SISYPHUS HAPPY: Beckett beyond the Absurd

Abstract

Relatively early in Beckett's career, his works came to be associated with and the likes of Kafka, Sartre, and Camus. In 1951, for example, the French reviewer Jean Pouillon called Molloy novel of the absurd, to use a word which has become convenient [...].2 And, of course, Martin Esslin in 1961 launched Beckett as his flagship figure in his book The Theatre of the Absurd. As late as 1971, David Hesla in The Shape of Chaos claimed that Beckett was stuck in the domain of the absurd. Said Hesla about Beckett's Watt and the work to follow: From this time forward, Beckett must and will conduct the art of narrative fiction on premises which will not permit him to escape from the ascesis imposed by the irrationality of (Hesla, 84). However, I propose that in the Beckett ceuvre there is life beyond the absurd, certainly in certain works of the 70's and 80's. To establish a measure for the meaning of the absurd, I recall here Albert Camus' seminal essays on absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus (Le mythe de Sisyphe, 1942), as well as certain remarks on the absurd by Eugene Ionesco. For Camus the two major factors of absurd existence are estrangement and the spectre of death: