Absurdist theater really appeals to me. I wrote my dissertation mainly on Samuel Beckett, who was considered Absurdist even though he disavowed the label. I also like Eugene Ionesco. There is something about the Absurdists that I find bracing and refreshing. They deal with the really difficult aspects of existence. That can often make them blunt and crude, but to me it is invigorating and often darkly humorous.
I was thinking of Ionesco yesterday because I was live-streaming a Catholic Mass service with a priest, readers, servers, and musicians but no audience in the pews because of the virus lockdown. It was slightly eerie: a church service with no one physically in attendance. It reminded me of Ionesco’s play The Chairs from the 1950s. The play involves an elderly couple at an auditorium anticipating a big crowd and important people for a performance related to the husband’s life’s work, a vaguely defined project to improve humanity’s fate. They act as if they are greeting attendees, but they are the only ones there. All the chairs are empty. The revelation the couple anticipates may be the husband’s discovery of the meaning of life; it isn’t specified.
An orator appears in person; he presumably will make the husband’s grand announcement. But the elderly couple commit suicide first by jumping out an open window while asserting long life to “the emperor. ” They die, as James Joyce put it in Ulysses, “with a great future behind” them (as Moses did before entering the Promised Land). The orator then indicates he is deaf and dumb and proceeds to write gibberish on a chalkboard. The play serves as an Absurdist meditation on the continual postponement of meaning and existential anxiety about lacking an attentive audience.
As the American poet Galway Kinnell put it, “..sometimes nowhere/is there anything to hitch oneself to,/and we must make our way by pure balance.” And perhaps seek divine help too.
Interestingly, the sermon yesterday dealt with Peter doubting Jesus and leaving his fishing boat to try to walk on water; one priest remarked that Peter leaving the boat represented a desire to leave the church. Lacking faith, Peter fails and Jesus must save him from drowning. Whether we are parishioners who cannot physically attend Mass, an elderly couple seeking their lifetimes’ fulfilment, or just truth-seekers in an apparently absurd world who lack an audience, many of us can feel like Peter in this passage: doubting the power of our beliefs but still believing.