Politics in the Absurdist Theatre of Samuel Beckett, Václav Havel and Eugène Ionesco by Danielle Pacheco
11106670
Master’s thesis
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
MA Literary Studies - Literature and Culture - Comparative Literature University of Amsterdam - Graduate School of Humanities
Supervisor: Dr. Matthijs Engelberts Second reader: Dr. Noa Roei
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ... 3
1.1 The Theatre of the Absurd ... 4
1.2 Committed Literature in the Twentieth Century ... 9
2. Samuel Beckett: The politics in En attendant Godot ... 12
2.1 Introduction ... 12
2.2 Beckett’s politics ... 13
2.3 En attendant Godot: Don’t mention the war ... 17
2.4 Guilt: The Vichy government and other reasons for not mentioning the war ... 19
2.5 Language ... 23
Cryptic messages ... 23
Rhetoric ... 25
2.6 Conclusion ... 28
3. Václav Havel: Soviet Poster Child... 30
3.1 Introduction ... 30 3.2 Czechoslovakia in the 1960’s ... 31 3.3 Writing style... 32 Nonsensical speech ... 35 Repetition ... 40 3.4 Reading Havel ... 42 Domestic reactions ... 42
Politics and translation: bringing Czech theatre across the border ... 44
Havel on Havel ... 46
3.5 Conclusion ... 48
4. Eugène Ionesco: The Development of a New Theatre ... 50
4.1 Introduction ... 50
4.2 Politics The Iron Guard ... 51
Rhinocéros ... 52
Neither left nor right ... 54
Liberalism ... 57
On committed writing ... 57
4.2 Language, aesthetics and style ... 60
Communication ... 61
Proliferation ... 63
4.3 Influences on the Theatre of the Absurd: Ionesco and Esslin ... 65
4.4 Conclusion ... 67
5. Conclusion ... 69
Introduction
Martin Esslin coined the term “Theatre of the Absurd” in his 1961 book of the same name to describe a group of emerging playwrights whose theatre1 broke radically from tradition. A retroactively-applied term with which the playwrights themselves did not necessarily identify, the term itself has met with contention in the years since Esslin’s book. However, there is no doubt that the playwrights Esslin grouped together do share many common traits - murky character background, strange plot development and incoherent dialogue - and although the term has been much criticized, I will examine the plays in the context of their label as “absurdist theatre.” Critical reactions to absurdist plays have ranged from psychoanalytic to philosophical, and given the emergence of the genre during the Cold War and immediately after World War II, many absurdist plays have been retroactively politically interpreted. Yet while some absurdist playwrights were manifestly political in their aims, others, while they may have been influenced by the political turmoil of their era, were less obviously so in their writing. Václav Havel’s Garden Party (1963) and
Memorandum (1965) have been understood as a pointed remark on the poisonous effects of
bureaucratic rhetoric under communist rule; in contrast, works such as Beckett’s En attendant
Godot (Waiting for Godot; 1952) are more universal in their targets, and vague in their
politics. Eugène Ionesco straddles both the political and non-political arenas; his first absurdist play, La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano; 1950), appears to be generic social commentary; but the much later Rhinocéros (Rhinoceros; 1959) is a clear condemnation of fascism. In my thesis, I will analyze the evolution of the Theatre of the Absurd, from Ionesco and Beckett, two of its pioneers, to Havel, who best represents absurdist theatre in the Soviet bloc, to show that although these absurdist playwrights often claimed their plays were not
1 Analyzing theatre for a Master’s thesis in literature is slightly contentious, as theatre involves a performance in addition to its written script. In my thesis, I will discuss only the written versions of the plays, which best represent the politics of the authors, and will refrain from any analysis of their performances.
political, the absurdist style in theatre was inextricably linked to the political climate of post-WWII Europe.
The Theatre of the Absurd
With the Paris productions of La cantatrice chauve in 1950 and En attendant Godot in 1953 (written in 1948), Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett unwittingly became the
founding fathers of a movement in theatre that would see a complete upheaval of the way people understood drama, starting in Paris and soon spreading to London, Germany and the rest of the European and North American world. This new “anti-theatre” was soon defined by Martin Esslin as the “Theatre of the Absurd.” Although Esslin cites “social criticism, [the] pillorying of an inauthentic, petty society” (Esslin 401, 1980 version) as one of the main messages of the Theatre of the Absurd, the genre’s “most essential” message, for Esslin, is philosophical:
The Theatre of the Absurd is facing up to a deeper layer of absurdity - the absurdity of the human condition itself… In the analysis of the dramatists of the Absurd in this book, we have always seen man stripped of the accidental circumstances of social position or historical context, confronted with the basic choices, the basic situations of his existence… Concerned as it is with the ultimate realities of the human condition, the relatively few fundamental problems of life and death, isolation and
communication, the Theatre of the Absurd, however grotesque, frivolous, and irreverent it may appear, represents a return to the original, religious function of the theatre - the confrontation of man with the spheres of myth and religious reality. Like ancient Greek tragedy and the medieval mystery plays and baroque allegories, the Theatre of the Absurd is intent on making its audience aware of man’s precarious and mysterious position in the universe” (402).
Esslin’s focus on the existentialist aspects of the Theatre of the Absurd was a strategic manoeuvre, with the goal of explaining the genre’s mysterious and incomprehensible style to audiences who had lambasted it for not being “real theatre.” He succeeded in establishing the plays of Beckett, Ionesco and their peers as works of art that were worthy of serious
academic criticism, but with the consequence that the field remained more or less anchored in a universalizing, philosophical turn for most of the 1950’s and 1960’s
Although the literary world was shocked with the premières of La cantatrice chauve and En attendant Godot, it is not fair to their antecedents to say that they came out of nowhere; Dadaism and surrealism, as well as defamiliarization and the breaking of the “fourth wall” in theatre and film, had predicted many of the techniques that would later be further developed in absurdist theatre (see Esslin 374-5 and indeed whole chapter, “The Tradition of the Absurd”). These antecedents to the theatre of the absurd had their own complicated relationship with politics. Esslin, devoted as he is to establishing an
existentialist reading of the Theatre of the Absurd, says of Expressionism that “the dramatic products of the Expressionist movement were on the whole too idealistic and politically conscious to rank as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd, with which, however, they share the tendency to project inner realities and to objectify thought and feeling” (Esslin 370). On the same page Esslin also notes the influence of Dadaism on the Theatre of the Absurd, and says the “outbreak of violence in the era of the Second World War is exactly forecast” by two Dada plays by Ribemont-Dessaigne, going on to say that “it is as though the
destructiveness of the Dadaists was a sublimated release of the same secular impulse toward aggression and violence that found expression in the mass murders of the totalitarian
movements” (370). In Esslin’s opinion, the Theatre of the Absurd is the apolitical child of these political artistic movements, born in a time when there was no longer such a need for committed political writing.
Perhaps the most obvious precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd is Bertolt Brecht, whose Epic Theatre was known for using its techniques, most notably the breaking of the fourth wall and the corresponding alienation effect, towards political ends. Esslin sees in Brecht a close cousin of absurdist theatre:
Like Adamov, [Brecht later] turned towards a socially committed and, at least in outward intention, fully rational theatre. Yet Brecht’s case also shows that the irrational Theatre of the Absurd and the highly purposeful politically committed play are not so much irreconcilable contradictions as, rather, the obverse and reverse side of the same medal. In Brecht’s case, the neurosis and despair that were given free rein in his anarchic and grotesque period continued as actively and as powerfully behind the rational façade of his political theatre, and provide most of its poetic impact. (Esslin 378)
Brecht’s theatre did indeed exhibit many similarities with absurdist theatre, with one of the main differences, according to Esslin, being its political aspects.
Because of Esslin’s influence, academic critique of the Theatre of the Absurd as a whole did not initially dedicate much time to its politics, with the notable exception of Marxist critics in the Soviet bloc, who saw Beckett’s absurdist theatre as a portrayal of life under capitalism. Esslin himself, in the 1967 update to his book, noted that:
In the early 1950’s… it appeared as though the Theatre of the Absurd… was the very antithesis of the political theatre as preached by Brecht and his followers, or by the official arbiters of the arts in the Soviet Union and her bloc. It is one of the ironies of the cultural history of our times that, after the thaw had set in in Eastern Europe, it was precisely the theatre of Ionesco which provided the model for an extremely vigorous and barbed kind of political theatre in some of the countries concerned” (Esslin 316)
The question of what makes a piece of art political is a contentious one and will be discussed shortly. However, Esslin was not the only one to see the Theatre of the Absurd as having potential political meaning in the right environment. Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, discussing the reception of absurdist plays in the Soviet Bloc a decade after their initial appearance, claims that:
The playwrights of the Absurd… suddenly found that their works contained political messages when performed in a different social atmosphere… Despite or, more likely,
because of its atmosphere of noncommittal mystery, the Theatre of the Absurd
became charged with politically electrifying meaning. Of course this aspect of the performances was not discussed in print but remained the open secret of the dialogue between the stage and the audience, fleetingly recreated with every performance..” Goetz-Stankiewicz 1979:35
Goetz-Stankiewicz asserts that the very vagueness which Esslin had originally demarcated as apolitical served to define it as exactly the opposite in a region where literature had long become cryptic so as to avoid censorship. Into this atmosphere emerged Václav Havel, who would later become famous not only for his dissident writings but for his political actions and his eventual election as President of the newly-democratic Czechoslovakia.
Havel’s plays are seen as more overtly political than those of most Western European playwrights; a representation of what the Theatre of the Absurd could have become had it been conceived in a more political atmosphere. Yet in fact, upon closer inspection, Havel’s theatre, as a representative of the absurd in Eastern Europe, does not differ much from absurd theatre from Western Europe. Havel’s settings are unspecified, his character backgrounds are undeveloped, his plotlines are vague, and his stories could be taking place anywhere. The same is true of Ionesco’s and Beckett’s drama; what is more, none of the playwrights’ drama from this early period makes specific mention of concrete historical circumstances. Perhaps
Ionesco and Beckett have been read as “apolitical” because they were produced in Western Europe at a time of relative peace, whereas Havel was often seen as political simply because for Westerners he was the token poster child of anti-communism in Eastern Europe. Beckett and Havel turned to committed political writing later in their careers (see for example
Beckett’s Catastrophe (1980) or Havel’s Largo Desolato (1984)). The fact that they did so proves their interest in politics, and highlights the complexity of the role of politics in their earlier works.
Despite emerging academic critique of the politics proper to individual playwrights, the most notable current monographs on the Theatre of the Absurd have only briefly touched on the overall relation of politics with the Theatre of the Absurd. Michael Bennett, in his
Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (2015), consecrates a mere
seven pages to the general historico-political background of absurdist literature. He notes that the absurd in literature developed in what he terms a “post-WWII world,” when Western Europe was in the process of rebuilding itself with the help of the Marshall Plan and Eastern Europe was in “various stages of being controlled by or rebelling against the Communist influence of the U.S.S.R.” In France, as well, the pro/anti-communist divide played an important role in politics (18-19; 35-39). Likewise, Neil Cornwell, in his monograph The
Absurd in Literature (2006), makes several passing references to the politics of the era (most
notably the Cold War politics in Eastern Europe, p. 143-144), but does not allot politics its own section. To my knowledge, there are few, if any, academic articles dealing with the politics of the Theatre of the Absurd generally, with the exception of Margot Morgan’s recent doctoral thesis and ensuing book, Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe.
Political interpretations, even today, are mostly limited to interpretations of the politics of individual playwrights.
In the wake of a cultural climate already populated with much overtly political art - Russian and Italian Futurism, Brecht’s Epic theatre, the German Exilliteratur of World War II - it is easily understandable that, in comparison, absurdist theatre appeared to be apolitical, the antithesis of its predecessors. However, taking such plays as Ionesco’s Rhinocéros and Havel’s The Garden Party into account, I find it impossible not to see a very clear link between politics and absurdist theatre.
Committed Literature in the Twentieth Century
In order to examine the issue of politics in the Theatre of the Absurd, it is useful to take a brief look at several key developments in the definition of politics as it relates to art from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The Theatre of the Absurd entered the literary scene when the lively debate concerning politics in literature was in a complicated state. In 1966, Walter Benjamin, citing Brecht’s Epic Theatre as a model, claimed that in order to be truly politically effective, art needed to be committed both in form and in content (Benjamin 98-99). It is for this reason that Brecht’s Epic Theatre was considered political (see for example Taunton 1-2) - the disjunctive nature of the performances, as opposed to stream-of-consciousness that washed over readers in modernist writing, provided the platform for the spectators of Epic Theatre to situate themselves in a specific position relative to history, grasp an idea of the larger context, and be inspired to enact social change. In contrast, the Theatre of the Absurd, while original in form, did not [consciously] exploit its form to political ends, nor did it consistently include politics in its content, and was therefore not considered
political, especially in comparison with movements such as Brecht’s Epic Theatre, which had an obvious (Marxist) political agenda.
However, after World War II, the views that Walter Benjamin developed on
committed writing had become problematic, since fascism had been all but eliminated and, conversely, the problems with communism in the Soviet bloc were starting to come to light
(Weisberg 161-162). Political writing no longer had a very clearly-defined goal, and this ambiguity was taken up by Jean-Paul Sartre, who began to advocate writing with a purpose, but a purpose more along the lines of existentialism; a universalizing “appeal to freedom” (Weisberg 162-163). Theodor Adorno in 1962 disagreed with Sartre’s conception of
committed art, arguing that art was more effectively political when it did not overtly associate itself with any one political aim; he advocated “works which swear allegiance to no political slogans, but whose mere guise is enough to disrupt the whole system of rigid coordinates that governs authoritarian personalities… when the social contract with reality is abandoned, and literary works no longer speak as though they were reporting facts, hairs start to bristle” (Adorno 1962: 179-180). This way of framing politics in art anticipates the theories of Jacques Rancière, who would develop his influential concepts of the politics of aesthetics and the distribution of the sensible several decades later. Rancière describes “the distribution of the sensible” as the hierarchy of our perception:
Cette distribution et cette redistribution des espaces et des temps, des places et des identités, de la parole et du bruit, du visible et de l’invisible forment ce que j’appelle le partage du sensible. L’activité politique reconfigure le partage du sensible. Elle introduit sur la scène du commun des objets et des sujet nouveaux. Elle rend visible ce qui était invisible, elle rend audibles comme êtres parlants ceux qui n’étaient entendus que comme animaux bruyants23. (Rancière 2007: 12)
The given order of things, the rules which determine who is dominant and who is
marginalized in a given society, can be changed through a “redistribution of the sensible,” a reconfiguration of the social order which may be enacted through a variety of means. For
2
This distribution and redistribution of spaces and times, places and identities, speech and noise, visible and invisible form what I call the distribution of the sensible. Political activity reconfigures the distribution of the sensible, introduces new objects and subjects to a formerly common scene. It renders visible what was invisible, renders audible as speaking beings those who formerly were only heard as noisy animals.
3 All French-English translations in this thesis done by me, with the exception of quotes from Waiting for Godot, which Beckett translated into English himself.
Rancière, political literature is literature that works to redistribute the sensible, not
necessarily by literally demanding a redistribution of the sensible so much as by presenting a view of the world that forces readers to reflect on how they see things:
Literature did not act so much by expressing ideas and wills as it did by displaying the character of a time or a society... writing is not imposing one will on another, in the fashion of the orator, the priest or the general. It is displaying and deciphering the symptoms of a state of things. It is revealing the signs of history, delving as the geologist does, into the seams and strata under the stage of the orators and
politicians—the seams and strata that underlie its foundation. (Rancière 2004: 18) The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd do not purport to overturn society by their novel techniques or subject matter. Yet despite the scattered approaches of each individual playwright - Ionesco’s vestiges of anger against mass conformity, Beckett’s memories of a war-torn France, Havel’s frustration at an everyday life made impossible by a
post-totalitarian bureaucracy - there is a general current of “revealing the signs of history, delving as the geologist does, into the seams and strata under the stage of the orators and politicians - the seams and strata that underlie its foundation.” Each of the playwrights, in their own way, expresses how politics - the war, the bureaucracy of the state - has affected the everyday of the citizens, the ordinary people. I will start with an examination of this phenomenon in Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot.
Samuel Beckett: The politics in En attendant Godot
Introduction
Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 into a Protestant family in what would soon become the (Catholic) Republic of Ireland, but spent most of his life in France (Bennett 47,
Knowlson). He experienced Irish censorship (Atkinson 1), lived through two world wars and was an active participant in the French Resistance during World War II (Bennett 47). Yet the issue of politics in Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, especially his earlier works, is one that has only received serious attention in the last few decades. Despite numerous political interpretations by a variety of scholars of En attendant Godot, and despite his own proclivities for political action, Beckett was notoriously cryptic about the meaning of the play, and, indeed, reluctant to endorse specific political interpretations of his work. His other plays from the period are similarly obscure4. Although directors have long adapted Beckett’s work to suit their own political agendas, it is difficult to know with any certainty whether Beckett meant to pursue any political goals while writing his plays. Perhaps the best way to put the issue is in the words of Peter Boxall, who said that:
The possibility that Beckett's status as an apolitical writer may need serious reconsideration is becoming ever more widely recognised. But put 'Beckett' and 'politics' together on a call for papers and ask critics actually to articulate a Beckettian politics, and the throng rapidly diminishes (207).
Beckett was extremely careful to excise any specific politics from his texts (one notable exception being Catastrophe, written in honour of then-imprisoned Václav Havel), even going so far as to change the name “Levi” to “Estragon” (Perloff np). As Beckett’s most well-known play, En attendant Godot, is a fairly good representation of the ambiguity of
4 It should be noted that Beckett’s novels were more frequently interpreted in a political light than was his drama at the time. Some of his later plays were also written with a political agenda, most notably Catastrophe, which Beckett wrote in support of Václav Havel, who had recently been imprisoned.
much of Beckett’s work from that era, I will focus on this piece in my examination of Beckett’s relation to politics in his drama.
Beckett’s politics
In his comprehensive biography of Beckett, James Knowlson sketches a compelling account of the various influences apart from politics which influenced Beckett’s writing - depressive and sickly, sensitive but intellectual, he experienced lifelong friction in the relationship with his mother and had a lively interest in art. Despite an active engagement in politics in his personal life, including his participation in the French Resistance, Beckett did not consider his early plays to be political. With the exception of several Marxist critics (such as Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács), who identified politics in Beckett’s work, mainstream academic discourse on Beckett remained fairly apolitical until the turn of the century. Peter Boxall astutely notes:
To suggest that Beckett’s oeuvre, which has been held up by so many of his critics as the definition of apolitical writing, is in some sense political after all, is to ask
questions about our understanding of the terms ‘political’ and ‘writing’ which have proved to be unsettling… Beckett’s cultural capital in the west has been amassed on the back of his apoliticism… That he seems to offer a writing which can reach the limits of non-specificity, which can speak so generally about the pre- or trans-cultural truths of being, has been read as confirmation that art can do something that isn’t political, that transcends the political, that puts the political in its place… Beckett is defended as an apolitical writer by a wide variety of critics who have a great deal invested in the claim that aesthetics and politics are mutually exclusive. (208) David Weisberg, in his book Chronicles of Disorder: Samuel Beckett and the Cultural
from the point of view of his novels, cautions that Beckett’s refusal to categorize his work as political might not necessarily mean his work was apolitical per se:
Beckett would have thought the idea “all writing is political” nonsense not because he believed that literary art was intensively subjective or aesthetically “autonomous”; he would have thought it nonsense because he came of age as a writer in the 1930s and ‘40s, when every writer was under pressure to declare explicitly a political stand, a “tendency,” a commitment or engagement… While many writers of the ‘30s and ‘40s accepted, and in some cases promoted, the harshly divisive opposition between autonomous and committed art, Beckett did not. Beckett’s rejection of politicized art was never an acceptance of its supposed antithesis... What ultimately structures the innovative features of Beckett’s best fiction is a struggle to reimagine a
communicative literature beyond the choices of autonomy or commitment. (1) Weisberg explains that Beckett’s work was not political in the sense of being committed, as for example in the case of socialist realist artists who were promoting a political agenda. However, that did not preclude Beckett from expressing his political views in his work. When later theorists such as Foucault took the opposite view and saw in Beckett’s style of writing a “radical, liberating indeterminacy” (Weisberg 2), Beckett was once again relegated firmly to one side of a reductive binary division between autonomous and committed art. But Weisberg argues that Beckett’s writing is more subtle in its relation to politics; that:
If, as textualist critics claim, a defining feature of Beckett’s writing is its
indeterminacy, it is an indeterminacy specific to a midcentury, post-World War II instability in conceptualizing the writer’s social function. What may, after all, constitute Beckett’s importance for twentieth-century literary history is just how emphatically his work begs for an alternate way of configuring an aesthetics/politics nexus. (2)
In post-World War II Europe, with the decline of the ideological combat between fascism and communism, the concept of “political writing” had become more nuanced, as we see in Beckett’s writing. While Beckett’s writing is not committed to any political agenda, there are many instances which could be taken as references to Beckett’s experiences during the war. Weisberg’s analysis in the rest of the book concentrates specifically on each of Beckett’s novels, and is beyond the scope of this essay. However, his views on Beckett’s style as a writer overall - that Beckett consciously developed a form of writing which “exploited contradictions inherent in the notion of an autotelic art” (9) - are just as applicable to his plays, and examples of Beckett’s political inclinations will be discussed later in this section.
The most obvious choice for an analysis of a political play by Beckett would have been Endgame (1957), whose politics were the subject of a lengthy essay by Theodor W. Adorno in 1958. “Trying to Understand Endgame” situates Beckett’s politics precisely in the author’s refusal to relate his play to a particular historical context:
Playing with elements of reality - devoid of any mirror-like reflection - refusing to take a 'position,' and finding joy in such freedom as is prescribed: all of this reveals more than would be possible if a 'revealer' were partisan. The name of disaster can only be spoken silently. Only in the terror of recent events is the terror of the whole ignited, but only there, not in gazing upon 'origins.' (126)
In its raw portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world brought to ruin by human actions - which Adorno purposely conflates with World War II (122) - Adorno considers Endgame to be more effectively political than if it had clearly related its storyline to the events of the twentieth century. As he says, “the violence of the unspeakable is mimicked by the timidity to mention it. Beckett keeps it nebulous. One can only speak euphemistically about what is incommensurate with all experience, just as one speaks in Germany of the murder of the Jews” (123). Beckett seems to agree with this statement; according to James Knowlson, “Beckett
took political positions: he was against oppression, he was for individualism, he was certainly against all forms of totalitarianism and fascism… But he had this view of art – that it
suggested rather than stated. If you got too explicit, you countermanded what you were trying to do” (cited in Glanville 2009).
In this respect, Adorno’s views confront those of Georg Lukács, who criticized Beckett’s writing, in particular his novels, for their apoliticism. Lukács criticized Beckett for his “overtly perverse” writing which, in his opinion, rendered the “escape into neurosis as a protest against the evils of society… [into] an immutable condition humaine” (152). Lukács condemns this unforgivable modernist style as it justifies the bourgeoisie instead of inciting change:
Absence of meaning makes a mockery of action and reduces art to naturalistic description. Clearly, there can be no literature without at least the appearance of change or development… As the ideology of most modernist writers asserts the unalterability of outward reality… human activity is, a priori, rendered impotent and robbed of meaning. (155)
Matthew Taunton notes that, ironically, Lukács and Adorno both see in Beckett a refusal to anchor his writing in reality. The difference between the two Marxist critics is that Lukács duly considers Beckett’s writing to be apolitical, while Adorno lauds this “unrealistic” quality as precisely that which renders the politics in Beckett’s writing so effective. Taunton
concludes that both Adorno and Lukács are wrong, because they reduce the issue of politics in Beckett’s plays to a “mutually exclusive, overly simplistic binary (10). Like Endgame, En
attendant Godot is certainly not anchored in reality, and the politics are similarly obscure -
arguably even more obscure than in Endgame - but I believe they are present, as will be demonstrated shortly.
En attendant Godot: Don’t mention the war
The advantage (and the problem) of En attendant Godot is that it lends itself to multiple interpretations. Beckett started writing Godot in the late 1940s, in the aftermath of World War II (Gontarski 27), yet he frowned on the attempts of critics to assign a specific political context to the play. Though many critics claim to have seen through the universality of Beckett’s works to the “obvious” politics therein, they have produced a multitude of different interpretations. Marjorie Perloff sees Beckett’s work at the time as a simple account of Beckett’s quotidien during the war; William Atkinson sees the influence of Irish
censorship in the set of Godot; Sinead Mooney notes Beckett’s unique position as a
Protestant writer from a Catholic country; and Gibson finds in Godot and L’innommable (The
Unnamable) a nostalgia for the time of the Third Republic in France and a refusal to accept
the [grandiose] rhetoric of the Fourth. Conversely, Hugh Kenner argues against such complex interpretations of Beckett; for him, it is obvious that Godot was inspired by
Beckett’s experience during the war, but he claims that Beckett’s ultimate goal in creating the play was to experiment with form and structure in theatre. An analysis of every single
political interpretation ever granted to Godot is beyond the scope of this paper, but I will delve into Beckett’s experience of World War II and its aftermath in France; Beckett may not have done it on purpose; nevertheless, these topics seem to have profoundly influenced the playwright during the writing of the play.
En attendant Godot is indisputably universal; dozens of original adaptations and the
heartfelt reactions of people around the world have attested to this. Quotes like Estragon’s “s'il s'est dérangé pour rien hier soir, tu penses bien qu'il ne viendra pas aujourd'hui”5
(18) speak to all of us and our fear of “missing the boat,” in life, career, marriage or whatever it may be. And yet the play also has unmistakeable political overtones. One of the earlier
5
If he came yesterday and we weren't here you may be sure he won't come again today. (15) *English quotes from Waiting for Godot are from the 1955 edition by Faber & Faber Ltd. (London).
critics to note the political significance of Godot was Hugh Kenner, in his Reader’s Guide to
Samuel Beckett. He points out what for him are obvious references to occupied France:
Two men waiting, for another whom they know only by an implausible name which may not be his real name. A ravaged and blasted landscape. A world that was ampler and more open once, but is permeated with pointlessness now. Mysterious dispensers of beatings. A man of property and his servant, in flight. And the anxiety of the two who wait, their anxiety to be as inconspicuous as possible in a strange environment (‘We’re not from these parts, Sir’) where their mere presence is likely to cause remark. It is curious how readers and audiences do not think to observe the most obvious thing about the world of this play, that it resembles France occupied by the Germans, in which its author spent the war years… Here is perhaps the playwright’s most remarkable feat. There existed, throughout a whole country, for five years, a literal situation that corresponded point by point with the situation in this play, and was so far from special that millions of lives were saturated in its desperate reagents, and no spectator ever thinks of it. (Kenner 29-30).
Beckett never explicitly mentions the war in his stories, but as Perloff says, “the very absence of the word has an odd way of insuring its prominence in these stories” (np). Theodore Adorno points out that “the cheap jibe that Beckett can never get away from urns, refuse bins and sandheaps in which people vegetate between life and death - as they actually vegetated in the concentration camps - this jibe seems to me just a desperate attempt to fend off the
knowledge that these are exactly the things which matter” (Adorno 1965: 442). It is true that Beckett’s plays often seem to feature conditions that resemble the war - not only in En
attendant Godot but also the end of the world in Fin de partie, the creeping suffocation of
Winnie in Happy Days and the like. As for these things being “exactly the things which matter,” if one considers the dialogues, which centre around mundane things in a concerted
effort to struggle through the less-than-desirable conditions (see again Godot or Happy Days), the spectator will notice that the characters’ conversations resemble normal everyday
conversations. This poignant parallel between our everyday and the times of crisis portrayed by Beckett makes it clear how the experience of the war would have been able to prompt Beckett to reflect differently on life overall.
Guilt: The Vichy government and other reasons for not mentioning the war
Perloff notes that “for the first wave of Beckett critics in postwar France—critics for whom war memories were not only painful but embarrassing, given the collaboration of the Vichy government—it was preferable to read Beckett as addressing man’s alienation and the human condition rather than anything as specific as everyday life in the years of the
Resistance” (np). Perloff argues that it was in everyone’s best interest to “universalize” Godot, in the wake of a war that everyone wanted to forget. On a slightly different note, Hugh Kenner posits that:
Beckett saw the need of keeping thoughts of the Occupation from being too accessible, because of the necessity to keep the play from being ‘about’ an event that time has long since absorbed. We may state its universality in this way: only a fraction of the human race experienced the German occupation of France, and only a fraction of that fraction waited, on Resistance business, for some Godot. But everyone, everywhere, has waited, and wondered why he waited. (Kenner 31)
It is obvious that in universalizing his work, it would more easily appeal to people across the globe. Perhaps Esslin was influenced by these views when he set about writing his 1960 essay (and ensuing 1961 book) on the Theatre of the Absurd; whatever the reason, he adopted this apolitical angle in his text, and the book made such an impact that critics eschewed politics in Beckett for years to come.
Perloff gives examples of many French critics who praised Godot for its universality. This early interpretative angle influenced the subsequent Anglophone critics, who adopted the theme of universal human suffering in their own analyses of Beckett’s play; for the next few decades, this would be the focus of Beckett studies. Yet, as Gibson says, “in the France of the mid- and late 40s, literature and politics, or cultural politics, were inseparable… If Beckett had indeed been oblivious of or indifferent to this, he would have been alone among Francophone novelists” (9-10)6
.
While at first glance En attendant Godot is fairly vague and non-committal,
references to the war are difficult but not impossible to find. Vladimir invokes the notion of “combat” from the very first page: “J’ai longtemps résisté à cette pensée, en me disant, Vladimir, sois raisonnable. Tu n’as pas encore tout essayé. Et je reprenais le combat. (Il se recueille, songeant au combat…7
)” (9). The lines feel weary, as if Vladimir had been waiting for a long time for the fighting to be over, with no hint of a change anytime soon. There is also a mention of the Vaucluse, where Beckett spent part of his time in hiding. Overall, though, the story gleams with a dogged effort to not mention the war.
Perhaps the most telling passage of the whole play, from a political point of view, occurs in Pozzo’s speech :
Les larmes du monde sont immuables. Pour chacun qui se met à pleurer, quelque part un autre s'arrête. Il en va de même du rire. (Il rit.) Ne disons donc pas de mal de notre époque, elle n'est pas plus malheureuse que les précédentes. (Silence.) N'en disons
6 The “nouveau roman” in France, a movement which started in the 1950’s, was another genre that would eschew politics; by this time, however, the politics of the war were not as urgent and the decision to avoid them in their stories would have not represented such a drastic choice for the novelists.
7 I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. To Estragon.) So there you are again. (9)
pas de bien non plus. (Silence.) N'en parlons pas. (Silence.) Il est vrai que la population a augmenté8. (42)
Pozzo sums up what Beckett might have been thinking as he wrote this story : times could be worse, times could be better, but, either way, it is best not to talk about it. In this sense, the characters’ reticence to make any outright mention of their situation is symbolic of Beckett’s own reticence to dwell on his memories of the war - a reticence echoed by many people who survived those terrible times. Earlier in the story, Vladimir confirms this reticence to speak:
Vladimir. - Si on se repentait ? Estragon. - De quoi?
Vladimir. - Eh bien ... (Il cherche.) On n'aurait pas besoin d'entrer dans les détails. (12)9
One gets the feeling, even if Vladimir and Estragon do not [want to] mention it, that a catastrophe happened. Vladimir explicitly says that there is something they should be repenting for, but he refuses to explain what that is. Beckett had already encountered resistance in this regard in the 1940’s when seeking to get his book Watt published and constantly meeting with rejection: “[the publishers] claimed Watt was not at all the sort of book people who had been through a terrible war would want to read, and suggested that Beckett stop trying to 'disguise his wartime memoirs within the framework of fiction' and write a 'realistic account' instead!” (Bair 348). Yet, conversely to what publishers were saying about Watt’s obvious recapitulation of WWII, Pozzo’s quote anchors the story of En
attendant Godot firmly in “notre époque,” while also inviting comparison with all the
8
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (He laughs.) Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (Silence.) Let us not speak well of it either. (Silence.) Let us not speak of it at all. (Silence). It is true that the population has increased. (32)
9 Vladimir: Suppose we repented. Estragon: Repented what?
preceding ones. “Notre époque,” for readers of today, seems to designate our time and not the time when Godot was written; the story thus becomes at once specific and universal. In this frozen state, unwilling to work through their memories but unable to move past them, Vladimir and Estragon are like Europe in the aftermath of World War II, allowing themselves to hope for peace but, in the traumatic wake of two world wars and a Great Depression, still unable to shake off the possibility that the world might end tomorrow. There is also another fairly explicit nod to this mentality:
Vladimir (se penchant). - C'est vrai. (Il se boutonne.) Pas de laisser-aller dans les petites choses.
Estragon. - Qu'est-ce que tu veux que je te dise, tu attends toujours le dernier moment. Vladimir (rêveusement). - Le dernier moment . .. (Il médite.) C'est long, mais ce sera bon. Qui disait ça ?
Estragon. - Tu ne veux pas m'aider?
Vladimir. - Des fois je me dis que ça vient quand même. Alors je me sens tout drôle. (Il ôte son chapeau, regarde dedans, y promène sa main, le secoue, le remet.) Comment dire? Soulagé et en même temps... (il cherche) ... épouvanté. (Avec
emphase.) E-POU-VAN-TÉ. (Il ôte à nouveau son chapeau, regarde dedans.) Ça
alors! (Il tape dessus comme pour en faire tomber quelque chose, regarde à nouveau
dedans, le remet.) Enfin …10 (11-12)
10 Vladimir: …Never neglect the little things of life.
Estragon: What do you expect, you always wait till the last moment.
Vladimir (musingly): The last moment . . . (He meditates.) Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?
Estragon: Why don't you help me?
Vladimir: Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer. (He takes off his hat, peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.) How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time . . . (he searches for the word) . . . appalled. (With emphasis.) AP-PALLED. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it.) Funny. (He knocks on the crown as if to dislodge a foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.) Nothing to be done. (Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot. He looks inside it, feels about inside it, turns it upside down, shakes it, looks on the ground to see if anything has fallen out, finds nothing, feels inside it again, staring sightlessly before him.) Well? (10-11)
“Le dernier moment”: is Vladimir referring to the end of the world ? As he says, the end of the world would have “soulagé” but also “épouvanté.” However, this sense of waiting for something catastrophic to happen is also very universal; Vladimir looking in his hat, Estragon looking in his shoe, trying to find answers that never come, those are themes that speak to everyone. Perhaps the postwar era that gave birth to Godot captured the essence of existence in a nutshell.
Language
Cryptic messages
Several critics suggest that the dialogue in Godot is also inspired by Beckett’s experiences during the war. Kenner notes that Vladimir and Estragon are falling over themselves to claim they do not know anything about Godot - “From this exchange… we gather that the world of the play is one in which it is prudent to know as little as possible” (Kenner 29) - mirroring the fear that would grip anyone that was captured and questioned by enemy forces during the war. Additionally, for Perloff, Beckett’s often-cryptic dialogues hark back to his days of translating Axis messages and relaying them to the Allies (np). Lucky’s monologue is perhaps the most possible example of this, its lack of punctuation recalling a telegraph machine such as would have been used to relay messages anonymously during the war. There are also several phrases buried in his frenzied ramblings that jump out at readers familiar with France’s military history:
…je reprends Oise Marne bref la perte sèche par tête de pipe depuis la mort de Voltaire étant de l’ordre de deux doigts cent grammes par tête de pipe environ en moyenne à peu près chiffres ronds bon poids déshabillé en Normandie on ne sait pourquoi bref enfin peu importe les faits sont là et considérant d’autre part ce qui est encore plus grave qu’il ressort ce qui est encore plus grave qu’à la lumière la lumière
des expériences en cours de Steinweg et Petermann il ressort ce qui est encore plus grave qu’il ressort ce qui est encore plus grave à la lumière la lumière des expériences abandonnées de Steinweg et Petermann…11
(57) And several lines down the page,
…la barbe les flammes les pleurs les pierres si bleues si calmes hélas la tête la tête la tête la tête en Normandie malgré le tennis les labeurs abandonnés inachevés plus grave les pierres bref je reprends hélas hélas abandonnés inachevés la tête la tête en Normandie malgré le tennis la tête hélas les pierres Conard Conard…12
(57-58) It is not difficult to see, as Perloff has, a style reminiscent of codes transmitted between Axis powers, especially in the repetition of certain words three or four times (“la tête la tête la tête la tête”) and the resurgence of terms several lines after their initial appearance, as if these words and terms were codes for something else (tête de pipe, la lumière des experiences, malgré le tennis, Conard, etc. all appear more than once, although in and of themselves they are nonsensical; Conard, especially, is sprinkled liberally throughout the dialogue, and always capitalized). Equally interesting are the proper nouns, of which there are not many in the overall monologue (about sixteen, depending on how you count them, over almost three pages). The Battle of Normandie, of course, was the catalyst for the victory of the Allies over the Nazi invasion of France - the beginning of the end of World War II. Similarly, the
regions of Oise and Marne were both integral to the fighting in World War 1 - but then again,
11
I resume Fulham Clapham in a word the dead loss per capita since the death of Samuel Johnson (*in most editions, “Samuel Johnson” is replaced with “Bishop Berkeley”) being to the tune of one inch four ounce per capita approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara in a word for reasons unknown no matter what matter the facts are there and considering what is more much more grave that it appears what is still more grave that in the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman it appears what is more much more grave that in the light the light the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman…
12 the beard the flames the tears (the Faber & Faber edition writes “the teams” but this appears to be a typo) the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones Cunard (mêlée, final vociferations) . . . tennis . . . the stones . . . so calm . . . Cunard . . . unfinished . . . (43-44)
*It is interesting but beyond the scope of this essay to note that Beckett’s English translations change the proper nouns to accord with Anglophone references.
Lucky also mentions “Seine” in relation to the latter two, rendering the text as a whole more directly linked to an ancient culture in France in the region, the culture of Seine-Oise-Marne. Steinweg is a brand of pianos, but the factory was put to use manufacturing parts for the Allied forces during World War II; and Petermann, a distinctly German name, could refer to either Viktor Petermann, a German Luftwaffe ace, or Erna Petermann, a high-ranking overseer of Nazi concentration camps. Of course, these associations are fairly randomly assorted, and Beckett was always grumpy with people who attempted close-readings of his work, staunchly denying that there were any “secret messages” hidden between the lines. However, this quick look at the lexical field does appear to show that the monologue was at least in part inspired by the war.
Rhetoric
The Fourth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was intent on avoiding the awkward issue of France’s collaboration with the Nazis during the war. Andrew Gibson writes that:
[H]istorians have increasingly shown that, in the late-40s and 50s, the French effectively rewrote their history... There was a huge drive to ‘reconstruct French identity and French history in a way that restored French pride’ (Gildea, 58). France needed ‘to create unity, national unity’, as even a great crusader like Jean Paulhan argued. (Gibson 6)
For Gibson, Beckett’s doggedly blunt and crude language is a reaction to De Gaulle’s rhetoric (15); in choosing this theme, of course, Beckett would resemble Václav Havel and his satiric reimagining of Communist discourse and bureaucratic speech. In an analysis of
L’innommable which is also applicable to En attendant Godot, Gibson writes:
Beckett’s willing espousal of an absurd logic is, again, precisely a rejection of the grandiose language of regeneration. Where he most differs from other critics of the
Fourth Republic is in situating his antipathy primarily at the level of language and everywhere expressing it through a practice in language, a kind of anti-rhetoric. (15) It is difficult to parse out what exactly was motivating Beckett during the writing of Godot, since, as mentioned before, his characters seem very reluctant to make any direct mention or condemnation of the war. Beckett would have been critical of the right-wing Vichy
government which collaborated with the Nazis, while people in the Resistance - like himself - fought to save the country. Therefore, it is curious that, like the government, Beckett would have chosen not to allude directly to the war. However, instances like Vladimir’s
consternation with the difficulty of choosing which version of history to believe about the
larrons who were crucified next to Jesus (Beckett 13-15) would seem to recall the French
government’s immense efforts to mitigate their culpability in the historical annals by
tampering with the storybooks. Stanley Gontarski looks in detail at Beckett’s first drafts in comparison with his final versions and finds several instances in which names were changed or omitted to avoid talking directly of the war. Estragon was originally called Levi (Perloff n.p.). Beckett also includes a direct reference to the Vaucluse, where he spent part of the war, and to a wineowner called Bonnelly, from Roussillon, for whom he worked (79-80).
However, in the English version, the Vaucluse is replaced by the less autobiographical “Mâcon country” and the references to Bonnelly and Roussillon are omitted together,
replaced with “a man called . . . (he snaps his fingers) . . . can't think of the name of the man, at a place called . . . (snaps his fingers) . . . can't think of the name of the place.” Perloff finds in Godot an unmistakeable metaphor for Beckett’s sojourn in Roussillon - “a mixture of boredom and danger,” and points out that the play’s original title was simply “Waiting” (np).
It is possible Beckett did not even realize how much the war had influenced the story of Godot, or perhaps he found it more powerful to let readers substitute their own experiences for his, since the basic story is something to which everyone can relate. Perloff offers:
To use words like war, Vichy, Resistance, Auschwitz, and atom bomb would
inevitably be to short-circuit the complexity of the experiences in question. Not for a moment does Beckett engage in the usual clichés about the horrors of war; not for a moment does he assume moral superiority or the knowingness… that makes so much war writing problematic… in his fictions [Beckett] takes his responsibility to be that of showing rather than the making of ideological points. Hence the extreme ellipsis, indirection and indeterminacy of the tales—an indeterminacy that allows the reader a good deal of space. But in the immediate aftermath of war in Europe, Beckett’s narrative was interpreted as putting forward such “universal” themes such as man’s alienation in a hostile universe, the trauma of birth and inevitability of death, and the waiting for something that never happens. (Perloff np)
Whether purposely or not, Beckett, though unmistakeably influenced by his experiences during the war, avoided including any direct mention of it. Perloff notes that this allowed the playwright to eschew the clichés that are so common after any horrific event that they soon lose all meaning and become empty words (consider any news report on natural disasters or wars - “5 million dead”… “Homes destroyed”… “life will never be the same”…). Of
Endgame, Taunton says caustically that “if, as Adorno contends, Endgame is in some sense
about a holocaust, its characters are manifestly unable to grasp the significance of this (7). Yet Adorno notes the potential political power in works such as Beckett’s which are implicit rather than explicit in their politics:
Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays… have an effect by comparison with which officially committed works look like pantomimes. Kafka and Beckett arouse the fear which existentialism merely talks about. By dismantling appearance, they explode from within the art which committed proclamation subjugates from without, and
hence only in appearance. The inescapability of their works compels the change of attitude which committed works merely demand. (Adorno 1962: 191)
Perloff writes that Godot represents “Not what wartime France was but how it felt… In this sense … the only “position” Beckett’s war writings take is that ethics and aesthetics are one” (Perloff n.p.). By focusing on the visceral experiences of just a few characters, Beckett was able to sort through what the war meant to people as individuals, before they became statistics. With regards to the reactions of Beckett’s audiences, since the playwright had excised all mention of specific times and places, it is fair that in a Europe where everyone had been recently affected by the war, people would have seen the themes of alienation, a hostile universe, the inevitability of death, etc. as universal. Indeed, these themes are universal.
Conclusion
“Beckett himself once warned that considerations of art’s relation to its ‘occasion’ too often led to a disquisition on the occasion at the expense of the art. It is a warning I take seriously.”
- David Weisberg Beckett’s aesthetics should not be passed over in favour of his politics. It is for good reason that Martin Esslin opens his book with an account of a performance of En attendant Godot; Beckett was instrumental in developing the nascent Theatre of the Absurd, and as Katherine Weiss asserts, “his refusal to provide interpretations for theatre professionals, his audiences and his critics testifies to Beckett's desire to keep his politics and his artistic aesthetics separate… the development of his aesthetics is not dictated by his political awareness” (2). En attendant Godot has all the hallmarks of absurdist theatre: minimal background information; mysterious situations with nonsensical or unrevealed motivations; original language; and little-to-no plot development; but Beckett was scrupulous about form for form’s sake (Gontarski 1-2, Weiss 2), and this (purportedly) had nothing to do with his
politics. Although it is probable that the themes and aesthetics of absurdist theatre, in Beckett’s case, stemmed directly from his experiences in the French Resistance - where friends became strangers, secret messages were sent in code or relayed in furtive meetings and people were captured and disappeared overnight - Beckett’s writing must be appreciated for its development of the absurdist genre, independent of its politics.
However, after several decades, now that we are able to situate Godot in its historical context, the direct influence of Beckett’s wartime politics on his writing, in my opinion, is undeniable. While it may not have been political in the sense of being committed, En
attendant Godot reflected and hyperbolized a reality that had been brought about because of
the very political event of World War II. If Adorno sees the play as political in its refusal to mention details, and Lukács sees it as apolitical for the same reason, I am inclined to rest somewhere between the two. For anyone with a sufficient level of interest and curiosity, En
attendant Godot functions as a politicized portrayal of the effects of Beckett’s World War II.
Moreover, as demonstrated by the varying political interpretations of the play in its numerous adaptations around the world, such as Susan Sontag’s production in Sarajevo, about which she said Godot “seems written for, and about, Sarajevo” (88) - Godot has enough politics inherent in it to be interpreted in many political ways that Beckett could not have foreseen.
Václav Havel: Soviet Poster Child Introduction
Much younger than Beckett, Václav Havel was born into socialist Czechoslovakia in 1936. Because of his family history, he was not permitted to pursue a university degree in the humanities (he obtained a degree in economics instead). Despite his primary vocation as a political dissident and activist, and his insistence that he was not interested in politics, he later became the first president of Czechoslovakia (Bennett 99). Václav Havel’s first full-length absurdist plays were written in the early 1960's, several years after the initial wave of the Theatre of the Absurd and Martin Esslin's book on the subject (Esslin later added a section on Havel to the revised version of The Theatre of the Absurd). His best-known plays from the 1960’s centre on the issue of absurd bureaucracy, a theme understandably pertinent to that era in Czechoslovakia. Havel was among the first playwrights to expand absurdist theatre to Central Europe under socialist rule. Where some see in Havel’s early plays the portrayal of the alienation of modern man, others see the unmistakeable mark of 1960’s Czechoslovakian politics. Ditrych et al. comment on how Havel’s early plays “combined elements of the absurd drama with merciless analysis of the decay of human identity, the alienation in the conditions of the political system of the technological age, and the
meaningless jargon of the newspeak of the totalitarian dictatorship” (415). Contrary to the views of his Western critics, Havel claimed his plays were not meant to be political.
However, the techniques common to absurdist theatre - nonsensical language, repetition and obscure plotlines - found a prominent place in Havel's plays and provided a platform for him to express what many deemed to be his dissident views about the Czechoslovakian
government.
As we can see in two of Havel's plays from the period just before the Prague Spring, the early Havel plays, epitomized by The Garden Party (1963) and Memorandum (1965),
were direct stylistic extensions of the Theatre of the Absurd and represent the beginning of the development of absurdist theatre in Central Europe (Den 390, Woods 9). Through an analysis of the Czechoslovakian political climate in the 1960’s, the role of absurdist
techniques in Havel’s early plays and the domestic and international reactions to his drama, I will endeavour to show that Havel’s mastery of absurdist theatre techniques is inextricably bound up with the political climate of post-totalitarian Czechoslovakia in the 1960’s.
Czechoslovakia in the 1960’s
Christopher Brooks, in his article, “The Art of the Political: Havel's Dramatic
Literature as Political Theory,” describes the system of government in 1960’s Czechoslovakia as “post-totalitarian” (492), a term also used by Havel in his essay, “The Power of the
Powerless” (Havel 1979: 131). Less severe than during Stalin’s time, the
Soviet-Czechoslovak regime in the 1960’s relied primarily on ideology to control its citizens through mechanisms such as state-controlled propaganda. Only if these methods failed to adequately control its citizens did the government turn to physical methods or, more often, adverse effects on a citizen’s education, career, housing situation, etc. (Brooks 495). As a result, politics in Czechoslovakia represented a serious intrusion into the personal everyday lives of its citizens. Havel's Garden Party does an especially good job of illustrating how the post-totalitarian system has saturated the privacy of home life. As Paul Trensky notes in his article 1969, “Václav Havel and the Language of the Absurd,” the play takes the form of a political satire, both of public and private life, in a socialist system:
There are unmistakable parallels between the home of the Pludeks and the outside world. Life guided by the socialist ideal turns out to be as soulless and degenerate as that of the petty bourgeois. It is governed to an even larger degree by opportunism and conformity, with people acting and speaking as senselessly; the only difference
actually is in the replacing of one type of verbal gesture by another. The
"conservative'" maxims of Pludek-father are superseded by the mechanical repetition of official statements, slogans, and ideological cliches. (Trensky 47)
Both Memorandum and Garden Party deal with the effects of government policy on the everyday lives of its citizens. In Garden Party, the main character becomes so imbibed with political maxims that, by the end of the play, he forgets who he is and his parents are unable to recognize him:
Hugo: … What about that nice cup of coffee?
Mrs. Pludek: Yes, of course, as soon as our darling little Hugo arrives. Hugo: He’s not home yet?
Pludek: He was probably delayed by that liquidation. (45)
Memorandum takes place in an average office workplace, where a new language has been
implemented to allow for better communication. The new language is so complex and its implementation so labour-intensive that it makes it impossible for any work to get done, to the point where we never actually find out what it is the organization does. The parallels between Memorandum and the immense effort poured into the propagation of rhetoric for the Soviet Union are obvious (one need only think, for example, of the multiple Five-Year Plans which the government reported successful but which, in reality, were a failure). Thanks to the censorship of dissident writers and artists, citizens faced a constant onslaught of
propaganda with almost no outlet for retaliation. This eventually spawned an underground dissident scene of artists who fought to mitigate the effects of the government’s rhetoric.
Writing style
Why absurdist theatre?
fables allowed him to covertly criticize the court, the church and other important institutions13, absurdist theatre offers much the same opportunity (Pontuso 2002: 44-45). The Eastern and Central European censors were well-versed in literature and the arts, and were well-equipped to find political allegories if any existed. Lev Loseff, in his 1984 book, On the Beneficence of
Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, describes how, in order to
circumvent this inconvenient censorship, “Aesopian language” (seemingly innocuous language which hides a secret meaning) was already used by writers as early as M.E.
Saltykov-Shchedrin, who coined the term in Russia in the 1860’s (Loseff 1). Along the same lines, the development of Central/Eastern European absurdist theatre, with its “nonsensical” nature, lack of character background and lack of logical plotlines, gave writers a similar outlet in which it was difficult to prove any subversive intentions. Petr Den, in his 1967 article “Notes on Czechoslovakia’s Young Theatre of the Absurd,” cites several examples of artists who escaped censorship by using Aesopian language, including a popular song about a canary that satirizes the bureaucratic nightmare involved in getting a travel permit (159). E. J. Czerwinski, in “Poland and Czechoslovakia: Open Underground Theatre and Drama,” also acknowledges the use of allegory in Czechoslovakia at the time:
Consequently when liberalization began in Czechoslovakia in the sixties, the theater [sic] was the first area to flourish, and it is not surprising that most of the Open Underground Theaters [sic] that appeared after 1963 concentrated almost exclusively on satire. As a result most of the significant drama written during this period is either openly satirical or disguised allegory. (390)
13
For details of the long history of politics in fables, see for example John Lydgate’s The Horse, the Goat and
the Sheep (1477) and The Churl and the Bird (1478), which detail the use of fables in politics, especially insofar
as they relate to social protest and freedom of expression. For treatment of politics in the fables of La Fontaine, see for example Delmasse’s and Lacassagne’s Le génie de La Fontaine: ou choix de ses plus belles fables, et de
celles de ce poète célèbre qui sont relatives à la morale et à la politique, accompagné de notes et d’observations tirées de ses commentateurs (1817); Georges Couton’s La politique de La Fontaine (1959); Annabel
Patterson’s Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (1991); or Marc Fumaroli’s Le poète et le
In addition to Havel, Czerwinski cites examples such as that of Ivan Klima, whose plays “have a political orientation, but because of their Aesopian language and vague allusions they are difficult to grasp by Western audiences who are not entirely familiar with the cultural and political scene in Czechoslovakia” (391). Apparently Havel was not the only artist to take advantage of Aesopian language and satire, which allowed Czech audiences to understand the political jibes hidden in the works, but made it difficult for censors to condemn them.
Absurdist theatre thus offered the perfect vehicle through which to engage in masked social commentary14. Douglas Soderberg explains that “absurdity is in a sense the dissident writer’s metier, his tool and his craft. He attempts to say the (legally) unsayable, to know that which he’s forbidden to know” (227). Esslin claims that by “concentrating on the psychological essentials of the situation in a setting of myth and allegory, [absurdist theatre] had no need to be openly political or topical by referring to politics or social conditions as such” (317). And Havel himself, in an interview with Karel Hvížďala, says “I have the feeling that, if absurd theatre had not existed before me, I would have had to invent it” (Havel and Hvížďala 54). Although Havel’s early work was less obviously satirical than some of his contemporaries, it is easy to see why he would have been drawn to the possibilities for free speech in absurd writing.
An avid reader, from a young age Havel managed to obtain smuggled copies of plays by Kafka, Beckett and Ionesco (Rocamora 20). His early plays are generally considered to be clear descendants of Beckett’s and Ionesco’s (Woods 9, Trensky 65). Michelle Woods, in her 2010 article, “Václav Havel and the Expedient Politics of Translation,” states that “Havel was explicitly writing in the absurdist tradition of his heroes, Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco” (9). Milan Kundera recognized the “liberating sense” that Ionesco brought to the previously stuffy Czechoslovakia, and notes that “one cannot conceive of Havel without the example of
14
Havel succeeded in having his plays performed in Czechoslovakia for several years, but after the Prague Spring in 1968, the censors won and his work was banned (Trensky 1980:159).
Ionesco yet he is not an epigone. His plays are an original and irreplaceable development within what is called 'The Theatre of the Absurd'. Moreover, they were understood as such by everyone at the time” (cited in Skloot 225). Domestic absurd theatre, of which Garden
Party (1963) was the first (Keane 157-158; Žantovský n.p.), preceded the productions of
foreign absurdist theatre in Czechoslovakia. However, in the mid-1960’s, under the direction of Jan Grossman, Prague’s “Theatre on the Balustrade” started to show foreign plays such as Ionesco’s La cantatrice chauve, Jean Genet’s Les bonnes and Beckett’s En attendant Godot. Havel became a resident playwright of the theatre, which quickly built a reputation for being one of the foremost places to see the “drama of the absurd” (Keane 157-158; Trensky 97). Of the techniques common to playwrights of absurdist theatre, Havel made most use of
experimentation with language and eccentric, repetitive plotlines. Robert Skloot compares Havel to such playwrights as Pinter and Stoppard in their “identical delight in the liberating power of satirical language” (224-225).
Nonsensical speech
Esslin states in The Theatre of the Absurd that one of the common characteristics of absurd theatre is a tendency for the dialogue to “consist of incoherent babblings” (22); Jean Vannier, a few years later, defines the movement as “a theater [sic] of language where man's words are held up to us as a spectacle” (182); and Goetz-Stankiewicz quotes a Czech critic who stated that the hero of The Garden Party was “the phrase” (Goetz-Stankiewicz 1990: 98). Trensky recognizes this focus on language in Havel’s Garden Party, asserting that:
[Since the play lacks] a real plot, conflict, and set of characters, the play rests on a highly complex verbal structure, and it is actually the language which is its primary moving force. This aspect of Havel's play is also identifiable with the absurd theater [sic] in the West, which has substantially changed the role of language in the structure of the dramatic genre” (44).
