Revista de Istorie și Teorie Literară (Dec 2015)
Tradiția literară și teatrală a absurdului
Abstract
The absurdist theatre’s legitimate ancestors renew archaic traditions. There are a few lines of thought which, according to Martin Esslin, anticipate absurdist theatre. First, pure theatre, which replaces spoken word with décor and movement, comes to life through the Latin mime, the British music hall or the American vaudeville, however Nicolae Balotă questions this denial of the word. Second, verbal nonsense, with deep roots in children’s folklore, is used to liberate one from the constraints of logic. Third, the dichotomy between dream and absurd is a constant theme and a generator of structure. Ubu-Roi, essential for modern theatre, representatively challenges reality and society as a whole, and anticipates the Dada movement or Surrealism. Later, Guillaume Apollinaire would use miracles and imagination without following any limit, while Antonin Artaud’s metaphysical theatre rediscovers the individual in relation to nature without any social or psychological elements. At the same time, it is important to point to the limits of this element, and to mention that Romantics, for example, consciously use dreams as an instrument of creation and therefore are not absurdits. Fourth, the grotesque, directly imported from baroque, is reshaped by Albert Camus to an extent that its limits are much wider. Irony, previously used to amuse, is now a tool to question certainties and possibilities. Fifth, absurdist theatre contains different props, one of them being the author’s tendency to perceive themselves as isolated unique creators, even though they share certain key characteristics. The term was however abused, becoming a shortcut for a mixture of philosophy and theatre. There are, of course, differences between generations, the likes of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco completely abandoning rational mechanisms, while Jean Giraudoux or Jean Anouilh use a brand-new logic.
