Katie Arthur

One of the most exciting things about growing up, after Christmas and trips to Walmart, is learning about the way the world works, and so many things go into creating that excitement.  Parents tell you, “don’t touch the hot stove; you’ll get hurt.”  Granddad says, “bake flour and sugar and eggs together, and you’ll get cookies.”  Your backside says, “don’t yell at your sister, or I’ll get spanked again.”  Eventually, you come to understand patterns in the world, and you find there is a cause and effect tendency in the universe.  You come to expect certain things in certain situations, and you discover in those expectations, you have an exciting power over your circumstances.  You can plug “x” social tool into “y” social situation to invariably come up with “z” desired social outcome.  But there has been a questioning among the literary minds, a wondering about whether cause and effect is actually a valid way to understand the world.  They wonder whether we shouldn’t unlearn those patterns we grew up into, whether we shouldn’t toss our expectations for anything and everything, perhaps, out the window.  Absurdist literature is a great challenge to readers’ expectations, calling into question their means of knowing anything.  In their plays Waiting for Godot and The Importance of Being Earnest, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde present a challenge to their audiences, asking them especially to examine their assumptions about the universality of words, by creating radically different meanings in different contexts, despite using the same words.

The primary underlying understanding when reading absurdist literature, the only universality granted by absurdists, is relativity.  Nothing can be assumed to be the same for separate people, times, situations, places, etc.  Although extreme relativism is accepted as a universal in the absurd, it cannot be understood to be a set down rule, a binding law governing all that happens in the world.  It is simply a coincidence.  Like a scientific theory, it is an observed pattern — or lack thereof, in this case — helping us understand the world and the limits of our understanding of the world.

When we happen upon them, Vladimir and Estragon are sitting there, “waiting for Godot,” not quite sure he will ever come, discussing a scattered montage of topics, progressing from suicide to taking off boots to painful suffering to buttoning one’s fly.  Vladimir ends the scene, saying concerning the maintenance of one’s fly, one should “Never neglect the little things of life” (Godot, Act I).  In other words, he is saying, the little things are too important to be overlooked, and in doing so, he makes an interesting word choice.  In my personal experience, “little” things are just … small.  He seems to be comparing buttoning his fly with a bigger, one might say, more important, weightier issue.  But that’s exactly the point.  That is my experience.  One might say that.  The problem for the absurdists is we can’t say anything about Vladimir’s experience.  We haven’t lived it.  To Vladimir, buttoning his fly is a valuable thing, despite being called “little,” despite my understanding of the word “little.”  He also does an interesting thing with the language style.  This is said in the style we often associate with proverbs, pithy sayings meant to be applicable to just about everything, everywhere, and in all times.  But, my experience is not the same as Vladimir’s.  The proverb works for him, but it does not work for me, which totally defeats the point of a proverb.  We can’t expect one proverb, Beckett’s work shows us, to apply to all times and places and people.  The proverb, as a literary device, has been subtly attacked and its readers and writers asked to reevaluate its use entirely, because Vladimir wants to button his fly and I don’t see the big deal about it.

Wilde also uses his play on the Significance of Being Sincere (wait…?) to ask his audience to reconsider their expectations of absolutes.  Algernon and his dear friend Jack are calmly discussing their complicated marriages over an afternoon snack, and, as they often do, things get a little tense.  Jack is annoyed with Algernon for continuing to calmly eat muffins, Jack’s muffins, when they are in such a terrible heap of trouble.  “I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances” (Earnest, Act II).  Jack then goes to eat a muffin, and Algernon retorts.

ALGERNON: But you have just said it was perfectly heatless to eat muffins.

JACK: I said it was perfectly heartless of you, under the circumstances.  That is a very different thing (Earnest, Act II).

Algernon sees an incongruity in Jack’s logic, as did I when I read this (although, I cannot speak for anyone else who reads this, as per absurdist suggestion).  It is heartless for Algernon to eat muffins.  It is not heartless for Jack to eat muffins.  They are in exactly the same situation.  The rules for eating are arbitrary.  There is no reason behind their existence, and that does not create any problems in the absurdist universe.  They are also performative to a degree.  It is heartless for Algernon to eat muffins because Jack says so.  This does not follow any of the social patterns we’ve learned as children.  There is no cause and effect here.  He simply says “so,” and it is “so.”  Words are used here to create arbitrary value.  Jack is free to say whatever he choses, to create whatever kind of values he choses, because he is using words: “I said it was perfectly heartless of you…” (Earnest, Act II, emphasis added).

Beckett’s fake proverb and Wilde’s arbitrary value assigning change the way we read absurdist drama.  We must now understand, language is versatile.  It can apply to many situations or only a few.  It is powerful to create and change the world.  It is itself only regulated by use, so must therefore change as its use is changed.  This is a freeing idea, they say.  With the versatility of language in mind, there is freedom to read without the need to expect universality.  We are free to simply be delighted by the author-creator’s (hopefully) clever uses of the language.  In speaking and writing, the absurdists claim there is freedom to discard the expected patterns, the rules that must regulate his creation (which are fairly arbitrary themselves).  Absurdist literature must be read as a challenge to discard patterns and accept the freedom of relativity.

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting For Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9^th ed. Vol. 8. Eds. Jahan Ramazani and Jon Stallworthy.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012. Print.

Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People. Project Gutenberg, 2006. Ebook.