Poetry or Truth? Part I: Chekhov, Absurdism, and the Meaning of The Final Problem
Tags: Literature, Sherlock Holmes, Theatre, LGBTQ, Sherlock

ii. Theatre of the Absurd

‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a collection of post-war playwrights who were producing plays that were, to borrow a term, garbage:

When the plays of Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and Adamov first appeared on the stage they puzzled and outraged most critics as well audiences. And no wonder. These plays flout all the standards by which drama has been judged for many centuries; they must therefore appear as a provocation to people who have come into the theatre expecting to find what they would recognize as a well-made play. A well-made play is expected to present characters that are well-observed and convincingly motivated: these plays often contain hardly any recognizable human beings and present completely unmotivated actions. A well-made play is expected to entertain by the ding-dong of witty and logically built-up dialogue: in some of these plays dialogue seems to have degenerated into meaningless babble. A well-made play is expected to have a beginning, a middle, and a neatly tied-up ending: these plays often start at an arbitrary point and seem to end just as arbitrarily. By all the traditional standards of critical appreciation of the drama, these plays are not only abominably bad, they do not even deserve the name drama.

The hallmarks of the Theatre of the Absurd: unrelatable inhuman characters, completely unmotivated actions, nonsensical dialogue, arbitrary progression of the main action. Already this is sounding unsettlingly familiar.

This list is nearly identical to the list of complaints brought against TFP. The deranged sister imprisoned in a dick-shaped fortress, the drone-delivered ‘patience grenade’, the bounce from Speedy’s awning onto a boat in the middle of the ocean, ‘Sherlock Holmes the Pirate’, among many many other inexplicable aspects of TFP tick every. Single. Box.

Whatever your opinion of the final product, it clearly is not the product of lazy writing.

But what context does Theatre of the Absurd add to our reading of the show, other than the possibility that TFP was exactly as the creators intended?

Aesthetic or Philosophy?

The essence of an absurdist view of life is contained in the opening line of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when Estragon says ‘Nothing to be done’. This one line sums up the sense of hopelessness and futility that characterises Beckett’s unchanging and unchangeable world. However Chekhov is not Beckett. What he depicts is a world in which ‘no one is doing anything’. (x)

The label of ‘the Absurd’ is used in a couple different ways, and I want to first clarify what I mean when I talk about it here. The category of ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was first applied by Esslin — a critic — and not born out of a cohesive group of self-identifying playwrights. There is a philosophy of Absurdism; Camus identified his own work and philosophy as Absurd, and Beckett and some others absolutely do follow in that philosophical tradition. Absurdist philosophy is a sort of meeting point between Existentialism and Nihilism: it’s futile to attempt to find meaning in life and the universe, but we attempt it anyway.

On the other hand, Esslin is more interested in grouping together anything that looks like a play about nonsense, regardless of how it was intended. This caused a few of the playwrights he grouped under this label to grumble that he hadn’t understood what their work was about at all. Many plays give the appearance of Absurdism — the Aesthetic of Absurdism, if you will — but are not, in fact, ‘plays about nothing’.

My point here is that we are by no means tied to the application of strictly Absurdist philosophy based on Talalay’s tweet, because even Esslin himself relied heavily on aesthetic to define the label he created. My goal is not to argue that TFP should be interpreted as a celebration of the inherent meaninglessness of life. (Thank goodness.)

‘Poetic Images’

So: if we aren’t talking about Absurdism the Philosophy, how do we define Absurdism the Aesthetic? Esslin breaks down the difference between conventional theatre and his idea of Theater of the Absurd:

Here we touch the essential point of difference between the conventional theatre and the Theatre of the Absurd. The former, based as it is on a known framework of accepted values and a rational view of life, always starts out by indicating a fixed objective towards which the action will be moving or by posing a definite problem to which it will supply an answer. Will Hamlet revenge the murder of his father? Will lago succeed in destroying Othello? Will Nora leave her husband? In the conventional theatre the action always proceeds towards a definable end. The spectators do not know whether that end will be reached and how it will be reached. Hence, they are in suspense, eager to find out what will happen. In the Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, the action does not proceed in the manner of a logical syllogism. It does not go from A to B but travels from an unknown premise X towards an unknowable conclusion Y. The spectators, not knowing what their author is driving at, cannot be in suspense as to how or whether an expected objective is going to be reached. They are not, therefore, so much in suspense as to what is going to happen next (although the most unexpected and unpredictable things do happen) as they are in suspense about what the next event to take place will add to their understanding of what is happening. The action supplies an increasing number of contradictory and bewildering clues on a number of different levels, but the final question is never wholly answered. Thus, instead of being in suspense as to what will happen next, the spectators are, in the Theatre of the Absurd, put into suspense as to what the play may mean. This suspense continues even after the curtain has come down. (x)

The most interesting piece of this breakdown is the difference in what creates the suspense in the work. It is a wholly different type of suspense. People have complained that S4 really does appear to be the end of the show, because it’s the only season that hasn’t ended in an outrageously dramatic cliffhanger. Alternatively, I would suggest that ‘suspense as to what the play may mean’ describes the experience of the majority of Sherlock fans since January.

It seems, really, that TFP achieved exactly the effect that it was aiming for.

So then: how does an Absurdist work create meaning? New episodes of Sherlock only appear once every few years; we all expect new content to add some kind of new understanding of the story.

We know that conventional drama is a series of actions and reactions of the characters that logically follow from one another. These choices give us that insight into the characters. Symbolism is used within the bounds of realism to simultaneously support and reinforce the surface-level events, i.e. the main action.

When symbolic meaning drives the narrative choices of the author to some extent, while still maintaining a veneer of realism, we have Chekhov. We have, I’ve argued, Sherlock S1–3.

We break into Absurdism as soon as that veneer of realism is abandoned. The driving force of symbolism takes precedence over the logic of the surface-level narrative. On the surface, nonsensical things are happening in service of the greater symbolic intent of the art. Esslin describes the result as ‘poetic images’:

[T]he plays of the Theatre of the Absurd are primarily intended to convey a poetic image or a complex pattern of poetic images; they are above all a poetical form. (x)

Narratives present a character making decisions, learning, changing. The intended takeaway from poetry is a mood, a feeling.

Contrast this with the description of Chekhov as the ‘poet-realist,’ and you begin to see two control knobs at the disposal of the author: one knob for the grit of the realism attempted, and another knob for the depth and poeticism of symbolic meaning.

Poetry or truth? Many would say they’re the same thing.

Weird, Gay, and Misunderstood

Now, I’m by no means an expert on the Theatre of the Absurd, but there was something that created enough of a pattern that even I noticed in my very cursory overview: there exists a substantial overlap between playwrights designated as ‘Absurdists’ and 20th-century gay playwrights writing on the topic of sexuality.

Albee’s play mentioned by Esslin, Zoo Story, is very blatantly about two gay men cruising Central Park in the late 1950s. The play takes place around the bench where they meet, where they frankly discuss their sexual pasts and the story of a monstrous dog that they alternately feed and poison stands as a metaphor for their complex relationship with their sexualities. It ends, as these plays so often do, with a tragic yet euphemistic ‘stabbing’ death.

Jean Genet, another originator of Theatre of the Absurd, made his sexuality ‘the center of his autobiographical fiction’ (x). You may also be familiar with his play Deathwatch, known affectionately in some circles as the Leonard Nimoy gay prison threesome movie. (x)

It’s striking just how specific the overlap is at points: Esslin allows that “Brecht’s earliest plays bear the marks of the Dadaist influence and can be regarded as early examples of the Theatre of the Absurd: In the Jungle of the Cities for instance presents the audience with a totally unmotivated struggle, a series of poetic images of man fighting a senseless battle with himself.” (x) Elsewhere, a critic notes that “three of Bertolt Brecht’s first four plays […] portray sexual relationships between men, especially In the Jungle of Cities (1923) and Edward II (1924).” (x)

Absurdist plays painted an image of man’s loneliness and inability to make contact at the same time that gay artists were depicting their struggles with their sexuality and society.

For all of Albee’s specificity in Zoo Story, Esslin’s interpretation is extremely generic, even suggesting that it may be an allegory for the crucifixion before hinting at any of its sexuality. Whatever his reason for remaining silent on the overt homosexuality presented in some of these plays, you can see how Absurdist themes of general isolation and futility of human connection could be read into works that are more specifically about the isolation and futility of human connection felt by gay men in the past century.

That Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat would give a nod to these gay innovators of modern theatre aligns with their assumed mission of writing an overtly gay Holmes and Watson adaptation, and follows their pattern of celebrating and subverting the history of gay subtext and symbolism of Victorian horror in both THoB and TAB. It’s a delightful and I’m sure intentional side-effect that in order to solve their show, you must become fluent in the works of 20th century gay writers, but it hasn’t yet explained why their methods are appropriate at this specific point in the story. For that, we must continue.