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Influence of ‘Absurd theatre’ on the play “The Birthday Party”

Ø     About theatre of absurd:-

The Theatre of the Absurd ( French: Theater de l'Absurde) is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s, as well as one for the style of theatre which has evolved from their work. Their work expressed what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down, in fact alerting their audiences to pursue the opposite. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.

“Absurd theatre is associated with existentialism.”

 Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "Theatre of the Absurd." He related these plays based on a broad theme of the Absurd, similar to the way Albert Camus uses the term in his 1942 essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus ". The Absurd in these plays takes the form of man’s reaction to a world apparently without meaning, and/or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. Though the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays: broad comedy, often similar to Vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made play".

Ø     “Theatre of Absurd” = “Expression in art of the meaninglessness of human existence.”

Ø     Characteristics of the “Theatre of Absurd:-

1.Broad comedy

2.Menacing and tragic effect

3.Alienation effect

4.Hopelessness in characters

5.Fragmentations

6.Parody of the concept of ‘well maid play’

7.Unconventional writing

8.Irrationality

9.At some extent similar to the characteristics of Postmodernism.

Ø     The Birthday Party:-

 

The Birthday Party (1957) is the second full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of Pinter's best-known and most-frequently performed plays. After its hostile London reception almost ended Pinter's playwriting career, it went on to be considered "a classic".

The Birthday Party is about Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player in his 30s, who lives in a rundown boarding house, run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town, "probably on the south coast, not too far from London". Two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who arrive supposedly on his birthday and who appear to have come looking for him, turn Stanley's apparently innocuous birthday party organized by Meg into a nightmare.

Ø     Effect of ‘Theatre of Absurd’ in “The Birthday Party”:-

This play comes under both “Comedy of Menace” and “Theatre of Absurd”. For Beckett, absurdity is a metaphysical predicament, Eugene Ionesco visualizes absurdity in concrete terms. For these dramatists, much of the absurdity in human existence emerges from our failures in language, communication, motivation, judgment and human relationships. Harold Pinter presents the same Theatre of the Absurd one finds in the plays of Beckett and Ionesco. Pinter, however, presents his plays in a deceptively realistic idioms and convention and goes to unmask the absurdity of the human situation and the conventional theatre. The Birthday Party has a credible dramatic situation, but not a credible plot structure, characters or any logical, progressive and linear action. In Pinter’s theatre, the persistent presence of a closed room, with a few persons huddled together inside, in a sort of “non-communicative conversation”, is significant. The dramatic image of his play is based on a basic human situation: individual’s search for security in a world which is full of anxiety, terror, false friendship and a lack of understanding between people “We live on the verge of disaster”. The absurd character, in order to reveal the precariousness of man’s existential security, is built up by three distinct elements: mystery, menace and humor. Pinter successfully creates a drama of human relations at the level of language. The plot of the play hinges on Stanley who isolates himself from the world by putting up in a squalid seaside boarding house, owned by Meg and Petey. The couple protects Stanley and tries to make him comfortable. But the peaceful atmosphere is disturbed by unexpected guests, McCann and Goldberg, the agents of unknown forces who have come to claim Stanley. Pinter presents personal breakdown, disillusionment and decay through the linguistic terror unleashed by McCann and Goldberg. Pinter’s play is the absurd story of language. In fact, it is only language that significantly happens in the play, with the characters, plot narrative and stage action hiding behind the language. Language significantly evolves the absurdity in the characters, emotions, relationships and situation. Stanley is tormented not so much by McCann and Goldberg, but by the language used by them. For Pinter, language positively creates a stasis in a communication. Uttering leads characters into pauses and silences, and any verbal assertiveness causes communicative disjunction. The dialogue between Petey and Meg are more an attempt at evasion than communication. According to Ganz, “The most distinctive elements in Pinter’s dramatic technique are the ambiguity that surrounds events, the mysterious behaves of characters, the near Omni presence of menace, and the silences and other verbal characteristics.” For instance, Pinter uses repetition as a mode to create laughter and also to ease the tension of the scene and divert the audience’s response slightly from the action. In the first Act, Meg repeatedly asks a question to create laughter

Meg – Is that you, Petey?

Pause

Petey- is that you?

Pause

 Petey?

 Petey – what?

Meg –Is that you?

 Petey – Yes it’s me.[The Birthday Party: 24]

Absurd ideas and fanciful imagination indicate the feeling of hollowness in Meg and Petey’s married life and also in Stanley’s life gripped by uncertainties and insecurities. This peaceful atmosphere is disturbed by the unexpected entry of McCann and Goldberg who come to perform a “job”. They not only disturb Stanley but arouse his fear for unknown reasons. And this tension passes on to Meg as Stanley starts behaving peculiarly. Pinter is more preoccupied with our fears, our anxieties that reflect throughout the play. Meg’s fear of losing Stanley, “You wouldn’t have to go away if you get a job” (The Birthday Party: 9), reveals her sense of insecurity. The arrival of the two men at the boarding house reflects Stanley’s fear of losing the security, which he was getting from Meg. Again, Stanley’s fear becomes an inevitable cause for absurd imagination. He says:

“They’re coming today.”

Meg: Who?

Stanley: They’re coming in a van.

Meg: who? They’ll carry a wheel barrow in a van.

Stan: They’re looking for someone.

Meg: No they’re not. (The Birthday Party: 24)

Pinter’s dialogues are so created that the ambiguity is maintained and yet they unnerve the audience and open several avenues for interpretations. In this context, Hobe says: “Pinter has consistently relied upon language device for his effects rather than ritualistic visual devices characteristic of the theatre of Absurd”. Pinter uses silence and pauses as mediums of communication. He says that the characters convey a lot by being silent or giving a pause during their conversation, both the actors and the spectators are left wondering as to what would follow. Terror is intensified further with the arrival of two agents who start interrogation and cross-examination. They accuse him of unknown guilt and sins. Stanley remains speechless and only makes the inarticulate gurgling sounds. His silence only denotes the gradual fading of memory, the disintegration of the human personality. In the process of cross-examination words become weapons. Stanley is virtually brain-washed through a flood of incomprehensible questions. Pinter’s plays can be seen as structures of poetic images of an unverifiable and, therefore, dream-like world between fantasy and nightmare. His observation of linguistic quirks is extremely sharp; his dialogue must be considered to be one of the most realistic representatives of the genuine vernacular of the mid-twentieth century. But the real speech of the real people is to a large extent composed of solecism (mistake of grammar idiom) and tautology; it can also be compared to nonsense poetry. In Pinter’s drama, implied meaning with an undertone of ambiguity is quite manifest. He has attained this unique dynamism by a clever manipulation of the exchange pattern of the dialogue. He stresses on four different aspects of language: rhythm, tempo, intensity and tension. These aspects are manifest in the brief exchanges amongst characters and their subtle moves are also precisely illustrated through lingual variation. In Pinter, the structure of the dialogue plays a vital role in creating a tense dramatic atmosphere of menace, and the absurd changes, from one to another, which is a major linguistic element in The Birthday Party. Pinter arranges his words meticulously, and he listens to them through silence. Pinter as an absurdist knows that life never shapes itself. He wants the existential adjustment to come first, and hence, the characters and situation are minutely observed. Dialogue is shaped on bad syntax, tedious repetitions and excruciating contradictions. Through dialogue he presents the inadequacy of the words we use. He hints at the unspoken and latent. He creates an absurd atmosphere by means of the theatrically useful nature of words pertaining to correct rhythm. Illusions, past recollections and childhood memories also become a medium for the characters to relieve their mounting tensions and serve for them as an escape from the present world of brutality. Meg easily enters into her world of happy memories and illusion the next day after the Birthday Party. She is not aware of the harsh reality that Stanley had to undergo harassment, and that he was carried away by force by McCann and Goldberg. With an unconscious irony, she recollects the happy moments and insists….

 “I was the belle of the ball.”

 Petey: Were you?

Meg: oh Yes, They all said I was Petey, I bet you were, too.

 Meg – oh!. It’s true, I was.

 (Pause) I know I was. (The Birthday Party: 59).

The Birthday Party evokes a mood of terror and mystery by creating a distorted world. Esslin (1969:205} rightly remarks: “It speaks plainly of the individual’s pathetic search for security of secret dreads and anxieties of the terrorism of our world.”

Ø     Conclusion:-

 As a whole, Harold Pinter’s plays reveal our state of solitude, nothingness, meaninglessness and isolation. In Pinter’s world, language has lost its semantic power and significance. The characters in The Birthday Party are neither capable using the language; language for them is like movement, the irrationality, aggressiveness and violence. Language, like an absurd hero, brings to the audience the absurdity of human situation. Pinter succeeds in creating an allegorical drama of epic proportions: Man versus his birth and existence, or Man versus language. But, though Man is foredoomed to failure in any epical battle between himself and nature, fails heroically. Absurdity engulfs everything and everyone, even language and life itself.

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Santiago as a tragic hero 

Introduction:-

The Old Man and the Sea is a novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952.

It was the last major work of fiction to be produced by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it centers upon Santiago, an aging fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.

Definition of tragic hero :-

“A hero who suffers from a tragic flaw that eventually causes his downfall.” A tragic hero is the protagonist of a tragedy.

Character of Santiago :-

 Santiago is a Cuban fisherman who has had an extended run of bad luck. Despite his expertise, he has been unable to catch a fish for eighty-four days. He is humble, yet exhibits a justified pride in his abilities. His knowledge of the sea and its creatures, and of his craft, is unparalleled and helps him preserve a sense of hope regardless of circumstance. Throughout his life, Santiago has been presented with contests to test his strength and endurance. The marlin with which he struggles for three days represents his greatest challenge. Paradoxically, although Santiago ultimately loses the fish, the marlin is also his greatest victory.

Santiago as a tragic hero:-

In the novel “The Old Man and the Sea” the main character, Santiago is a tragic hero with a tragic flaw. His hubris ultimately leads him to triumph for a few reasons. Santiago’s hubris helps him to develop into a passionate, optimistic and determined individual; this is what ultimately helps lead him to his triumph.

“A man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honor, courage and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful, and always painful.”

The "Old Man" is a Cuban, without money to buy proper gear or even food, and past the days of his greatest strength, when he was "El CampÈon" of the docks. He fishes for his living, far out in the Gulf Stream, in a skiff with patched sails. It is September, the month of hurricanes and of the biggest fish. After eighty-four luckless days a marlin strikes his bait a hundred fathoms below the boat. The old man, Santiago, is "fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever heard of." The ultimate is now demanded of the craft which a half-century of fishing has taught him.

It is a tale superbly told and in the telling Ernest Hemingway uses all the craft his hard, disciplined trying over so many years has given him. Both craft--writing and fishing--are clearly in mind when the old man Santiago thinks of the strangeness of his powers as fisherman. "The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it." When the boy who took care of him asked if he was strong enough now for a truly big fish, he said, "I think so. And there are many tricks."

In "Big Two-Hearted River," one of the best and happiest of his early short stories, Hemingway sent a young man very like himself off alone on a fishing trip in completely deserted country in northern Michigan. They young man, Nick, needed to be alone and to control his thinking with physical tiredness and to get back to something in himself to which memories of fishing seemed to offer a clue.

The trip was a success because Nick, grateful for the purity of his pleasure, was able to set himself limits. He did not go into the deep water of the swamp where the biggest fish were, but where it might be impossible to land them. "In the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it." There was plenty of time for that kind of fishing in the days to come.

 In it Hemingway has described a fishing adventure which is tragic, or as close to tragedy as fishing may be. In "The Old Man and the Sea," as in the early "Big Two-Hearted River," the art and the truth come from a sense of limits. In the new story, however, a man exceeds the limits, and pays a price for it that is more than his own suffering.

The line of dramatic action in "The Old Man and the Sea" curves up and down with a classic purity of design to delight the makers of textbooks. But what Santiago brings back suggests something new about Hemingway himself, defines an attitude never so clearly present in his other work.

In "The Old Man and the Sea," it is all quite different. The old man has learned humility, which he knew "was not disgraceful, and carried no less of true pride." Humility understands the limits of what a man can do alone, and knows how much his being, the worth and humanity of his being, depends on community with other men and with nature, which is here the sea. Santiago has the language to express this, as the American Harry Morgan did not. Santiago speaks in those formalized idioms from the Romance languages which in so many of Hemingway's stories have served to express ideas of dignity, propriety and love. Santiago lives in a good town where he had been happy with his wife, and where there is now the boy. He had taught the boy fishing, and the boy loves him. "Queva" the boy says devotedly. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you."

In the evening when he came back empty-handed many fishermen made fun of him but he was not angry. Still other, of the old fishermen, looked at him and was sad. Santiago, though not a religious man, started muttering prayers and promises to make a pilgrimage to the virgin de cobre if he caught the fish.

Conclusion:

At the end we can say that as a noble and kind hearted man Santiago always suffers from tragic flow of life. But he never ever complaint about their bad lucks. Santiago’s character gets sympathy from the readers through the entire novel.

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The character of ‘CALIBAN’ in ‘The Tempest’ and ‘A Tempest’:

                                                 

Ø     Post-colonial literature:-

Colonialism:

The controlling and governing influence of a nation over a dependent country, territory or people. Colonialism is the establishment, exploitation, maintenance, acquisition, and expansion of colony in one territory by a political power from another territory.

Post-colonialism:

Post colonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline featuring methods of intellectual discourse that analyze, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism, to the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers for the economic exploitation of the native people and their land. Drawing from postmodern schools of thought, postcolonial studies analyze the politics of knowledge (creation, control, and distribution) by analyzing the functional relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism—the how and the why of an imperial regime's representations (social, political, cultural) of the imperial colonizer and of the colonized people.

       
 ‘The Tempest’:-        

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skilful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's lowly nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son, Ferdinand.

‘A Tempest’:-

A Tempest by Aime Cesaire was originally published in 1969 in French by Editions du Seuil in Paris. Cesaire, a recognized poet, essayist, playwright, and politician, was born in Martinique in 1913 and, until his death in 2008, had been instrumental in voicing post-colonial concerns. In the 1930s, he, along with Leopold Senghor and Leon Gontian Damas, developed the negritude movement which endeavored to question French colonial rule and restore the cultural identity of blacks in the African diaspora. A Tempest is the third play in a trilogy aimed at advancing the tenets of the negritude movement. In 1985, the play was translated into English by Richard Miller and had its American premiere in 1991 at the Ubu Repertory Theater in New York after having been performed in France, the Middle East, Africa, and the West Indies.

Ø Etemology:-

The name is an anagram of the Spanish word cannibal (Carib people). Character may be inspired by Kaliban or cauliban in the Romani language- means black or with blackness.

Ø Character of Caliban:-

Caliban is one of the primary antagonists in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. He is the subhuman son of the malevolent witch, Sycorax.

After his island becomes occupied by Prospero and his daughter Miranda, Caliban is forced into servitude. While he is referred to as a calvaluna or mooncalf, a freckled monster, he is the only human inhabitant of the island that is otherwise "not honour'd with a human shape". In some traditions he is depicted as: a wild man, or a deformed man, or a beast man, or sometimes a mix of fish and man. Caliban is a Cambion, the half-human son of Sycorax by (according to Prospero, though this is not confirmed) a devil. Banished from Algiers, Sycorax was left on the isle, pregnant with Caliban, and died before Prospero's arrival. Caliban, despite his inhuman nature, clearly loved and worshipped his mother, and refers to Setebos as his mother's god. Prospero explains his harsh treatment of Caliban by claiming that after initially befriending him, Caliban attempted to rape Miranda. Caliban confirms this gleefully, saying that if he had not been stopped he would have peopled the island with a race of Calibans—"Thou didst prevent me, I had peopled else this isle with Calibans". Prospero then entraps Caliban and torments him with harmful magic if Caliban does not obey his orders. Resentful of Prospero, Caliban takes Stephano, one of the shipwrecked servants, as a god and as his new master. Caliban learns that Stephano is neither a god nor Prospero's equal in the conclusion of the play, however, and Caliban agrees to obey Prospero again.

Character of Caliban in “The Tempest” :-

This picture shows the situation of Caliban in “The Tempest”.

Caliban is a product of nature, the offspring of the witch Sycorax and the devil. Prospero has made Caliban his servant or, more accurately, his slave. Throughout most of the play, Caliban is insolent and rebellious and is only controlled through the use of magic. Caliban claims the island as his own and maintains that Prospero has tricked him in the past.

Caliban represents the black magic of his mother and initially appears bad, especially when judged by conventional civilized standards. Because Prospero has conquered him, Caliban plots to murder Prospero in revenge. It is clear, though, that Caliban is a poor judge of character: He embraces Stefano as a god and trusts his two drunken conspirators to help him carry out a plot to murder Prospero. In many ways, Caliban is an innocent, reacting to emotional and physical needs without the ability to think through and fully understand the events and people who surround him. He is truly a child of nature, uneducated and reacting to his surroundings in much the same way that an animal does.          

Caliban is no mere creation of a passing poetic fancy, no chance addition to the substance of the drama; for although he may have originated in Shakespeare's imagination from the fantastic and wondrous reports about the wild inhabitants (the cannibals) of the newly discovered  continents, and although grotesquely formed and humorously exaggerated — so as to suit the fantastico-comic coloring of the whole — still he is a necessary member in the artistic organism of the piece. And as Prospero's mind is evidently one of more than ordinary endowments, and, like every historical leader of men, represents the higher idea of what is general, so Caliban, his organic opposite, is likewise no mere individual, but also the representative of what is general, the personified idea of human wickedness; in him, in his defiance and arrogance and his blind, coarse sensuality, the demonical meets the brutal. 
Caliban has become a by-word as the strange creation of a poetical imagination. A mixture of gnome and savage, half daemon, half brute, in his behavior we perceive at once the traces of his native disposition, and the influence of Prospero's education. The latter could only unfold his understanding, without, in the slightest degree, taming his rooted malignity: it is as if the use of reason and human speech were communicated to an awkward ape. In inclination Caliban is malicious, cowardly, false, and base; and yet he is essentially different from the vulgar knaves of a civilized world, as portrayed occasionally by Shakespeare. He is rude, but not vulgar; he never falls into the prosaic and low familiarity of his drunken associates, for he is, in his way, a poetical being; he always speaks in verse. He has picked up everything dissonant and thorny in language to compose out of it a vocabulary of his own; and of the whole variety of nature, the hateful, repulsive, and pettily deformed have alone been impressed on his imagination. The magical world of spirits, which the staff of Prospero has assembled on the island, casts merely a faint reflection into his mind, as a ray of light which falls into a dark cave, incapable of communicating to it either heat or illumination, serves merely to set in motion the poisonous vapors. The delineation of this monster is throughout inconceivably consistent and profound, and, notwithstanding its hatefulness, by no means hurtful to our feelings, as the honor of human nature is left untouched. 

Character of Caliban in “A Tempest” :-

This picture shows the situation of Caliban in “A Tempest”.

Aime Cesaire also represents the character of Caliban in his famous work ‘A Tempest’. Caliban has power and language. They also shift perspectives from colonial to post-colonial. Cesaire presented Caliban as colonized with more aggressions. Enslavement caused by their race. He attributes his alleged attempted rape of Miranda to in Prospero's language. His intense feeling of alienation for his dominated subjectivity. Caliban always seeking more for his freedom knows how to use language. Caliban often speaks in his native language.

Caliban tells Prospero that no longer he wants to be called Caliban.

Conclusion:-

At last we can say that the character of caliban play vital role in both the play. We can see the pityful situation of caliabn in the play. Both the writers represents the character of caliabn diffently.


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