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Masarykova univerzita

Filozofická fakulta
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky

Magisterská diplomová práce


2010 Vital Voranau

Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts
Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Vital Voranau


Drama of Repetition
Repetition as a Dramatic Tool in Samuel Beckett’s Writing

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D.
2010

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..

Author’s signature
Table of Contents



The drama of Samuel Beckett 33

Nothing is absurd in a world bereft of judgement.


Samuel Beckett

Introduction

The aim of this work is to show that linking Samuel Beckett’s drama to the theatre of the absurd, and interpreting his plays through the prism of this convention, runs counter to attempts at unbiased reading of this author. The inescapable subjectivity derived of reading Beckett, is exemplified through Martin Esslin’s discussion of the theatre of the absurd as compared with Samuel Beckett’s own dramatic works, demonstrating fundamental incongruities between the two. This will be followed by an analysis of Beckett’s use of repetition, his primary dramatic tool, as that which facilitates and provides for those subjective interpretations beyond the theatre of the absurd. Source materials dealt with are mainly Beckett’s dramatic works, since that is where his use of repetition reached nearest to perfection, while his prose, poetry and essays are taken into consideration where they serve to farther illustrate his use of the stylistic device.

Chapter One characterizes the theatre of the absurd, its language, humour and various formal aspects as organized and understood by Martin Esslin. Then, those characterizations are traced in history through traditional drama, from Greek drama and Medieval theatre, through Commedia dell’arte and Shakespeare, by way of Camus and Sarte, to Chaplin and Keaton. This is followed by a study of Beckett’s writing in the context of the theatre of the absurd and an analysis of four common elements: absurd, tragicomedy, symbolism and avant-garde. On the whole, the survey of this chapter explores Samuel Beckett’s writing within the context of the theatre of the absurd, showing both, how Beckett pertains to it, and in what ways he is detached. Ultimately, Chapter One concludes with a criticism against the attribution of Samuel Beckett to the theatre of the absurd. In Chapter Two, by contrast to Chapter One, Beckett’s drama is presented out of the context of the theatre of the absurd. Here, priority is given to the scope and specifics of traditional disciplines having common influence with Beckett’s works, e.g., philosophy, art, religion and certain aspects of drama, such as silence, language, light etc. The final section, Chapter Three, focuses on repetition in Beckett’s writing. Discussion centres on repetition here for being the tool most specific to his dramatic work. It has become conventional to divide Beckett’s writing career into three periods: early works, middle period and late works, and this is normally useful enough a division for the sake of a general study of the whole of his oeuvre. For the study of his drama, however, a tri-part division is more practical between his major works (Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, Endgame), short pieces and plays for radio and television.


The Theatre of the Absurd


The theatre of the absurd is a term which usually refers to a type of drama which dominated West-European literature between the years 1940-1960 and is most often associated with the names of famous writers, such as: Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Witold Gombrowicz, Sławomir Mrożek, Vaclav Havel and many other less famous playwrights. However, as any characterization of genre, attempts to encompass its abstract relations and phenomena, this term has many inconsistencies. Unlike other coinages used to describe different kinds of theatre in the XX century such as: „prose drama”, „kitchen-sink drama”, „theatre of menace”, or „theatre of cruelty”, which mainly refer to a few, or even singular, plays or playwrights, of distinguished manner, in close time proximity, or being clearly associated with a specific literary movement, „the theatre of the absurd” tends to entail too many features, authors, and spans of time.

The term was first introduced by the dramatist, critic and scholar, Martin Esslin, in his book titled Theatre of the Absurd, which, in the 1960’s, became an influential dramatic critique. In this book, the author sets out a re-framing in light of misconceptions and confusions connected with the new type of theatre:


A public conditioned to an accepted convention tends to receive the impact of artistic experience through a filter of critical standards, of predetermined expectations and terms of reference, which is the natural result of the schooling of its taste and faculty of perception. This framework of values, admirably efficient in itself, produces only bewildering results when it is faced with a completely new and revolutionary convention – a tug of war ensues between impressions that have undoubtedly been received and critical preconceptions that clearly exclude the possibility that any such impressions could have been felt. Hence the storms of frustration and indignation always caused by works in a new convention. (Esslin 28)
The purpose of his book as he puts is “to provide a framework of reference that will show the works of the Theatre of the Absurd within their own convention” (Ibid.). To give a framework of reference, Esslin first explains what the difference between traditional theatre and the theatre of the absurd is:
If a good play must have a cleverly constructed story, these have no story or plot to speak of; if a good play is judged by subtlety of characterization and motivation, these are often without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical puppets; if a good play has to have a fully explained theme, which is neatly exposed and finally solved, these often have neither a beginning nor an end; if a good play is to hold the mirror up to nature and portray the manners and mannerism of the age in finely observed sketches, these seem often to be reflections of dreams and nightmares; if a good play relies on witty repartee and pointed dialogue, these often consist of incoherent babblings. (Esslin 21, 22)
The difference between the traditionally well-made drama and the drama to which Esslin refers, lies, as he argues, in the dissimilarity of their purposes. Traditional criticism, Esslin says, cannot be applied to the evaluation of the dramas described by him as the theatre of the absurd. Therefore, he provides a set of references, which according to the author coincide in plays of the theatre of the absurd. These references encompass a variety of features based on the quality of language, form and style. The largest focus is on language:
The Theatre of the Absurd… tends toward a radical devaluation of language, toward a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the stage itself. The element of language still plays an important part in this conception, but what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters. (Esslin 26)
The role of language in this theatre, due to its incapability of illustrating reality, is reduced to a minimum and devalued of its traditionally preconceived weight. “On the stage, language can be put into a contrapuntal relationship with action, the facts behind the language can be revealed. Hence the importance of mime, knockabout comedy and silence...” (Esslin 85). Therefore, according to the author some functions of language are transferred to other dramatic tools. Esslin cites Ionesco: “Just as words are continued by gesture, action, mime, which at the moment when words become inadequate, take their place, the material elements of the stage can in turn further intensify these” (Ionesco, cited by Esslin 186).

Humour is one of the tools, which compensates for the limited language of the drama of the absurd. It serves both to release the tension of and to balance the tragic part of such plays:


Humour makes us conscious, with a free lucidity, of the tragic or desultory condition of man… It is not only the critical spirit itself… but… humour is the only possibility we possess of detaching ourselves – yet only after we have surmounted, assimilated, taken cognizance of it – from out tragicomic human condition, the malaise of being. (Ionesco, cited by Esslin 186)
In the theatre of the absurd humour is not applied for the sake of fun, as in traditional theatre. Here it serves another purpose: “To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying…” (Ionesco, cited by Esslin 186). Laughter has a revealing and strengthening function against unbearable misery and despair. It saves the character of the drama of the absurd from craziness and self-annihilation.

Also connected with illogical communication and incomprehensible language is the lack of linear plot. Again, this absence is compensated for with circularity of actions and dialogues. “Many of the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd have a circular structure, ending exactly as they began; others progress merely by a growing intensification of the initial situation” (Esslin 405, 406). Since, the linear development is absent; there is also no typical resolution, or culmination in a classical meaning of these words.

Still another feature is the absence of Aristotle’s unities of place, time, and action. The theatre of the absurd usually distorts all the dramatic rules described in Poetics. Absurdist drama does not need to be attached to one realistic scene, often does not need any stage props at all; the actions become distorted, and time changes its primarily function.
While the play with a linear plot describes a development in time, in a dramatic form that presents a concretized poetic image the play’s extension in time is purely incidental. Expressing an intuition in depth, it should ideally be apprehended in a single moment, and only because it is physically impossible to present so complex an image in an instant does it have to be spread over a period of time. The formal structure of such a play is, therefore, merely a device to express a complex total image by unfolding it in a sequence of interacting elements. (Esslin 394)
Hence, as time depends on unreal images it becomes deformed and is often marked by its absence. For the characters of this theatre, time is not to be counted or referred as to some reality, but simply to pass or fill with irrelevant actions.

As the author admits his term does not refer to those contributing, in his view, to the theatre of the absurd, but rather to a common basis for their works, which is illustrative of “the preoccupations and anxieties, the emotions and thinking of many of their contemporaries in the Western world” (Esslin 22). He also acknowledges that such an illustration is always relative:


It is an oversimplification to assume that any age presents a homogenous pattern. Ours being, more than most others, and age of transition, it displays a bewilderingly stratified picture… The Theatre of the Absurd, however, can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time. (Esslin 22, 23)
Therefore, in his book, Esslin does not seem to aspire to giving an exclusive and homogenous name to the group of writers, as if placing them in the same school or convention. On the contrary, he is rather describing the receptions of such dramatic pieces, which according to classical conventions, are deemed absurd in their nature. Instead of saying what the aesthetics of the theatre of the absurd are, assuming that such aesthetics exist at all, he is rather saying what they are not, in contrast to the aesthetics of a “well-made drama” in the conventional meaning. Although, Esslin introduces a series of characteristics which, in his opinion define the essence of the drama of the absurd, they are always discussed in the terms of absence or contradiction to traditional ones, rather, than possessing sustainable quality of their own.

Although the theatre of the absurd is often viewed as a purely avant-garde creation, its elements can be found in the variety of theatrical traditions. Esslin comments that the novelty of this theatre is rather in the audience’s perception than in the theatre itself:


If there is anything really new in it, it is the unusual way in which various familiar attitudes of mind and literary idioms are interwoven. Above all, it is the fact that for the first time this approach has met with a wide response from a broadly based public. This is characteristic not so much of the Theatre of the Absurd as of its epoch. (Esslin 388)
According to Esslin the public plays an important role as far as writers’ inspirations and applications are concerned.

Absurdist elements are already to be found as early as in Greek drama. Similarly to the theatre of the absurd, Greek drama is preoccupied with language: “With respect to Greek tragedy, which, of course, comes to us only as a drama of words” (Nietzsche 199). Another focus of absurdist drama is on laughter, which in many senses echoes with a specific usage of laughter in Greek drama. As Erik Segal puts it: “All Comedy aspires to laughter – although not all laughter is related to Comedy” (Segal 23). This evokes the association of laughter as applied in the theatre of the absurd in order to achieve a sort of “cathartic” effect. However, the most astounding commonality between the two theatres is the domination of merging quality:


The wearing of masks, symbolizing changes of personality, a practice of multi-levelled cross-dressing, the presence of a chorus (giving out its commentary, plus an argument in the form of parabasis (a pronouncement of advice, often seemingly unrelated to the rest of the play), a widespread tone of vulgarity (evident both in stage-props and dialogue), and various metatheatrical devices were all prominent features. The more unusual the combination of such elements contained in a particular play or performance, the closer such a drama (the Greek drama, meaning ‘something done’) might approximate to our modern understanding of Theatre of the Absurd. (Cornwell 34)
Alike Greek drama the theatre of the absurd is a certain fusion of sometimes loose and seemingly unrelated elements of performance.

Elements of the theatre of the absurd can be also traced to the medieval theatre, in the form of allegorical farces, which “represents a world gone wrong; social institutions and people in general are in the grip of vicious folly from which no one is able to break free... often peopled with wise or benign fools, clowns, and acrobats, whose function is to reveal, ridicule, and censure the folly around them” (Knight 80). Such plays are closely intertwined with performances of travelling clowns, which became extremely popular in The Middle Ages.



Commedia dell'arte was another source of inspiration for the writers of the theatre of the absurd. “Commedia dell'arte has three main stock roles: servant, master and innamorata” (Katritzky 104), which reminiscent of many stock characters in Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard’s plays. Similarly to the theatre of the absurd, in commedia dell’arte “the characters themselves are often referred to as "masks", which according to John Rudlin, cannot be separated from the character. In other words the characteristics of the character and the characteristics of the mask are the same” (34). The characters of the theatre of the absurd also tend to exemplify a type of an individual, rather than a singular individual, but at the same time cannot be separated from its “mask”. Commedia dell’arte made use of different types of humour, including prepared jokes, physical gags, as well as improvised, practical jokes, which is still another parallel to the theatre of the absurd.

Absurdist elements also abound in Shakespeare’s tragicomedies, in which tragic elements are fused with comical ones in such a way, that they often bring about an ambiguous effect. Shakespeare’s devotion to meaningful names, when a name serves as a label of a person’s character, is also typical for the theatre of the absurd. These plays brought about the low and mad characters typified of quaint humour, ranging from bastards to fools, which later became illustrative of the drama of the absurd. Tom Stoppard’s reference to Shakespeare notes the absurdist potential of Shakespearian characters as well. Plays by Shakespeare and other Jacobean playwrights often, like plays of the absurd, are illogical and lack realism.

Major philosophical influences come from the writings of existentialists, mostly of Camus and Sartre’s interpretations. Camus makes an elaborate description of the absurd in his work “The Myth of Sisyphus”.
Camus’s starting point is a dichotomical all or nothing: life has meaning, or to go on living is pointless. This formulation of the question grows from existence, characterized by a deep sense of despair and an inability to find purpose in life’s everyday moments. (Sagi 48)
According to Camus the absurdity of life lies not only in the alienation caused by living in a hostile and inhuman world, but also in language, which does not mean what it is supposed to mean: “When things have a label, aren’t they lost already?” (155). For Camus there are two options in response to human anxiety cause by absurdity, either to find the answer to existence or to commit a “philosophical suicide”. Sartre seems to go even further in his pessimism: “For Sartre, absurdity is a state of affairs. Existence is absurd because it lacks any inherent design, meaning, or end point. In Being and Nothingness and elsewhere, Sartre links the notion of absurdity to the notion of contingency” (Conard 110). Sartre’s solution is not in looking for a non-contingent answer to our existence, but in realization of its contingency: “I do not have nor can I have recourse to any value against the fact that it is I who sustain values in being... In anguish I apprehend myself... as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself” (Sartre 40). Whereas for Camus the absurd is contextual and usually lies in the dichotomy between the inner and the outer worlds for Sartre it is ubiquitous, thus including our innate selves. Although they have a different perception of absurd, they agree upon the expository potential of absurdity. “Sartre and Camus are alike in an important respect. Specifically, in their literary works, both illustrate how susceptible individuals are to the menace of absurdity and how powerful the revelation of absurdity can be” (Conard 111). In this respect, they also agree with many authors associated with the theatre of the absurd.

Still more non-literary influences can be found in vaudeville comedy style, particularly as it transitioned from stage into the silent film era by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton; frequently associated props, including the derby hat, walking stick, and baggy trousers, are also very often encountered in theatre of the absurd. There is also a noticeable relation between silent movies and the use of silence by many authors writing absurdist plays. Samuel Beckett’s desire to see Chaplin as an actor of Film is an example of such relations. Another similarity, originating from Commedia dell’arte, and popularized by Chaplin and Keaton, is usually referred to as “slip stick” and describes a type of comedy involving exaggerated physical violence and, often, irrational acts.



Ever since the first edition of The Theatre of the Absurd with which Martin Esslin coined the name, invoking the meaningless of life as thematically consistent with the plays of Beckett, Adamov, Genet and Ionesco, Beckett’s name has been forever linked. “Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless” (Esslin 23). Absurdist theatre echoes all other genres, literary techniques and philosophical schools, which stand in opposition to realism. It explores Bertold Brecht’s “alienation effect”, the aim being to distance the audience from the reality of the stage, and to perform a study in the philosophy of existentialism, the key concepts of which were “dread” and “nothingness”. One of the most important features of this theatre was a denial of the communicative function of language.
The Theatre of the Absurd constituted first and foremost an onslaught on language, showing it as a very unreliable and insufficient tool of communication. Absurd drama uses conventionalized speech, clichés, slogans and technical jargon, which it distorts, parodies and breaks down. By ridiculing conventionalized and stereotyped speech patterns, the Theatre of the Absurd tries to make people aware of the possibility of going beyond everyday speech conventions and communicating more authentically. (Culík 2000: http://www.samuel-beckett.net)
Samuel Beckett uses this unconventional language thusly, in order to create the specific atmosphere of his plays, which consist of numerous misunderstandings and endless misinterpretations based on language defect structure. Camus concluded that: “…our situation is absurd because our longing for clarity and certainty is met with, and forever thwarted by, the irrationality of the universe into which we have been thrown; we can neither rid ourselves of the desire for order nor overcome the irrationality that stands in the way of order” (Camus, cited by Brockett 1988: 226). Thereof Beckett not only denies definiteness, but he also questions the reality of human life.

In Beckett’s plays, the absurdity of life does not end with death. Death does not reveal the rationality of people’s lives or give any sort of solace, but rather makes ridicule of any preconceptions of any function, such as in Christianity: “death, in which… one will ‘come to oneself’ and meaning will arise” (Butler 112). Beckett agrees with Sartre on this issue:
Thus, for Sartre, death, far from being an end that gives a meaning to life, is absurd. We are like the condemned man who is preparing to give a meaning to his life, to close the account’ satisfactorily, by making ‘a good showing on the scaffold’ and who is then carried off by a ‘flu epidemic’. (Sartre, cited by Butler 112)
For Beckett, however, unlike for some existentialists, death, though meaningless, is not a matter of dread, and it is not a final destination, by no means. Beckett’s characters are preoccupied with waiting for death, not by death itself, which serves completely different aims:
Thus death becomes the main subject of the Trilogy, but not in any ordinary sense. Not one of Beckett’s people is afraid of death. Some long for it (Hamm, for instance), but all, without exception, are desperately puzzled about its meaning and its mechanism. (Coe 59)
Death is neither the end to existence nor a transitory state. Beckett’s usage of death is to mark the absence of real life: “All [characters] think of life as an exile, a punishment for some unknown crime, perhaps the crime of being born, as Estragon suggests – an exile in time from the reality of themselves, which reality is, and must be, timeless” (Coe 59). Hence, his characters think rather in terms of life, than in terms of death. Estragon and Vladimir are able to commit neither a real nor a philosophical suicide, in terms described by Camus. “Death is never that which gives life its meanings; it is, on the contrary, that which on principle removes all meaning from life” (Heidegger, cited by Butler 112). Here, Beckett is closer to Sartre who says: “Since the for-itself is the being which always lays claim to an ‘after’, there is no place for death in the being which is for-itself” (Sartre, cited by Butler 112). Therefore, Beckett focuses on the process of waiting, but not on the object of waiting: “…if Godot came there would not be a joyous revelation of the meaning of the waiting (i.e. of suffering, life). On the contrary, it would only confirm the absurdity of existence” (Butler 113). Beckett’s characters’ hope is in what is ahead of them, not behind.

Another difference between Beckett’s and the existentialists’ attitudes toward absurdity is brought about by Adorno:
Beckett’s oeuvre has many things in common with Parisian existentialism… But whereas in Sartre the form – that of the pièce à these – is somewhat traditional, by no means daring, and aimed at effect, the form overtakes what is expressed and changes it… For Beckett absurdity is no longer an ‘existential situation’ diluted to an idea and then illustrated. (Adorno, cited by Lane 131)
Hence, Beckett’s preoccupation with form and themes, like absurdity, is somewhat different from the existentialists approach and illustration.
While Sartre and Camus express the new content in the old convention, the Theatre of the Absurd goes a step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed. In some sense, the theatre of Sartre and Camus is less adequate as an expression of the philosophy of Sartre and Camus – in artistic, as distinct from philosophic, terms – than the Theatre of the Absurd. (Esslin 24)
As such, the difference between the authors lies not only in their approach to reason and absurdity, but is also evident in their forms of expression. “Beckett’s absurd’ works deny meaning’ and protect themselves against interpretation, but provoke and entice interpretation” (Buning and Engelberts 317). Potential literary expression is less confined in its formal representation than philosophical works on the absurd.

Tragicomedy is another link between Samuel Beckett and the theatre of the absurd. Tragicomedy is not only a compound word in lexical terms, but it also carries a twofold semantic meaning. It is popularly understood as a combination of tragedy and comedy. Sometimes, when the combination is not so obvious, balanced or visible, it can be defined as neither a pure tragedy nor a classical comedy. Ristine explains this mixture as follows:
What we consider as tragic and comical have a way of shading into one another by imperceptible advances, until the juncture is lost; or what may appeal as tragic to one will be comic to another. Many a serious event has its humorous side; that the pathetic is akin to the comical and laughter neighbour to tears are truisms of long-standing acceptance; while the comparison of life to a tragicomedy is almost as old as the world itself. (Ristine ix)
In his terms, both tragic and comic have more than one effect or meaning. Neither laughter, nor tears should be taken for granted, as they are people’s reactions, which are highly subjective and individual in every case. Although the heyday of tragicomedy is considered to have been in XVII c., Beckett revived and substantially refreshed the genre in the fifties of XX c. Whereas, classical tragicomedy moves towards catastrophe, but results in a happy ending, brought by some fortunate events, Beckett’s tragicomedy has rather a reversed nature:
He would allow “the dark” into his work, the chaos, pain, and painful comedy of existence as he experienced it, and thereby make a new kind of art, one that depended not on Joycean richness and playfulness, but on deliberate shrinkage of material and elimination of literary ornament, an art that sought its apotheosis in failure… an art shot through in equal measure with unassuageable anguish and bleak humour. (Banville 1996: http://www.samuel-beckett.net/banville.html)
In contrast to classical tragicomedy, Beckett’s plays depict comic events with a rather tragic result or ending. Beckett makes the combination between funny and sad even more intensive and the boundaries between the two yet more blurred. Since the publication of Waiting for Godot (A Tragicomedy in Two Acts) critics often cite Samuel Becket as having provided its definitive, updated form.

In many works by Beckett, this blur between laughter and crying ascends beyond its threshold, where it is virtually impossible to say which is which, and is best described as crying with laughter.


The dislocations of language that follow are serious but, given the playfulness of the Anglo-Irish tradition, hardly ever solemn. Humour runs across almost every episode or scene in Beckett’s novels and plays. Even when ‘it is no laughing matter’, a tragicomic language is created that is constantly at play, as if acting out the mutilated Nell’s response to Nagg’s laughter…: ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But – ’ (Kennedy 6)
The reason for which Beckett is popularly perceived as a gloomy and pessimistic writer grows from the fact that his plays tend to overshadow his prose, in which he often appears almost a comic writer.
There are books – Proust, More Pricks Than Kicks, and various collections of poems – in which he is not clear whether he is a comic writer or simply a bitter one, and his first comic book, Murphy, achieves its daft freedom in a kind of air pocket, while simultaneously poems… precipitate into three or four hundred words his mounting nausea with the human state. (Kenner 35)
This confusion lies in the nature of tragicomedy, as well as in the usage of various comic tools, ranging from clowning, through slip stick, to farce.
Act Without Words I and II are perfect clowning: in the second, the two clowns come out of their sacks, go through the day’s work and back into the sacks, in possibly ten minutes… Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot seem to be outside any definition of clowning; perhaps we should be content with calling them clownish actors, but they do an act rather than play a part. In fact, Beckett has been careful to insert enough farce to discourage pathos in spite of the pathetic elements in the text. Thus the pulling off of a stubborn boot, the horse-play with Lucky, and the kicks and howls and the tumbling of all the characters in a heap, and the juggling interlude… involving two heads and three hats, are carefully inserted with a dual purpose… (Mayoux 29)
As suggests Mayoux, all such applications have twofold purpose: reduction of tragic pathos and elimination of unwanted realism: “Moreover, aesthetically speaking, clownish clothes and clownish acting are part of the rejection of all realism” (30). Moreover, Beckett does not avoid dirty humour. The examples of this could be Hamm’s “pee” without catheter, Lousse’s eloquent parrot, and Murphy’s taste for Glimigrim, Gulliver’s diuretic wine (Tindall 36). According to Tindall another purpose of such combinations is the analgesic or aggravating effect: “A guaranteed painkiller, humour makes horror bearable or, as Yeats has it, transfigures dread. Yet humour also intensifies what it guarantees relief from” (Tindall 32). In these terms, Beckett can be described not only as the successor of a great legacy of tragicomedy but also as a contributor to its development and a precursor of a sort.

Still another feature that serves as a common platform for Beckett and the theatre of the absurd is symbolism. This kind of symbolism says that truth cannot be logically grounded, but should be sought with the help of intuition. Different symbols can be indirect hints in the quest for the ultimate truth. Symbolism in the theatre changed the view of many traditional aspects in this genre.
The Symbolists believed that scenery should be confined to draperies or undefined forms which evoke a sense of infinite space and time. Historical detail was avoided because it tied plays to specific periods and places rather than bringing out their timeless qualities. Décor was reduced to elements giving a generalized impression appropriate to the ideas and feelings of a play. Similarly, costumes were usually simple, draped garments of no particular period o place; colours were dictated by the play’s mood. (Brockett 1969: 318)
That is why sceneries of Beckett’s plays are usually either undefined or limited to some symbolic elements, like a bare tree or trash scattered over the scene. Similarly, language in the dialogues of his heroes is more metaphorical and vague than literary. Maeterlinck referred to this in the following way:
Side by side with the necessary dialogue you will almost always find another dialogue that seems superfluous; but examine it carefully, and it will be borne home to you that this is the only one that the soul can listen to profoundly, for here alone is the soul that is being addressed. (Brockett 1969: 310)
Beckett’s dramas abound in symbolic meanings and exploration of suggestiveness. All the elements that appear in them are motivated by the writer’s intentions. “No symbol where none intended” (Alvarez 86). Beckett’s works are so symbolic that sometimes it makes all interpretations virtually impossible or erroneous.
This is why the many and elaborate interpretations that have been foisted on Godot seem particularly superfluous. Pozzo and Lucky may be Body and intellect, Master and Slave, Capitalist and Proletarian, Colonizer and Colonized, Cain and Abel, Sadist and Masochist, even Joyce and Beckett. But essentially and more simply, they embody one way of getting through life with someone else, just as Vladimir and Estragon more sympathetically embody another. (Alvarez 86)
Beckett’s symbolism is particularly hard to discern, as it is multilayered and often simultaneously expressed through many different media, such as language, gesture, sound and visual signs. Therefore, Beckett’s works give endless opportunities for varied, sometimes contrastive, readings.

On the other hand, Beckett’s attitude towards symbolism is not passive and merely derivative, but also critical: “Symbolism was an art movement originally designed to resist the discursive, the prosaic, to edge toward silence, but Beckett finds that the symbolic method hinders the symbolists from attaining their goal…” (Albright 13). Long before Beckett wrote the majority of his pieces, he became not only captivated by the potential of symbolism, but also quite cautious about its traps, which is conspicuous in his essay on Proust. The symbol, he says, must be reduced to “autosymbolism” (Beckett’s own term). “A fiction purged of mimesis and symbol alike would seem to deny itself every resource… Beckett’s chief mode of self-entertainment was to refine the procedures through which a text can reflect its lack of content, the central absence” (Albright 13). Therefore, symbolism in Beckett’s realization has a dual function, in a traditional and figurative, self-deniable senses. Consequently, Beckett is one of the most over-interpreted authors ever.

A final important correlation between Beckett and the theatre of the absurd that is considered here is the avant-garde element. The nature of avant-garde art is to criticize established canons and replacing them with new alternatives. Although the term is applied to many different artistic acts and forms, it can be described as follows:
“Avant garde” has become a ubiquitous label, eclectically applied to any type of art that is anti-traditional in form. At its simplest, the term is sometimes taken to describe what is new at any given time: the leading edge of artistic experiment, which is continually outdated by the next step forward. (Innes 1993: 1)
Avant-garde usually bears on provocative message, which aims to evoke repugnancy, bewilderment and anger. In these terms, Beckett’s writing can be labelled as avant-garde. Throughout his entire career, experimentation remained the most important catalyst of his art. “In each play he has successively pushed out the limits of abstraction… His work has continually extended the frontiers of modernism, to the point that his later plays barely belong in the theatre at all” (Innes 1995: 428). Although there are no stylistic features, which would describe an avant-garde drama, it does manifest in the desire for transformation of every genre as well as in the revolt against the status quo of mainstream culture. “The outlines of his concerns must have been obvious… We need not expect any Victorian three-deckers, any engage pamphleteering, any autobiography or any bourgeois melodramas from Paris this year; yet the uncompromisingly experimental products of Beckett’s “ontospeleology” have become, with time, entirely unpredictable” (Pilling 184). Becket would not comply with any, even his own conventions in his art.

However, as with absurd, tragicomedy and symbolism, Beckett’s avant-garde is not univocal either. First, although avant-garde is a pretty fuzzy notion, Beckett is rather not a typical representative of avant-garde movement:



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