Second World War, reciprocally disappointed at the state in which the terrors of war had left humanity. This overwhelming feeling of despair had been appropriately compared by Camus to the Sisyphus’s condemnation and the whole existence of the contemporary humanity to the act of repeatedly pushing the boulder just to watch it fall down the hill again and again. As we will be mainly interested in the appearance of the absurd in drama, it should be emphasized that the topic of absurdity, so closely related to the terms postmodern, avant-garde and experimental, has been overtly present in all other artistic media, genres and fields of activities, as well, all of which have tried to express the newly formulated idea of the modern world. And the drama of absurd, alike, could not be said to represent a unified movement but rather a “a complex pattern of similarities in approach, method, and convention, of shared philosophical and artistic premises, whether conscious or subconscious, and of influences from a common store of tradition”; helpful as it is, for the literary analysis, “it is not a binding classification; it is certainly not all-embracing or exclusive”(Esslin). Exactly what was understood by the idea of absurd, specifically in relation to the theatre, is best illustrated in Martin Esslin’s Introduction to ‘’Absurd drama’’.
The term “absurd” is no stranger to the contemporary man. It seems as if for the last seventy years since the beginning of its popularization we haven’t moved away from the same existential philosophy it stems from. Therefore, it could be said that the notion of absurdity is a prevailing element of postmodern art and of postmodern way of thinking in general. Ever since the term “absurd” was used by Alber Camus in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, it attracted a lot of attention (“Absurdism”). Camus was one among the many intellectuals and artists who were, by the end of the Second World War, reciprocally disappointed at the state in which the terrors of war had left humanity. This overwhelming feeling of despair had been appropriately compared by Camus to the Sisyphus’s condemnation and the whole existence of the contemporary humanity to the act of repeatedly pushing the boulder just to watch it fall down the hill again and again. As we will be mainly interested in the appearance of the absurd in drama, it should be emphasized that the topic of absurdity, so closely related to the terms postmodern, avant-garde and experimental, has been overtly present in all other artistic media, genres and fields of activities, as well, all of which have tried to express the newly formulated idea of the modern world. And the drama of absurd, alike, could not be said to represent a unified movement but rather a “a complex pattern of similarities in approach, method, and convention, of shared philosophical and artistic premises, whether conscious or subconscious, and of influences from a common store of tradition”; helpful as it is, for the literary analysis, “it is not a binding classification; it is certainly not all-embracing or exclusive”(Esslin). Exactly what was understood by the idea of absurd, specifically in relation to the theatre, is best illustrated in Martin Esslin’s Introduction to ‘’Absurd drama’’.