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Beckett, Ionesco, and the Tradition of TragicomedyAuthor(s): Enoch BraterSource: College Literature, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1974), pp. 113-127Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25111022Accessed: 11-12-2019 16:44 UTC

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113

BECKETT, IONESCO, AND THE TRADITION OF TRAGICOMEDY

Enoch Brater

Brendan Behan once said that if a man wanted entertainment he might do worse than to see one of his plays; but if he wanted "lectures" he should visit Beckett's theater.1 Behan's remark seems to reflect his own uneasiness with the metaphysical dialectic at work in Beckett's plays. But other critics have been quick to recognize Beckett's "unique comic repertoire, like a European clown's."2 Jean Anouilh reviewed Waiting for Godot for the magazine Arts (January 27, 1953) as "the music hall sketch of Pascal's Pensees . . . played by the Fratellini clowns." Gogo and Didi, observed Genevieve Serreau, "suggest clowns more than they do tramps; Footit and Chocolat, Alex and Zavetta, Pipo and Rhum, the Fratellini trio, the Marx Brothers, or the traditional comedians of English music hall." 3 And Hugh Kenner, among the first to track down that Car tesian Centaur rampant in Beckett's work, noted that the antecedents

were not in literature but "in Emmet Kelly's solemn determination to sweep a circle of light into a dustpan: a haunted man whose fidelity to an impossible task . . . illuminates the dynamics of a tragic sense of duty." 4 So the relationship between "lectures" and comic entertainment is not as irreconcilable as Brendan Behan thought ?even a brief history of how the plays were received seems to indicate that both levels might be work ing simultaneously. The 1956 American premiere of Waiting for Godot at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, starring Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, was billed as "the laugh sensation of two continents"?yet on open ing night the audience, dismayed by seeing the stars of Harvey and The Seven Year Itch in a new work that was by no means light comedy, walked out in droves.5 Next morning a headline appeared in the Miami Herald:

MINK CLAD AUDIENCE DISAPPOINTED IN GODOT. Bert Lahr, going on with stiff upper lip, took the situation philosophically: "Playing Waiting for Godot in Miami was like doing Giselle at Roseland." () Later that same year, in early April, an advertisement appeared in drama sections of New York newspapers announcing that Godot (with Bert Lahr, but this time without Tom Ewell, and also without director Alan Schneider)

was coming to Broadway for a limited engagement. A signed postscript by producer Michael Meyerberg served as a warning: "I respectfully suggest that those who come to the theater for casual entertainment do not buy a ticket to this attraction." An anxious interviewer asked Bert Lahr if he knew what the play was about ?"Damned if I know," Lahr confessed. 7 Hume Cronyn was similarly baffled; he turned down an offer to play Godot because "it was so alien I didn't recognize its quality." 8

Waiting for Godot sounded something new in theatrical experience; its dramatic effectiveness depended on a curious mixture of comedy and


114 COLLEGE LITERATURE

tragedy; its success or failure in production would vary directly with the audience's ability to feel both impulses at the same time. The first American production ran into trouble; it was played before audiences uneasy about having their media or their metaphors mixed. Centuries of theater-going had trained them to laugh at the comic and weep at the tragic?now here was Beckett suggesting that the responses could be integrated and sometimes reversed. And yet, though Beckett's style had all the trappings of newness, Waiting for Godot was by no means the sudden jolt to dramatic propriety it was initially assumed to be. Harold Hobson responded en thusiastically to the elements of theatrical innovation:

This play knocked the shackles of plot off the English drama. It destroyed the notion that the dramatist is God, knowing everything about his characters, and master of a complete philosophy answerable to all our problems ... It revealed that the drama approximates, or can approximate, the condition of music, touching chords deeper than can be reached by reason, and saying things beyond the grasp of logic. It re newed the English theatre in a single night. 9

But Beckett's real effectiveness was not so much in being revolutionary as in being circumspect: he was simply forcing his audience to ask itself the same questions about comedy and tragedy that he had previously asked himself. Once the success of his play was assured, critics began look ing for "absurdist" elements in works written years before: Strindberg's

Dance of Death and even that holiest of holies, Shakespeare's Lear, be came subjects for much tragicomic scrutiny. Despite the excesses to which such an approach might lead, in some ways it came closer to Beck ett's own ideas than did the idolatry of Hobson. Beckett's use of words amounts to an examination of language and what it can or cannot com municate; his use of the comic and the tragic constitutes an evaluation of those forms as well. Beckett's accomplishment, then, is not so much in the introduction of tragic consequences to what is essentially a comic

mode, but rather in pointing out that the tragic overtones already exist in the comic. Perhaps the comic spirit contains a potential for danger far more threatening than any tragedy may impose. It is this demon, up setting our nerves far more than our minds, that lurks in the wings of Beckett's theater. The centaur's effects might be, when properly orches trated, less Cartesian than visceral.

Beckett's use of the comic resulted from his recognition of the unsettling potential he could wring from this form. Tragedy by itself would be in sufficient? catharsis involved resolution of conflict and release from dra matic tension. In the finality of tragedy Beckett could not find a vehicle to sustain his metaphysical burden. For the completion involved in this form ?a physical, ethical, or spiritual disintegration ?put an end to the gnawing anxiety that was the only constant in Beckett's imaginative world.


BECKETT, IONESCO, AND THE TRADITION OF TRAGICOMEDY 115

Tragedy meant self-discovery and rebirth, a second chance, a last chance; it involved an underlying possibility that things might be different from the way things were; it was entirely too optimistic, even in its hopeless ness. Tragedy put anxiety within a frame and made it a subject for study? convenient, recognizable, and sufficient unto itself. Its coherence?in particular its formal structure?was especially at odds with Beckett's sensibility. But in the comic Beckett found the same frenzy and disorder he saw in the world around him. Humor could be anarchic, disruptive, and threatening. It fulfilled no expectation and respected no taboo; it could achieve its effects in turmoil, riot, and shock. The dislocation Beckett found in language was the same spirit of dislocation he found in humor. Laughter achieved its effects because it was based on incongruities: it was thus a possible vehicle for the art of the impossible.

Beckett's conception of humor should be seen as distinct from the classical idea of comedy in the long tradition from Aristotle to Moliere to Meredith.

Writers of traditional comedy find that it is rational, orderly, and cor rective: works like The Country Wife, As You Like It, and Pride and Prejudice are thus classical in the sense that within them humor is in complete accord with reason. Classical comedy implies a control which keeps the scope of the work within a recognizable, realistic framework. For Beckett these boundaries no longer apply: for his is a "black" humor which lies in extreme distortion and in farce. The limits of reason are immediately transcended; it is the world of Sterne, of Swift, of Through the Looking-Glass. Although Beckett's conception of comedy is not classical, there is a tradition behind it nonetheless. What Beckett has done in his imagination is simply set this counter-tradition of comedy in sharper re lief: humor is not exploited for its power of consolidation, but rather for its potential to transmit a sustained level of the dislocation of reason. Beckett by no means stands alone in his recognition of the suitability of comedy as a form for shaping his apprehensions about the world in which he lives. Anthony Burgess also finds a congenial medium in the comic spirit: "Comedy has a meaning in terms of?not of content, but effects: elation, acceptance of the world, of the fundamental disparateness of all the elements of the world. The test is, it makes one, if not laugh, at least consider laughing." Then, in a final aside on the effects of laughter that makes him sound like Beckett, Burgess remarks: "One feels one can push on. I recognize the total inadequacy of that, but that's what I have in mind." 10

It might prove helpful also to consider the ideas of Antonin Artaud in order to understand more clearly the theoretical basis for much of Beckett's work. Artaud's observations on the nature of comedy, written in the Thirties, stand as a curious parallel to the situations Beckett estab


J16 COLLEGE LITERA TURE

lishes in his novels and plays. Le Theatre et son Double, published orig inally as a series of manifestos by Gallimard in Collection Metamorphoses, appeared in 1938 ?the same year that Beckett's Murphy was published in London by Routledge. Set side by side, the two works are not only interesting because they spring from the same intellectual climate?pre

war Paris of the Thirties?but more crucially because they reflect a similar awareness of the possible effects of humor. Artaud was primarily con cerned that the realistic and psychological theater would lead the dramatic experience to a dead-end; as a form for an age of disorder it had little viability for him. The "realistic" theater was only superficially realistic, mistaking outward forms for inward certainties, imposing a false security on its audience by an arbitrary ordering of events and settings:

The contemporary theater is decadent because it has lost the feeling on the one hand of seriousness and on the other for laughter; because it has broken away from gravity, from effects that are immediate and painful?in a word, from Danger.

Because it has lost a sense of real humor, a sense of laughter's power of physical and anarchic dissociation.

Because it has broken away from the spirit of profound anarchy which is at the root of all poetry. 11

Artaud compared the Balinese theater, based on "hallucination and fear," with the "psychological tendencies" of the Western theater. The Oriental theater achieved a "metaphysical" plane because it was less concerned with surface "realism" than it was with poetry and magic. Artaud wanted to derive the most extreme poetic results from the means of realization, and, in so doing, make a metaphysics of them. He was aware, also, of the potential of the cinema: it could beat the realistic theater at its own game. But if the theater became metaphysical, achieving its effects through "hallucination and fear," it could open up possibilities that neither the realistic theater nor the cinema had explored before. To accomplish this the theater would need to involve the "spirit of profound anarchy" which

might be found in the poetic and the comic. For poetry and humor were united in that they accomplished their effects through a dislocation of reason; they revealed truths that were valid because they were identifiably human. In Henry Miller's words, "a clown is a poet in action. He is the story he enacts. It is the same story over and over?adoration, devotion, crucifixion."1^ The poetic and the comic were dangerous and threatening: by their insistence on mystery and anarchy, they had the power to make a folly of rational thinking.

Artaud's sensitivity to the poetic potential of humor was influenced less by abstract theories of comedy than by the antics of the Marx Brothers.

What especially impressed Artaud about their films was the aura of fatality underlying the essential comedy of the situation:



In order to understand the powerful, total definitive, absolute originality (I am not exaggerating, I am trying simply to define, and so much the worse if my enthusiasm carries me away) of films like Animal Crackers and at times (at any rate in the whole last part), Monkey Business, you would have to add to humor the notion of some thing disquieting and tragic, a fatality (neither happy nor unhappy, difficult to form ulate) which would hover over it like the cast of an appalling malady upon an exquisitely beautiful profile, (pp. 142-43)

Artaud was impressed by everything that was "poetic and revolutionary in the Marx Brothers' jokes," where the comic situation always burgeoned into "a kind of boiling anarchy, an essential disintegration of the real by poetry." A Marx Brothers' movie was "a hymn to anarchy and whole hearted revolt" because it involved the substitution of order by endless frenzy, a total disorientation of logical expectations:

In a Marx Brothers' film a man thinks he is going to take a woman in his arms but instead gets a cow, which moos .... that moo, at just that moment, assumes an in tellectual dignity equal to any woman's cry. Such a situation, possible in the cinema, is no less possible in the theater as it exists: it would take very little ?for instance, replace the cow with an animated manikin, a kind of monster endowed with speech, or a man disguised as an animal?to rediscover the secret of an objective poetry at the root of humor, which the theater has renounced and abandoned to the Music Hall, and which the Cinema later adopted, (p. 43)

It was essentially this "objective poetry" at the root of the Marx Brothers' humor that made Artaud realize the portentous consequences lying be neath the surface of comedy. The Marx Brothers' humor was poetic; and its poetry led to "metaphysics in action":

In Animal Crackers a woman may suddenly fall, legs in the air, on a divan and ex pose, for an instant, all we could wish to see?a man may throw himself abruptly upon a woman in a salon, dance a few steps with her and then whack her on the behind in time to the music ?these events comprise a kind of exercise in intellectual freedom in which the unconscious of each of the characters, repressed by conventions and habits, avenges itself and us at the same time. But in Monkey Business when a hunted man throws himself upon a beautiful woman and dances with her, poetically, in a sort of study in charm and grace of attitude, the spiritual claim seems double and shows everything that is poetic and revolutionary in the Marx Brothers' jokes. But the fact that the music to which the couple dances ?the hunted man and the beautiful woman ?may be a music of nostalgia and escape, a music of deliverance, sufficiently indicates the dangerous aspect of all these funny jokes; and when the poetic spirit is exercised, it always leads toward a kind of boiling anarchy, an essential dis integration of the real by poetry, (p. 142)

The comic antics of the Marx Brothers thus reveal a complete upheaval of what we have been trained to think of as the real. The comic situation evolves into a revolutionary grotesquerie whose overtones are at once political, social, and metaphysical. At the roots of comedy there is a capacity for danger far more threatening than any feelings generated by tragedy?for the comic agony is unendurable and unrelenting at the same time. There is no catharsis, no release; there is only a spirit of pro found and total dislocation of reason:


US COLLEGE LITER A TURE

If Americans, to whose spirit (esprit) this genre of films belongs, wish to take these films in a merely humorous sense, confining the material of humor to the easy comic

margms ot the meanmg ot the word, so much the worse tor them; but that will not prevent us from considering the conclusion of Monkey Business as a hymn to anarchy and wholehearted revolt, this ending that puts the bawling of a calf on the same in tellectual level and gives it the same quality of meaningful suffering as the scream of a frightened woman, this ending that shows, in the shadows of a dirty barn, two lecherous servants freely pawing the naked shoulders of their master's daughter, the equals at last of their hysterical master, all amidst the intoxication?which is in tellectual as well?of the Marx Brothers' pirouettes. And the triumph of all this is the kind of exaltation, simultaneously visual and sonorous, to which these events attain among the shadows, in their intensity of vibration, and in the powerful anxiety which their total effect ultimately projects into the mind. (p. 144)

In Beckett we never meet up with the Marx Brothers?but we do en counter a series of clowns who similarly display the disquieting element Artaud champions. Various critics?among them Lawrence Harvey, Edith Kern, and Eric Bently?have pointed out that "Godot," with its ot ending in French, a nickname mechanism frequently applied to clowns, sounds suspiciously like "Chariot" (Charlie Chaplin in French). Chaplin, vac illating before us on the screen between disquieting elements and pathos, engages our sympathy more than the antics of the Marx Brothers ever succeed in doing?but the unsettling dimension is there nonetheless. And it surfaces again and again in the parade of clowns running through Beckett's work. In Watt, the novel written during World War II, much is made of a "hardy laurel," and in How It Is we are entertained by the Stalinist comedians Bim and Bom, a pair we meet in several Beckett works. They appear as the sadistic brothers Clinch in Murphy and, even earlier in the Beckett canon, they surface in the story of Belacqua's death in More Pricks Than Kicks, where they are linked with Democritus, the pre-Socratic Greek who laughed at metaphysics, and Grock, whose humor rested on failure.13 And along with these clowns we must not forget Buster Keaton, the "stoic comedian" in Beckett's "comic and unreal" Film. In each case we have come a long way from the consolidating force of classical comedy.

II

Fortunately for the critic, one can find valuable parallels to Beckett's theoretical concepts in the writings of his fellow absurdists. Ionesco is a likely candidate. In Fragments of a Journal and Notes and Counter Notes

he has had a great deal to say on some of the same intellectual issues under lying Beckett's work. In fact, Ionesco's writings about himself and his theater seem to keep a steady pace with his actual writings for the stage. Con versations with Eugene Ionesco appeared in 1970 and the English trans lation of Present Past, Past Present was published a year later. Both con tain valuable material for the Ionesco enthusiast. One must be cautious, however, in enclosing Beckett and Ionesco, "France's angels of darkness,"14



within the same convenient mantle of "absurdity"; the unrestrained ex uberance of Ionesco's theater is a significant departure from the "maximum of simplicity and symmetry"15 Beckett prizes as an ethic in his own writing. Beckett is the metaphysical writer whose ideas exist before, during, and after the creative process ?his works are, among other things, always illustrations of ontological problems. He is always the deliberate thinker

with a painful awareness of what he is doing?a self-conscious artist say ing, "witness, Molloy"; "consider, Watt"; "for example. Endgame." Ionesco,

by contrast, is a playwright who discovers the consequences of what he is doing only in the process of writing. His reflections come afterward: "I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it, or while I am not writing at all. I believe that artistic creation is spon taneous. It is for me."16

Yet despite this basic difference from Beckett's spirit and theatrical execution, Ionesco's observations on the nature of comedy reflect a similar appreciation of the "unendurable" quality of humor: "The unendurable admits of no solution, and only the unendurable is profoundly tragic, pro foundly comic and essentially theatrical." Because it involved a violent dislocation of feelings, seeing the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers had revealed to Artaud "a distinct poetic state of mind" that he defined as sur realism. Ionesco, too was aware of the essentially disruptive qualities

which could be set in motion if the comic spirit were pursued far enough. But for Ionesco this surrealistic element of comedy could be found in every day life:

... in my view the unusual can spring only from the dullest and most ordinary da$y routine and from our everyday prose, when pursued beyond their limits. To feel the absurdity or improbability of everyday life and language is already to have transcended it; to transcend it, you must first saturate yourself in it. The comic is the unusual pure and simple; nothing surprises me more than banality; the "surreal" is there, within our reach in our daily conversation. (NCM, p. 165)

Ionesco was attracted to the theatrical medium because he saw the stage as a forum which could embody this surreal dimension of everyday life. The stage was a place where man could detach himself from his personal anxieties and study his own existential dilemma: "When I manage to detach myself from the world and feel able to take a good look at it, it seems to me comic in its improbability." The responsibility of the play

wright was then to demonstrate on stage this "comic improbability." His task was to find the stage techniques which would make the "unendurable" absurdity of existence dramatically effective:

... if the essence of the theatre lay in magnifying its effects, they had to be magnified still further, underlined and stressed to the maximum. To push drama out of that in termediate zone where it is neither theatre nor literature is to restore it to its own domain, to its natural frontiers. It was not for me to conceal the devices of the theatre,



but rather make them still more evident, deliberately obvious, go all-out for caricature and the grotesque, way beyond the pale irony of witty drawing-room comedies. No drawing-room comedies, but farce, the extreme exaggeration of parody. Humor, yes, but using the methods of burlesque. Comic effects that are firm, broad and outrageous. No dramatic comedies either. But back to the unendurable. Everything raised to paroxysm, where the source of tragedy lies. A theatre of violence: violently comic, violently dramatic. (NCN, p. 26)

Because the theatre could be made to communicate through exagger ation and distortion (essentially comic devices), it was a place in which to portray the personal disorder each of us may experience at certain moments in our everyday lives; it was at these moments, moreover, that we were forced to see life clearly: "Avoid psychology or rather give it a metaphysical dimension. Drama lies in the extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality. Dis location, disarticulation of language too." Ionesco's use of the comic was thus based on its potential for dislocation; it was more bleak than tragedy because it offered no escape from the "unendurable" nature of existence:

For my part, I have never understood the difference people make between the comic and the tragic. As the "comic" is an intuitive perception of the absurd, it seems to me more hopeless than the "tragic." The "comic" offers no escape. I say "hopeless," but in reality it lies outside the boundaries of hope or despair .... it seems to me that the comic is tragic, and that the tragedy of man is pure derision. (NCN, pp. 26-27)

The comic was inextricably bound to the tragic?the dramatist thus had before him the unique possibility of setting both impulses into motion at the same time:

Push burlesque to its extreme limits, then, with a flick of the finger, an imperceptible transition, and you are back in tragedy. It is a conjuring trick. The public should not notice the passage from burlesque to tragedy. Neither perhaps should the actors, or only slightly.

A burlesque text, play it dramatic. A dramatic text, play it burlesque. Make words say things they never meant. (NCN, p. 182)

Ionesco's actors were thus able to discover "a style at once more natural and more exaggerated, something between a realistic character and a marionette." What they had discovered at the same time was the tragi comic situation of modern man.

Ill

Ionesco raises some crucial questions about the relationship between comedy and freedom. He once said that "humor is freedom" because it made possible the uninhibited play of imagination and fancy. Unfettered by the constraints of logic and reason, the comic gave the dramatist the intellectual freedom to create a new world with a perspective of its own. Through the "liberating" effects of humor, the artist had the chance to allow



his imagination to wander as it would: the realities embodied in the process would thus become, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, "more real because im agined." In comedy the rules of time might be suspended and the limit ations of space might be expanded or contracted. But it was this same free dom that proved threatening to the human mind. Marianne Moore said that poetry was "an imaginary garden with real toads in it"; but what would happen if the real toads turned into disembodied chimeras of a grotesque nightmare? If the spirit remained shackled to the conventional rules of logical thinking, it also had the guarantee of safety: to explore the potential of comedy was to set free at the same time an element of danger:

We are afraid of too much humor (and humor is freedom). We are afraid of freedom of thought, of a play that is too tragic or too despairing. Optimism and hope are com pulsory under pain of death. And what is sometimes labeled the absurd is only the denunciation of the ridiculous nature of a language empty of substance, sterile, made up of cliches and slogans, of theatre-that-is-known-in-advance. I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a race-horse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least. {NCN, p. 46)

Yet the freedom Ionesco saw in humor was something more than a hedon istic self-indulgence of riotous fancy. For if comedy freed man from the chains of reason, it also freed man from himself. Humor is liberty because it unleashes man from his own anguish: when we laugh in Beckett's or in Ionesco's theater, we are really laughing at ourselves, at our own absurd situation: "Laughter comes as a reprieve: we laugh so as not to cry." See Beckett's Endgame:

Nagg: Can you hear me?

Nell: Yes. And you?

Nagg: Yes. {Pause.)

Our hearing hasn't failed.

Nell: Our what?

Nagg: Our hearing.

Nell: No. {Pause.)

Have you anything else to say to me?

Nagg: Do you remember?

Nell: No.

Nagg: When we crashed in our tandem and lost our shanks? {They laugh heartily.)



Nell: It was in the Ardennes. (They laugh less heartily.)

Nagg: On the road to Sedan. {They laugh still less heartily.)

Laughter comes as a reprieve because in the process of not taking our selves seriously, we manage to see ourselves even more seriously. Laughter detaches us from our own anxiety; it distances us from our individual dis appointments and makes us realize that the horror is not so much one of personal circumstances as it is one of being alive. Even if things were dif ferent they would still be the same?happiness is not part of the human condition. According to Ionesco?

There is only one true way of demystifying: by means of humor, especially if it is "Black"; logic is revealed by our awareness of the illogicality of the absurd; laughter alone respects no taboo and prevents the setting up of new taboos that are anti-taboo; the comic alone is able to give us the strength to bear the tragedy of existence. The authentic nature of things, the truth, can only be revealed to us through fantasy, which is more realistic than all our realisms .... nowadays people are scared stiff both of freedom and of humor; they do not realize that life is impossible without freedom and humor. (NCN, pp. 144, 150)

And this is how Beckett has Arsene explain the problem to Watt:

Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation, only three I think need detain us, I mean the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless. They correspond to successive, how shall I say successive . . . sue . . . successive excoriations of the understanding, and the passage from the one to the other is the passage from the lesser to the greater, from the lower to the higher, from the outer to the inner, from the gross to the fine, from the matter to the form. The laugh that now is mirth less once was hollow, the laugh that once was hollow once was bitter. And the laugh that once was bitter? Eyewater, Mr. Watt, eyewater. But do not let us waste our time

with that, do not let us waste any more time with that, Mr. Watt. No. Where were we. The bitter, the hollow and?Haw! Haw! the mirthless. The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well, well. But the mirth less laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout?Haw! ?so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs?silence please?at that which is un happy. 18

The relief that comes from comedy is thus of a very different quality from the effects of tragedy: it is not so much a release from tension as it is an understanding of that tension and that release. Humor is free dom, writes Ionesco, because it "brings us a free and lucid realization of the tragic or derisory condition of man." The freedom that humor provides comes with understanding: if man could detach himself from his own immediate situation, he would laugh at the absurdity of existence?he

would see his own anxiety as nothing unique unto himself, but part of the burden of being alive.



IV

Ionesco is optimistic about the corrective and consolidating possibil ities of comedy. He believes that "the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated." Laughter is the result of detachment? through laughter we can distance ourselves from our habits of thinking and so discover the world anew. His use of comedy is thus essentially moral: "As I am writing for the theatre I am only concerned with person ifying and incarnating a sense of reality which is both comic and tragic." Ionesco thus sees the theatre as a place in which we can study ourselves and our own actions. He chooses to write comedy fundamentally because it provides greater depth for such study: "A tragic character does not change, he breaks up; he is himself, he is real. Comic Characters are people who do not exist." Tragedy directly engages our sympathy and makes detachment difficult. But detachment is essential for comedy? the "alienation effect" Piscator and Brecht tried to formulate for the theatrical experience is thus an element inherent in the comic spirit. Comedy is abstract and infinitely suggestive; each of us must create the comic character in his own imagination because he is never real. The comic character forces us to think; his world is not one of psychological problems, but of unsettling situations with metaphysical overtones. He is a one-dimensional cardboard figure who engages us not so much in understanding his self, but in appreciating his situation:

Take a tragedy, accelerate the movement, and you will have a comic play: empty the characters of all their psychological content, and again you will have a comic play;

make of your characters people who are purely social, caught up in the social machine, for their social "truth," and again you will have a play that is comic ... or tragi-comic. {NCN, p. 228)

Ionesco's optimism is not only about the future of man; it is at the same time about the future of literature, for in his imagination these two pros pects are linked. Humor, especially if it were "black," would open up the possibility of new dramatic structure, demystifying not only our precon ceptions about the world, but our presuppositions about the theater as well:

In my first play, The Bald Soprano, which started off as an attempt to parody the theatre, and hence a certain kind of human behavior, it was by plunging into ban ality, by drawing the sense from the hollowest cliches of everyday language that I tried to render the strangeness that seems to pervade our whole existence. The tragic and the farcical, the prosaic and the poetic, the realistic and the fantastic, the strange and the ordinary, perhaps these are the contradictory principles (there is no theatre without conflict) that may serve as the basis for a new dramatic structure. {NCN, P. 28)

The question, of course, remains: to what extent does Beckett share Ionesco's optimism regarding the re-integrating possibilities of humor?



It would be worthwhile to keep in mind Ionesco's own view of Beckett in drawing a distinction between the two. While he appreciated Beckett's comic spirit, Ionesco sensed the underlying fatality in his sensibility:

Beckett is essentially tragic. Tragic, because with him it is precisely the whole of the human condition which comes into play and not man in this or that society, or

man seen through and distorted by a particular ideology that both simplifies and mut ilates his historical and metaphysical reality, the authentic reality into which man is integrated. Whether one is pessimistic or optimistic is another question. What is true and important is that man should appear in all his deeper aspects and various dimensions. Beckett poses the problem of the ultimate ends of man; the picture of history and the human condition this author gives us is more complex, more soundly based. (NCN, p. 135)

But surely more is to be gained in understanding Beckett by setting him along with his contemporary thinkers than it is by placing him in a long series of traditional comic writers. Beckett's sensibility is linked to Artaud and Ionesco more than it is, for example, to Henri Bergson. Ruby Cohn constructed an important study of how Beckett's comic de vices may be traced with specific attention to Bergson's essay on laughter. The Comic Gamut, one of the earliest serious studies of Beckett's work, uses Bergson's catalogues as a basis for an approach to the novels and plays.19 Yet such an approach, though it raises illuminating parallels in the use of certain features ? misplaced literalism, puns, twisted quotations, hyperbole, litotes, irony, jargon, incongruity, parody, paradox?does not explain why Beckett may have turned to comedy as a vehicle through which to demonstrate his metaphysical problems. Bergson's essay, the product of a philospher of the comic, not a creative comic writer, is largely a catalogue of stylistic devices; his analysis, based primarily on the civil ized comedy of manners, would, for example, regard Beckett's illiberal jests and shock devices as too crude to notice. Ruby Cohn's approach, nevertheless, started an entire generation of Beckett critics thinking about the function of comedy on the contemporary stage. It was not within the scope of that seminal study to take into account that, just as what is con sidered funny may vary from civilization to civilization, it may also vary from one historical moment to another. Bergson, in this particular per spective, would be of questionable value in a discussion of Beckett's work. One of the main points of Le Rire is that "laughter is incompatible with emotion." Yet the special grace of Beckett's world is that we laugh and cry at the same moment ?it is "the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs ... at that which is unhappy." The most hilarious moments in Beckett's world are simultaneously the most emotional: this is not a comedy of manners, but of metaphysics.

In evaluating Beckett's comic spirit one has to search within oneself, to evaluate one's own emotional reactions, and to consider one's own



vulnerability. For it is above all in the vulnerability of his heroes that we recognize ourselves and study our own dilemma. For Beckett, as for Artuad and Ionesco, it is not a question of the comic versus the tragic: the comic is essentially more hopeless than all our tragedies. It is the imaginative exploration of this tragicomedy that creates the underlying tension in Beckett's novels and plays?it is an antagonism based on incongruity, dislocation, contradiction. It might be convenient to think of the content of Beckett's world as tragic and the forms and devices as comic; yet one loses half of Beckett's complexity by reducing his accomplishment to such shaky foundations. Paradox is not, therefore, a sign of Beckett's in tellectual imprecision; it is, however, the only certainty he can find on "this bitch of an earth." His sensibility locates tragedy in the very heart of laughter. He calls one play Happy Days, but the force of his work gains an ironic resonance when we consider that this Irish toast is followed, inevitably, by "shed a tear." Beckett's is the chaotic, upsidedown world of the Marx Brothers; his peers are Artaud and Ionesco, and perhaps, as Ihab Hassan suggests,20 Henry Miller:

Out of that dark, unstitched wound, that sink of abominations, that circle of black thronged cities where the music of ideas is drowned in cold fat, out of the strangled Utopias is born a clown, a being divided between beauty and ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he looks down and sidelong is Satan himself and when he looks upwards sees a buttered angel, a snail with wings. 21

Although the tradition of comedy to which Beckett belongs is not en tirely a twentieth-century phenomenon, it reaches its most representative expression in the art of our own times. Smollett, Sterne, Rabelais, and Swift are the predecessors of such a sensibility, but it is really not until Kierkegaard that such a comic spirit is associated with man's being in the world; and it was Kierkegaard who claimed that in existence the pathetic was already blended with the comic. John Gassner pointed out that "modern drama has been the result of fundamentally anti-Aristotelian playwriting, largely plotless, meandering, semi-comic and semi-tragic."22 Certainly the theater of Samuel Beckett follows very closely Gassner's recipe. But the tradition of the tragicomic cannot be limited to Samuel Beckett nor even to the larger category of the theater of the absurd: it is, in fact, a tradition embracing much of what is called modern art. As Thomas Mann said when writing with special reference to Conrad's The Secret Agent, 23

I feel that, broadly and essentially, the striking feature of modern art is that it has ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and comic, or the dramatic classifications, tragedy and comedy. It sees life as tragicomedy, with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style?to the extent, indeed, that today it is the only guise in which the sublime may appear.



ENDNOTES

1 Frederick J. Hoffman, Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self (New York, 1964), p. xiii. 2 Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, 2nd. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles,

1968), p. 13. 3 Ruby Cohn, ed., Casebook on 'Waiting for Godot' (New York, 1967), pp. 12-13. 4 Kenner, p. 13. 5 John Calder, ed., Beckett at Sixty: A Festschrift (London, 1967), p. 40. 6 John Lahr, Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr (New York, 1969),

pp. 263-269. 7 Cohn, Casebook, p. 76. 8 Audience discussion with the actor after his performance of Krapp's Last Tape on a

double-bill with Not I at the Zellerbach Theatre, Annenberg Center, University of Penn sylvania, on Oct. 26, 1973.

9 Calder, p. 25. 10 Walter demons, "Anthony Burgess: Pushing On," New York Times Book Review, Nov.

29, 1970, sec. 7, p. 2. 11 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. M. C. Richards (New York, 1958),

p. 42. Subsequent page references from Artaud are given in the text. 12 The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (New York, 1958), p. 46. 13 Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton, 1973), p. 231. 14 Gerald Weales, "Theatre I," Kenyon Review, XX, 2 (Spring 1958), 303; Colin Duck

worth, Angels of Darkness: Dramatic Effect in Beckett and Ionesco (London, 1972). 15 Stage directions, opening scene of Happy Days (New York, 1961), p. 7. 16 Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre, trans. Donald

Watson (New York, 1964), p. 34. Hereafter cited in the text as NCN. 17 (New York, 1958), pp. 15-16. 18 Watt (New York, 1959), p. 48. 19 Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N. J., 1962). 20 The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York, 1967). 21 Tropic of Cancer (New York, 1961), p. 247. 22 The Theatre in Our Times (New York, 1954), p. 79. 23 Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London, 1933), pp. 240-41.

APPENDIX A

Suggested Reading 1. Raymond Federman and John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 1970). This indispensible annotated bibliography covers all material on the subject up to 1966.

2. Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (New York: Noonday, 1973). This is an updated version of Kenner's critical work, especially useful in its discussion of the

more recent and more elliptical plays and fragments. 3. Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1973). A veteran Beckett critic

incorporates her vast experience on the topic from the beginnings in Godot to the re cent Not I. The book contains a nice biographical sketch which, like those in Kenner and Alvarez, gleans much information from Lawrence Harvey's Samuel Beckett: Post and Critic (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1970). But Cohn's telling, like Kenner's, is, thank fully, more chronologically arranged.

4. A. Alvarez, Samuel Beckett (New York: Viking, 1973). Published in the Modern Masters Series under the general supervision of Frank Kermode, this short study is unique in



that it attempts to take Beckett off the every-work-is-great pedestal and looks at his achievement with a sharp and sometimes skeptical critical eye. Alvarez, however, is strictly of the F. R. Leavis school of scrutiny. His Beckett-as-he-really-is becomes an excursion into the-selected-Beckett-works-I-know-and-love. Idiosyncratic, obsessed with suicide and "desolation row," Alvarez, once he gets down to the texts themselves, can be fresh and exciting.

5. Michael Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead (New York: Grove, 1969). Although relying heavily on John Fletcher's two books, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964) and Samuel Beckett's Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), this is one of the most readable books on Beckett. An intelligent introduction for a first reading of the major works (up to How It Is, that is).

6. Ruby Cohn, ed., Casebook on 'Waiting for Godot' (New York: Grove, 1967). A valuable collection of reviews, references, and interpretations.

7. Edith Kern, Existential Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beckett. Professor Kern centers her attention on the fiction, but her thesis has suggestive possibilities in its relation to Beckett's dramatic form as well. This is a fine demonstration of how Beckett's stylistic achievement relates to the metaphysical problems to which his works inevitably give rise.

8. Alec Reid, All I Can Manage, More Than I Could: An Approach to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (Dublin: Dolmen, 1968). Designed for the theatergoer rather than the scholar, this short study argues that Beckett has devised a new kind of drama which upsets our normal expectations of the medium.


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