Realism and the Theater of the Absurd
Realism can be defined as the representation of everyday life in literature. Concerned with the average, the common place, the ordinary, realism employs theatrical conventions to create the illusion of everyday life. With realistic drama came the depiction of subjects close to the lives of middle-class people: work, marriage, and family life. From this standpoint, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House are more realistic than Shakespeare's Othello, which in turn is more realistic than Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Although each of these plays possesses a true-to-life quality, each operates according to different theatrical conventions. Royal personages, gods, military heroes, and exalted language are absent from Miller's and Ibsen's plays, as modern dramatists turned to an approximation of the daily life of the lower and middle classes.
One means by which realistic drama creates the illusion of everyday life is trough setting. Whereas settings consist primarily of painted backdrops in Moliere's plays and are often established by dialogue in Shakespeare's plays, the settings of modern realistic plays are designed to look authentic. Moreover, setting in plays such as Ibsen's A Doll House often functions symbolically. In Elements of Literature 3, Robert Scholes has noted that the elaborately detailed setting of A Doll House symbolizes both "the impact of the Helmers' environment on their marriage" and the "very nature of their marriage"; it also embodies "the profound pressures placed on Helmer and Nora by the material and social conditions of their world."
Other conventions designed to create and sustain the illusion that the audience was watching a slice of domestic life include the following: the use of a three-walled room with an open fourth wall into which the audience peers to view and overhear the action; dialogue that approximates the idiom of everyday discourse, polished to be sure, but designed especially to sound like speech rather than poetry; plots that, though highly contrived, seem to turn on a series of causally related actions; subjects not from mythology or history, but from the concerns of ordinary life.
Absurdist drama on the other hand is nonrealistic, even antirealistic. Absurdist playwrights reject the conventions of realism, substituting well-contrived plots with storyless action; they replace believable characters of psychological complexity with barely recognizable figures; and for witty repartee and grand speeches they offer incoherent ramblings and disconnected dialogue.
This rejection of realistic theatrical conventions primarily because ways of perceiving reality in the twentieth century had changed so radically that realistic dramatic conventions were considered to be inadequate to the task of representing reality as dramatists of the absurd envisioned it. absurdist dramatists reject the implications that lie behind realistic conventions; they object, for example, to the idea that characters can be understood or that plot should be rationally ordered. For them, people are not understandable, and life is disorderly and chaotic. Absurdist writers attempt to dramatize these and other conceptions in plays that depict experience as meaningless and existence as purposeless; they portray human beings as irrational, pathetic figures, helpless against life's chaos. For the absurdist, humans are uprooted, cut off from their historical context, dispossessed of religious certainty, alienated from their social and physical environment, and unable to communicate with others.
Martin Esslin, a leading drama critic and expert on absurdist drama, has noted that the word absurd when used with reference to the theater of the absurd does not mean "ridiculous," but "out of harmony." Modern individuals, according to the absurdist dramatists, are out of tune with nature, with other human beings, and with themselves. This sense of being at odds with life thwarts their hopes, deprives them of happiness, and robs their lives of meaning.
Esslin has also recognized that dramatists of the absurd, such as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, have moved beyond arguing about the absurdity of the human condition to present that condition in concrete dramatic terms of the theater. When dramatists of the absurd, thus, violate the rules of conventional drama, they do so because they see that strategy as the most effective way to illustrate the conditions of modern human experience as they understand them.