Billington's assault on absurdism

The Guardian's Michael Billington began his recent series on modern theater by discussing the contemporary irrelevance of absurdism, a European artistic response to the senseless horrors of World War II. Absurdist writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Albert Camus captured the post-war zeitgeist of humans cut off from all meaning and trudging onward in useless striving.

But that was then. Billington argues that today's audiences want more from playwrights than a "cry of anguish" at the absurd human condition; they want "information and enlightenment." Absurdism, by contrast, remains a historical curiosity that served its era, and Billington dismisses its ability to explain "the complexities of today's world." (See "A is for absurdum.")

His dismissal assumes much about what audiences want to see and absurdist literature, and even more about the human condition.

Fukuyama's fallacy

Billington's insistence on audience's desire for "information" over philosophy reflects a sentiment asserted by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book, The End of History and The Last Man. Fukuyama's work argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in an end of social and economic changes, after which all humanity would live under market-based, liberal democratic conditions.

Billington, similarly blinded, would have us believe that all remaining theater— especially political theater— must pose and answer questions within this liberal-democratic-market framework, where "enlightenment and information" consists of fact-based answers and policy-driven solutions. But his argument excludes those in Western society have reached the end of that rope and would turn to theater for an answer to the "Why should we live?" rather than the much easier question of "How should we live?"

Billington doesn't see that millions today wander in aimless stupor like the hoboes in Beckett's Waiting For Godot. Many more feel— like Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern— trapped in the bowels of a ship, flipping a coin in symbolic illustration of the forces that have placed them in their station. All those protesters in Greece, Portugal, Russia and Britain might well ask: Who cares about enlightenment when the answers to life's fundamental questions of value and meaning still elude us?

America's widespread Occupy movement has been widely characterized as an assortment of dropouts who lack a coherent agenda or demands. That sounds an awful lot like a cry of anguish to me.

Waiting for a message

As for the absurdist works themselves? Two examples staged recently in Philadelphia by Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium suggest the contemporary relevance of absurdism.

Ionesco's The Chairs depicts a couple living in a lighthouse, where they anxiously await an orator whose message will bring meaning to their lives. I can imagine such a play resonating with John the Baptist before Christ's arrival and also with the 40% of the U.S. electorate who intend to vote against President Obama without yet knowing his opponent's identity.

Max Fritsch's The Arsonists portrays a similar husband and wife living fearfully in a world of moral decay; although they know that arsonists are burning down civilization, they nonetheless invite the firebugs into their home— after all, one must keep an open mind about everything, even arsonists.

To be sure, Billington acknowledges this play's relevance to today's debates over how to fight subversion and terrorism. But for the most part he insists that absurdism speaks only to continental Europe after World War II.

Nietzsche's experiment

Absurdism as a description of existence first appeared in the works of SÓ¸ren Kierkegaard, a 19th-Century theist who saw the absurd as rational man's inability to grasp God's intended reason and meaning in life. Since we can't know the correct action, Kierkegaard maintained, every choice tosses the individual into a state of despair and anguish.

Nietzsche subsequently abandoned God but picked up where Kierkegaard left off. Unlike every philosopher since Aristotle, Nietzsche refused to look on the world in wonderment. Instead, he saw existence as meaningless and filled with horrors, which we can't ameliorate or eliminate but only ignore, endure or resist.

Yet Nietzsche found a way to make sense of this nightmare: amor fati, or "love of fate." In The Gay Science, he proposed a thought experiment:

Imagine that a demon told you that you must live your entire life over and over again, eternally. Would the thought cause you to gnash your teeth in anguish? Or have you experienced even one ecstatic moment that would make you wish nothing were different for all eternity?

The notion that life is senseless has always plagued human beings— not just Europeans who survived World War II. Somewhere on this planet, it's safe to say, absurdism will always find an audience and serve a useful purpose, even in an ostensibly civilized place like Philadelphia.