There were a certain equivocation on the period of the Absurd

“I've invited a person :::. in order to describe to you, ” states the Old Man in The Bar stools, “that often the individual”—that avatar of this self spawned by this Enlightenment—“and the man happen to be one and the exact same. ” That established, he says a minute later, “I am definitely not myself. Me one more. I am this one inside other” (145). About the personal, to help be sure, there seemed to be a certain forestalling upon the stage of the particular Screaming, from Beckett's tramp insisting that the minor messenger via Godot certainly not come tomorrow and declare that he never ever saw him to the imbroglio about the doorbell around The Bald Soprano. “Experience teaches people, ” tells Mrs. case in a fit of anger, “that even when one hears the doorbell ring it is because there will be by no means anyone there” (23), like there were being virtually no one to become there, not any person as well as individual, little resembling a good self applied. Connected with course, we don't have to trust her, no more than we trust Derrida or even Deleuze or maybe the brand-new orthodoxy involving dispersed subjectivity, that the self is no more than the liability of identities elided into language. For inside the utter untenability, untenable as utterance, the self is additionally liable to be consumed on faith. “This morning hours when you viewed by yourself in the mirror, an individual didn't see yourself, ” says Mrs. Martin to be able to Mr. Martin, who is usually undeterred by that. “That's mainly because I wasn't there yet, ” he claims (36). Exactly how curious it is, how inquisitive the idea is, we somehow consider we exist.
As regarding the existence of a new “work of art” within our demystifying period, in the event skill has not recently been fully divested of benefit, that is relegated in order to the status involving another kind of “discourse, ” while (with the various in jeopardy too) the particular aesthetic has been switched into an antiaesthetic. 1 might think that Ionesco was there in advance together with his notion of a good antiplay, taking to it is metonymic hat, certainly not this particular, that, certainly not that, this particular, words sliding, sliding, rotting with imprecision, the empty play on the signifiers: epigrams, puns, évidence, suppositions, deductions, pleonasms and paradoxes, impure, proverbs, fables, the show of prosody, or around a schwindel of nonsense and nonsensical iterations, the eruption of mere terme, plosives, fricatives, a cataclysm of glottals or, within the screaming choral climax of The Bald Soprano, with a new staccato of cockatoos, “cascades of cacas” (40) careening over the stage. Or perhaps as the Professor demands through the Scholar in The particular Lesson, sounds forecasted loudly with all the power of her bronchi, like that diva of performance art, Diamanda Bals, not necessarily sparing typically the vocal cords, but generating a electronic weapon of them. Or often the sounds warming within their sensation—“‘Butterfly, ’ ‘Eureka, ’ ‘Trafalgar, ’ ‘Papaya’”—above the nearby weather, “so that they could travel without danger regarding going down on deaf the ears, that are, ” as within the duro vibration associated with the bourgeois visitors (Brecht's culinary theater), “veritable voids, tombs of sonorities, ” to be awakened, if, simply by an accelerating combination of words, syllables, paragraphs, in “purely irrational montage of sound, ” a good assault of sound, “denuded of all sense” (62–63).
Mania obsessive, cruel since he / she becomes, what the Teacher is apparently defining, by way of the crescendo connected with violence, is not only this hero worship of a antiplay, nonetheless a kind involving alternative theater or another form of skill. Certainly, he might be conveying, “from that dizzying and elusive perspective in which usually every reality is lost, ” what Artaud tries to reimagine, in associated often the Orphic techniques on the alchemical theatre, its “complete, sonorous, streaming realization, ”6 mainly because well as certain fresh activities of the sixties, turned on simply by Artaud's rudeness, its faith-based project, which came, just like the return of the repressed, on the exhilarating crest with the theater of the Outrageous. So, in the interval of the Dwelling Movie theater and Dionysus around 69, or Orghast in Persepolis, we saw artists (the word “actor” shunted apart, tainted like “the author” by conventional drama) pitilessly expelling air in the voice, or caressingly on the oral cords, which, similar to Artaud's incantatory murmurs surrounding this time as well as, in the Balinese dilemma, the “flights of elytra, [the] rustling of branches, ”7 or perhaps, in the brutalizing fervor on the Professor's lyric visualizing, “like harps or foliage inside wind, will unexpectedly move, agitate, vibrate, vibrate, vibrate or ovulate, or even fricate or jostle from one another, or sibilate, sibilate, inserting everything in activity, typically the uvula, the language, often the palate, the teeth, ” and as an individual might still discover this today (back around the acting class) along with routines in the tradition through Grotowski to Suzuki (tempered by the Linklater method) typically the polymorphous perversity connected with it all: “Finally the particular words come out associated with the nose, the mouth, the pores, sketching along with them all this internal organs we have referred to as, torn right up by the particular moth, in a strong, majestic flight, … labials, dentals, palatals, and other individuals, some caressing some nasty and violent” (62–64). And many, too, expressing “all this perverse possibilities of often the mind, ” as Artaud says on the contagious great time-saver of the Plague8—the contamination there, if not the revelation, in Ionesco's This Chairs, with “a bad smell from … flat water” listed below the windowpane and, with mosquitos to arrive (113), the unrelieved stench of the pathos connected with “all that's gone straight down the drain” (116).