(3 of 6)
In the world of Samuel Beckett, the entire machinery of existence seems to be grinding to a halt. Words leave his characters' mouths between pauses and in slow motion, as if speech were becoming extinct. The scenery is either fossilized, the bare gnarled tree of Waiting For Godot, or funereal, the ashcans of Endgame, the urns of Play, the mound of earth in Happy Days.'Man is maimed and buried alive in these props. One critic has called a Beckett hero a perverse Cartesian: I stink, therefore I am. Actually, the degradation and mutilation of the body are Beckett's image for the withering away of the soul.
The mood of his plays is traumatic loss, a vestigial memory of the expulsion from Eden. With elegiac melancholy, Beckett intones a Kyrie eleison without God. Godot is hope's requiem. The two tramps are waiting for Godot in vain. In Endgame, the lid is lifted on a character who is dying in an ashcan, and it is disclosed that "he's crying." "Then he's living," says another. The only sort of affirmation lies in Beckett's very act of communicating the darkness of his vision. As Eric Bentley puts it: "If one truly had lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so."
If existence comes to a halt in Beckett, it is absurdly speeded up in the work of Eugene Ionesco. When the clock strikes 17 in the first scene of his first play, The Bald Soprano, it sounds the meaning of all his plays: "The universe is out of control." Better than any other playwright, Ionesco has captured the ludicrous panic that invades modern man in an age of rapidly changing technology. An ardent admirer of the Marx Brothers, Ionesco produces tragic farce by using the proliferation and acceleration of physical objects—much the way that the Marx Brothers in A Night at The Opera piled people and things into a tiny ship's cabin. In The New Tenant, furniture inexorably chokes up every inch of space until the hero is entombed amid his belongings like a petty-bourgeois Pharaoh. But as the props become more animated, the people become more desiccated. The insides of Ionesco's characters are like the outsides of computers. It is only a step from their interchangeable rhinoplastic noses to their look-alike Rhinoceros horns. Ionesco has drawn a devastating portrait of the Unnoticeables.
Death Without Reason
Conformity yields to enormity in Jean Genet. If one can imagine Walter Mitty as a criminal, a pederast and a diabolist, one has taken a quick squint into Genet's imagination. Genet makes the erotically impossible possible. He creates nuns in black lace panties, bare-breasted prostitutes with the flowing tails of ponies. But the whores, pimps, sadists and lesbians who people his plays are also his army of revenge marshaled against the world. The ritual murder of a white woman in The Blacks is a Negro act only insofar as it contains the death wish of the outcast for the society that excludes him.