Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The Absurd in Modern Literature

Author(s): Adolph H. Wegener
Source: Books Abroad, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Spring, 1967), pp. 150-156
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
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The Absurd in
By ADOLPH H. WEGENER
Tjr £ we approach twentieth-century litera-
|| ture in its context as world literature,the
JL artificial demarcationsof subject matter
and methodology proclaimed by Van Tie-
ghem, Carre, Guyard, and Baldensperger
might be gently subject to review. The re-
awakened interest in languages, the numer-
ous translations of texts from the original,
the cosmopolitan note in recent poetry, in-
ternational festivals, mass media of com-
munication, and the relentless advances of
science have brought the different quarters
of the globe closer and have contributed
toward a better understandingof man. The
contemporary writers, no longer sustained
by the literarytradition nor the language of
their own countries, inject a universal tex-
ture to the perennial problems that have
distinguished the human race in its evolu-
tionary progress and which have found
divergent expression in the literature of all
ages, from the passionsportrayedby Aeschy-
lus and Shakespeare,to the socially condi-
tioned instincts delineated by Euripides,
Moliere, and Ibsen, to the quest for wis-
dom and harmony expressed by the Stoics,
Dante, and Goethe. Concerned primarily
with the enigmatic aspectof being, the mod-
ern writers bear the indelible imprint of
their time, a kinship in human experience
and creative instinct, and an understanding
of the unity of the human spirit which
transcendsthe sacrosanctboundariesof time,
geography, and race to establish man as the
common denominatorbetween the past and
the present.
The inspirationwhich comes from the in-
terpenetrationof cultures, such as the Ger-
man and French, can only be transformed
into permanent artistic values when it rep-
resents an awakening, an affirmationand a
reinforcing of qualities and tendencies al-
ready inherent. The history of French and
German literaturesfrom the French epic of
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Modern Literature
chivalry, to the singularity of Lessing and
Schiller, to the impact of French surrealist
poetry upon the experimentallyoriented ex-
plorationsin language of Benn, Celan, Mon,
Eich, Grass,and Enzensbergeratteststo this.
The avant-garde in France and Germany,
laboringunder the effectsof two world wars,
intellectual vacuums, the occupation, po-
litical and spiritual schisms, mushroom
clouds, and moon rockets, reflectsa cultural
crisis of broken hierarchies,discreditedval-
ues, and general disillusionment in the des-
tinies of all nations and all men.
From the romantic outburst in Paris of
the 1830's,the problemsin Germany created
by the breakdown of the religious tradition,
social revolution, bourgeois liberalism, and
the propositionsof Hegel, to the despairing
voices of Kierkegaard,Marx, Schopenhauer,
and Nietzsche, the twentieth century an-
ticipated the absurd in the failures of the
Western world during the turmoil of the
Thirties and Forties to solve unemployment,
to rein capitalism, to curb nationalism, and
to spread democracy. While faith in prog-
ress and the idea of individual successflour-
ished, anxiety or, existentially considered,
tragedy accompanied them. Its outgrowth
was solitude. It is this solitude that charac-
terizes the fundamental condition of man.
The turning toward Innerlich\eit, or more
precisely,toward the creative sources of life
in the depths of man's experience,occurred
throughout Europe. In the post-World-War
I period, a vast universal, esoteric avant-
garde movement was felt in all domains of
the human mind. In music, the emergence
of compositional procedures from Satie,
Ravel, Stravinsky, Prokofieff, Schonberg,
Webern, Copland, and Sessions to the post-
World-War II electronic music of Boulez
and Stockhausen affected the direction in
which musical discoursewas to go. The dis-
solution of the rationalistically conceived
 ABSURD IN MODERN LITERATURE
vision of the universe was transcended by
the instinctive spirit of man, evident in
painting from Klee to Picasso, Matisse to
Mondrian, Cubism to Futurism, and Sur-
realism to Abstractionism. The pervasive
undercurrent of the literary consciousness
of Europe was confirmed by Sartre,Camus,
and Malraux, by the forebodings of Kafka,
Gide, Koestler, Orwell, and Capek. The
literary revolution that started with Biich-
ner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Goll,
Giraudoux, Pirandello, Wedekind, Wilder,
Fry, and Eliot finds its counterpart in the
Theater of the Absurd. Beckett, Ionesco,
Genet, Hildesheimer, Grass, Pinter, Albee,
and Gelber, to mention a few, question the
whole state and destiny of man, proclaiming
the irrationalityand apparent meaningless-
ness of existence, defying the absurdity of
life by its very affirmation.With headquar-
ters in Paris and exponents in Germany,
England, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the
United States,the absurdmight be regarded
as a cosmopolitan movement, nourished by
international sources.
II.
The deceptively simple term "absurd"is
not defined in the standardreferenceworks
by CasselPs,Pongs, Shipley, Benet, Magnus,
Harvey, Fowler, and Merker-Stammler.
Mario Pei and Frank Gaynor define "ab-
surd" as "unreasonable; contrary to the
rules of logic."1 The philosophy of the ab-
surd derives its name and its way of formu-
lating its critical opposition to rationalistic
views of reality from the Latin absurdus,
meaning in a musical context, "inharmon-
ious, out of tune." In contemporaryusage it
has come to mean "out of harmony with
reasonor propriety;irrational,incongruous,
senseless, stupid, silly, ridiculous." Martin
Esslin,2 Andre Espiau de La Maestre,3
Charles Glicksberg,4 and Walter Stein,5
among others, have eloquently developed
the theoretical and practical aspects of the
absurd. The Theater of the Absurd is not
a school nor a program guiding individual
authors, but a term applied by critics, edi-
tors, and historians of literature in labeling
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151
a group of writers who rarely,if ever, apply
the term absurdiststo themselves. "Cosmo-
logical comedy,"6 "ontological theater,"7
"theological theater,"8 and "metaphysical
farce"9are the epithets given to express the
disintegrationof man in a world of gradual
decomposition.
Despite the diversity of the method in
form and spirit within the tradition of the
absurd,its unitary principlesrevolve around
the theme of an all-pervading sense of an-
guish at the absurdity of the human condi-
tion, the autonomy of the stage, and a new
aesthetic toward language. Not unlike the
"nausea" of Sartre's Antoine, Camus's
"Stranger,"Unamuno's "tragicsense of life,"
and more recentlyRiesman'sLonely Crowd,
man's isolation and spiritual dereliction in
an absurd universe devoid of meaning; the
unjustified presence of the being of things;
the mechanically trite and complacent na-
ture of bourgeois life enmeshed in trivial
gossip about weather,family, jobs, marriage,
traffic,or fragmented memories; the difficul-
ty of communicating, the uncertainty of
one's own identity; frustration,conformity,
the taedium vitae of everyday activities;
physical death and the psychic annihilation
of the individual are the basic motifs of the
"theaterof revolt."
Common to the absurd is the insignifi-
cance of the programmatic element, the
central dialectic of illusion and reality, rem-
iniscent of Strindberg's famous introduc-
tion to his Dream Play, and more recently
in Bramble's Two Timers, the indifference
to the traditional concepts of dramatic rules
and the stage setting, through which a cer-
tain degree of universality can be achieved.
Drawing upon Mallarme, Maeterlinck,
Jarry, and Apollinaire, Artaud (in The
Theater and its Double) calls for a "total
theater"and believes that the reform in the
modern theatermust begin with the mise en
scene. The stagecraft of expressionism, the
Reinhardt and Piscator productions in Ber-
lin, and the pantomimic theater of Vollmol-
ler and Maeterlinck anticipate some of the
alienating effects encountered in the avant-
152 BOOKS ABROAD
garde theater. On the contemporary scene
the dynamic utilization of setting and stage
is found in the dramas of Diirrenmatt,
Frisch, Schehade, Genet, Brecht, and
Anouilh. The mimes of the Middle Ages,
Shakespearean clowns, the Viennese Folk
Theater, the nonsense verse of Lear, Carroll,
and Morgenstern, the grotesque art of
Bosch, Brueghel, and Pollock, and the gen-
eral theatrical tricks of the circus, cabaret,
vaudeville, and movies reverberate in the
stage spectacle. Ionesco contributes an ex-
panding corpse, a woman with three noses
and a left hand with nine fingers, headless
bodies and bodiless heads dangling through
shell-riddled ceilings, figures adrift, furni-
ture moving spontaneously, clocks striking
at will, and invisible figures. The theatrical
pyrotechnics of Ionesco's proliferation of
chairs, mushrooms, eggs, or coffee cups,
Genet's masks and rituals, the mutilated
trunks of the senescent parents emerging
from ashcans in Beckett's Endgame, Ada-
mov's pinball machine and old men playing
ping-pong, Hildesheimer's glazier on the
ladder, Arrabal's derelicts inhabiting an
automobile graveyard, Grass's cooks and
D'Erico's locusts affirmfurther the primacy
of the stage.
That the syllogistic structureof language
is a contradictionwhich reflectsa vanishing
belief in a categorically harmonious rela-
tionship between man and the universe has
been succinctly stated by Ionesco: "what is
sometimes labelled the absurdis only the de-
nunciation of the ridiculous nature of a
language which is empty of substance,ster-
ile, made up of cliches and slogans."10If
the non-communicableworld is deprived of
any authority from a divinely ordered uni-
verse and man is imprisonedin his own self-
consciousness, then nothing in this world
has any value and our language deceives us
with all its imitations of higher meanings,
for "languageno longer correspondsto real-
ity, no longer expresses a truth. . . ."n Hei-
degger's tortuous metaphysicalprobings in-
to language, Wittgenstein's "word games"
and the expressive absorptionsin language
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of his Tractatus logico-philosophicus re-
semble the absurdistwritersin their quest to
trackdown language to its origins and there-
by to correctthe absurditiesof man to speak
the truth.
III.
Although marked individual differences
exist among the playwrights,we should like
to offer a comparative study of those ideas
which are most characteristicof the absurd
in France and Germanyby selecting Eugene
Ionesco's The Chairs12 and Wolfgang
Hildesheimer's "Plays in which Darkness
Falls."13An evaluationof the significanceof
the writers'ideas will remain implicit in the
exposition and will be stated explicitly in a
summary conclusion.
Ionesco's life lacks the spectaculartraits
that marked the careers of other French
writers.He was born in 1912in Slatina, Ru-
mania. Ionesco found much materialfor his
future works by attending the Punch-and-
Judy spectacleat the Luxembourg Gardens.
He studied at the ecole communale in Paris,
at the University of Bucharest,acceptedthe
responsibilitiesof a teacher of French, and
worked in the production department of
a publishing house until his talent mani-
fested itself in the living theater with the
premiere of his "anti-play,"The Bald So-
prano, in 1950. In articles and interviews
Ionesco inveighs against the traditional
forms of the theater which no longer suffice
to present the manifestationsof the absurd.
Ionesco has spoken of a feeling of human
anguish since his childhood, which he be-
lieves comes not only from his life but from
the life of man.14 He describes his dislike
for the theater, his negative judgments on
playwrightsand his nonacceptanceof the art
of the actor who is in full possession of the
character he is playing.15 He deliberately
calls his plays "comic dramas," "pseudo-
dramas," "tragic farces," "anti-plays,"and
"naturalistic comedies." In emphasizing
exaggeration of effects in the theater, he
acknowledgesthe coexistenceof tragedyand
farce,the poetic and the prosaic,fantasy and
reality, and, not unlike Durrenmatt's Par-
 ABSURD IN MODERN LITERATURE
ables of the Theater, underscoresthe critical
nature of modern comedy as the "intuition
of the absurd,"more conducive to despair
than the tragic.16Human dramais as absurd
as it is painful and, in rinding it difficult to
distinguish between the comic and the trag-
ic, Ionesco regards them as merely two as-
pects of the same situation.17
Continuing in the tradition of Cromme-
lynck and Ghelderode, the play which per-
haps best characterizesthe dominant theme
of emptiness, frustration, and despair, the
scenic spectacleand the devaluation of lan-
guage of the absurd is Ionesco's tragicomic
farce, The Chairs.Here, as in The Bald So-
prano,Amadee or How to get rid of it, ]ac\,
or the Submission, and The Future is in
Eggs, is the recurring motif: the married
couple. An old man and an old woman live
in a circular apartment on an island sur-
rounded by stagnant water. With the old
man metamorphosed into a sobbing baby
boy, rocked by his maternal old wife, the
conversationrevolvesaroundtheir marriage,
careers,old age and his duties as general fac-
totum. The inarticulate old man hopes to
communicate a message to humanity at a
formal gathering of celebrities with the
assistance of a professional orator. With
an admixture of triviality, embarrassed
silences, platitudes, repetitions, and dis-
located dialogue, the invisible guests,
among them the Colonel, the Photoen-
graver, and the Emperor are welcomed,
the light intensifies and the room fills with
chairs. There follows a recounting of the
efforts of the couple to lift a chair with the
invisible lady in it, a metamorphosisof the
old woman into an enticing coquette and
the audio-visual concatenation of doorbell-
ringing, door flapping,and chair-toting.The
Orator,a real person,appears,signs and dis-
tributes numerous autographs. Like Kot-
schenreuther in Giinter Grass's Ten Min-
utes to Buffalo, he is dressed like an artist
and bohemian of the nineteenth century.
He makes the signs of a deaf-mute, coughs,
groans,gurgles, and with a piece of chalk he
writes in large capital letters on the black-
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153
board: "angel food/' With fireworks and
fanfares,the old couple, separatedfrom each
other by the invisible crowd, jump into the
sea, "far from each other" as their corpses
"rot in an aquatic solitude." Gradually the
audience hears the sounds of the invisible
crowd, the "bursts of laughter, murmurs,
shh's, ironical coughs," and the stage is
bathed in a grey light as in the beginning.
The Orator wipes out the chalk letters, sub-
stitutes others, descends from the dais, and
bows ceremoniously to the rows of empty
chairs and to the invisible Emperor.
Wolfgang Hildesheimer has won an im-
portant place among the German play-
wrights of this century in the realm of the
tragicomicand as an exponent of the absurd
in particular.He startedhis dramaticcareer
with a series of witty radio plays, spiced
with broad picaresque melodramatic over-
tones of Balkan adventures and Oriental
romance, peopled with imposters, forgers,
spies, hypocrites,and pedants.Hildesheimer
was born in 1916 in Hamburg, studied in
Mannheim and Salzburg; lived in London
until the war, active in painting, sketching,
and staging; served as British Information
Officerin Palestine; translatorfrom 1946to
1949 at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials,
and currentlyresidesin Poschiavoin the can-
ton of Graubiinden, Switzerland. In addi-
tion to radio plays, revisions of comedies by
Sheridanand Goldoni, translationsof Djuna
Barnes and Franz Kafka, and essays,he has
written satiric short stories collected under
the titles of Lieblose Legenden (Suhrkamp.
1962) and Vergebliche Aufzeichnungen
(Suhrkamp. 1962). Recently his first full-
scale monological novel Tynset (Suhrkamp.
1965) was published.
Several essays may be regarded as state-
ments of his approachto the absurd. Upon
the occasion of the Ninth Berlin Festival
Week, Hildesheimer speaks of himself as
an anachronist, a pessimist, and acknowl-
edges his debt to surrealism,Molloy, Joseph
K., and the personages of Use Aichinger's
world. Defining his theater as a "Guck-
kasten," he expresses his antipathy to the
154 BOOKS ABROAD
absurditiesof the daily newspapers and his
aversion to theory, analysis, and systemati-
zation. Like Ionesco, he is not interested in
relating a story, documenting a thesis, per-
petuating a symbolic principle, demonstrat-
ing the typical via a historical incident, or
effecting a catharsis. He views the future
with fear and horror as a continuation of
the absurdityof the present.18In a brief dis-
course entitled "Die Realitat selbst ist ab-
surd," Hildesheimer views the term "ab-
surd" as a definition for a particulartype of
non-Aristotelian and nonepic theater, and
asserts: "The absurdityof others is my real-
ity, or what others call absurd is real for
me."19 In a brilliantly persuasive essay,20
Hildesheimer defines the Theater of the Ab-
surd as philosophical theater, a reaction less
against establishedforms of the theaterthan
against a traditionally rational world view.
By emphasizing the logic of illogic and the
unrealityof the real in a series of incoherent
situations, the sum total offers insights
analogous to life. Ineptitude, despair, and
alienation are the ingredients of every ab-
surd drama which, in turn, elucidates the
condition humaine. He recognizes multiple
forms and innumerable representativesof
the Theater of the Absurd, and believes the
instability of the world finds its utmost ex-
pression in the panorama of Ionesco's The
Chairs,and Grass'sTen Minutes to Buffalo.
Ionesco's preoccupation with the disinte-
gration of language is absentin Hildesheim-
er's plays. With stronger satiric accents, the
action of "Plays in which Darkness Falls"
unravels against a background of extensive
stage directions, progressive variations of
light, the evanescenceof the illusion of time,
irrelevant recollections, witty repartee, in-
coherent babblings, and lyric overtones. In
"Pastoral, or Time for Cocoa" the atmos-
phere of Schehade,Williams, Adamov, The
Magic Flute, and the "Scene by the Brook"
from Beethoven'sPastoral is invoked. With
emphasis upon choreography and metony-
my, preparationsare made in an Arcadian
landscapefor a quartetrehearsal.The dram-
atis personae include: Philip, the cheerful
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and intelligent porter; Glinke, the aging,
unscrupulous president of a big company;
Dr. Frobel, the forty-year-oldvampire; the
pampered twin brothers,Abel and Dietrich
Asbach, consul and mining engineer re-
spectively;Selma, the governess;and a shep-
herd. The dialogue is mainly in the form of
self-contained statements and satiric com-
mentaries about evening courses, music,
burials, alluring promises, business matters,
and stock exchange deals. A comic interlude
is found in the scene where Philip, with
acrobaticdexterity, guards the music notes
against the wind with legs and hands as he
oscillates between the music stands of the
participants. As the light grows darker21
and summer turns into autumn and winter,
the ensemble of a musical comedy reachesa
crescendoof a sort. The presidentand Diet-
rich Asbach die of heart attacks,Abel leaves
with Dr. Frobel, and Philip proposes mar-
riage to Selma. The closed environment of
Beckett'sEndgame, Genet's The Maids, and
Pinter's The Caretaker is found in Land-
scape with Figures. In a studio, Adrian the
artist paints the portraits of three preten-
tious individuals also engaged in desultory
reminiscences: Mrs. Sartorious, an aging
coquettish society woman; Colin, her gig-
olo; and Herr von Ruhr, an elderly tycoon.
In true farcical style Colin is locked in a
golden cage and Herr von Ruhr climbs on
a hobbyhorse.The charactersbecome their
own portraits,pass from middle to old age
until they die, are neatly crated as panoptic
figures with tissue paper, and sold to a col-
lector. The interchange of light and dark is
effected by a Lamartine-quotingglazier on
a ladder who inserts mauve panes of glass
into the studio windows. In the end the glass
falls, bathing the stage in light and Adrian
and his maidenlike wife Bettina are as young
as they were in the beginning. Beckett's,
Moer's, Audiberti's, and Gelber's theme of
waiting and Bergson's mechanical some-
thing grafted upon the living are presented
in The Clocks. A room is inhabited by an
aging couple, Robert and Gertrud, who dis-
port themselves in a syncopationof dialogue
 ABSURD IN MODERN LITERATURE
concerned with the weather, time, mail,
physical conditions, and standardsof living.
The glazier arrives,inserts soundproof, im-
penetrable jet-black glass, and the room
gradually darkens. Toward the end, a lo-
quacious salesman appears,flirts with Ger-
trud, and sells the couple a profusion of
clocks with a lifetime guarantee.An acousti-
cal furioso of cuckoos, ding-dongs, tick-
tacks,ping-pongs,clink-clanksconcludesthe
play as the couple is inside the clocks, imi-
tating their sounds.
In an attempt to approach a work of art
in terms of the author's intentions, critics
have offered an infinite variety of allegori-
cal and symbolic interpretationsfor the dra-
mas of the absurdand hence in the final an-
alysis for none.22 Wolfgang Hildesheimer
regardsthe theaterof the absurdas a theater
of parables,comparing it with the parable
of the prodigal son. In analyzing the differ-
ence, Hildesheimer says that the story of the
prodigal son is a parable deliberately con-
ceived to allow an indirect statement, that
is, to give the opportunity to reach a con-
clusion by analogy, while the absurd play
becomes a parable of life precisely through
the intentional omission of any statement.
For life, too, makes no statement.23The ab-
surdity of the human condition defies any
interpretationas allegory. By definition, an
allegory is a story which translates general
concepts, moral qualities, or an abstract
truth or idea into word images. It is there-
fore not a statementof any kind by an illus-
trated comment on a statement. Since an
explicit didactic message is not present, the
dramas of the absurd might be considered
parablesaddressedto man. If we define the
parableas a short story, presentedto express
an analogy or parallel between its elements
and a lesson that the writer hopes to convey,
the absurdist writers' negative critiques
shock man into awarenessof life's relentless
and inconsolable absurdity, rather than
persuadehim with positive ideas and ideals
to contemplate a betterment of his destiny.
In a summing up of the dramatic efforts
of Ionesco and Hildesheimer, certain ten-
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155
dencies come to the fore: both harangue
against the insufficiency of the realistic,
ideological theater, bourgeois conventional-
ity and its preoccupationwith inconsequen-
tials. Each arrives at the universal by start-
ing with ordinary events taken from daily
existence, subsequently to modify and dis-
tort them to fantastic, sometimes grotesque
intensity. Both writers concern themselves
with social and political elements and are
convinced that life is absurd,that the world
has been on an unchartedand undimension-
al course. Ionesco exploits the syllogistic
structureof language with its built-in logic
of causality, and reduces language to unin-
telligible scraps of telephone conversation,
repetitions and physical sounds, systemati-
cally emptied of significance. Hildesheimer
presents a coherent surface and does not re-
duce vocabularyto inarticulatesounds. His
language is clear, witty, more colorful and
lyrical, filled with emotional connotations,
more vigorous and varied than Ionesco's
somewhat flat, banal, and unsuggestive
mode of expression. Neither Ionesco nor
Hildesheimer utilizes language to enhance
further understanding of characteror to de-
velop plot.
The unitary principles within the tradi-
tion of the absurdremain typical for Ionesco
and Hildesheimer: the restrictedsettings of
a familiar environment, the brevity of dis-
jointed plots or dramatic situations, the
limitation of the dramatis personae to few
figures with, for the most part, genealogical
names; emphasis on a static circular situa-
tion, a visible chiaroscuro of alternating
light and darkness,elimination of time and
space; the consistent admixture of bizarre,
macabre, and farcical tragicomic elements
in the contrast of sequence, cabaret, and
vaudeville techniques on a pre-eminent
stage; the deliberateomission of an explana-
tion, solution, or a motivation for the action;
the aspect of death; variations of dialogue
and the employment of cliches, repetitions,
incongruity, irony, fantasy, and rhapsodic
monologue for purposesof persiflage.
The impact of the absurd is felt in the re-
156 BOOKS ABROAD
cently performedplays of Bramble,Mrozek,
Pinget, and Drozdowsky, but the mood in
the theater seems to be shifting from the
representation of meaninglessness toward
something with greater pathos, from the
esoteric toward a theater dealing with more
immediately recognizable events.
In transcending the concept of time and
space, cause and effect, form and content,
the writers of the absurd re-establish an
awareness of man's situation and project
truths that reach a profound universality to
express modern man's endeavor to come to
terms with a world in which the dice are
loaded against his ability to survive. If the
absurd establishes an abiding truth of the
reality of the absurd itself, then, unlike Dr.
Strangelove and his bomb, we might smile
with Sisyphus as he repeatedly pushes the
stone uphill, and agree that the absurd has
meaning only insofar as we do not agree to
it.
Muhlenberg College
1. Mario Pei and Frank Gaynor, Liberal Arts Dic-
tionary, New York, 1952, p.3.
2. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, New
York, 1961 (Anchor Books A279).
3. Andre Espiau de La Maestre, Der Sinn und das
Absurde, Salzburg, 1962.
4. Charles Glicksberg, Ionesco and the Aesthetic
of the Absurd," Arizona Quarterly: 18 (1962),
pp. 293-303.
5. Walter Stein, "Tragedy of the Absurd," Dublin
Review: CCXXXIII (1959), pp. 363-82.
6. Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut,
New Jersey, 1962.
The Bikhner Prize, endowed by the German Acad-
emy for Language and Literature, has been awarded
to Wolfgang Hildesheimer for 1966. It is one of the
highest honors that can be obtained in Germany in
the field of literature.Hildesheimer, who is a resident
of Hamburg, is fifty, and has distinguished himself
particularly in the areas of satire, drama, and radio
plays.
In the presentation address, Walter Jens, professor
of literatureat Tubingen, said that Hildesheimer cre-
ated persons "who tend to consider reality a mislead-
ing invention," but who, in their consequent isolation,
are waiting for a new manner of communication, for
new signs and signals.
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7. J. S. Doubrovsky, "Ionesco and the Comedy of
Absurdity,"Yale French Studies: 23 (1959), pp.
3-10.
8. Philippe Senart, "Ionesco: Un theatre theo-
loeique" La Table Ronde: 192 (1964) pp.11-25.
9. Rosette C. Lamont, "The Metaphysical Farce:
Beckett and Ionesco," French Review: XXXII
(1959), pp. 319-28.
10. Eugene Ionesco, "The Avant-Garde Theater,"
Tulane Drama Review: II (1960), p.48.
11. Ibid., p. 50.
12. Eugene Ionesco, Les Chaises, Paris, Gallimard,
1954.
13. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Spiele in denen es dun-
\el wird, Pfullingen, Neske, 1958.
14. Eugene Ionesco, "The Playwright's Role," The
Observer,June 29, 1958.
15. Eugene Ionesco, "Experience du Theatre," La
Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Paris, February 1,
1958.
16. Eugene Ionesco, "Discovering the Theatre,"
Leonard C. Pronko, tr., Tulane Drama Review,
4 (1959), p.13.
17. Eugene Ionesco, "The World of Ionesco," Tu-
lane Drama Review, 3 (1958), pp.46-48.
18. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, "Empirische Betrach-
tungen zu meinem Theater,"September20, 1959.
19. DusseldorfTheaterprogramm, February28, 1963.
20. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, "Erlanger Rede iiber
das absurde Theater," A\zente: 6 (1960) pp.
543-58.
21. Roland H. Wiegenstein in his essay on Hildes-
heimer, Schriftsteller der Gegenwart, Klaus
Nonnenman, ed., Olten, 1963, asserts that dark-
ness is an unequivocally chosen metaphor for
the absurd (p. 154).
22. An exception is G.H. Wellwarth's fine article
"Life in the Void," University of Kansas City
Review: XXVIII (1961), pp. 25-33. In speaking
of Beckett, Professor Wellwarth claims that
"there are no hidden symbolic implications in
his works" (p. 25).
23. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, "Erlanger Rede iiber
das absurde Theater," op. cit. p. 545.
Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, who was later awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature,adopted his pen-name
(later his legal name as well) from the title of his
first story, published in Jaffa: Agunot. It has been
called one of the finest stories of S. Y. Agnon.
Joseph Wood Krutch and Robert E. Spiller were
appointed by the Librarian of Congress, L. Quincy
Mumford, to serve as HonoraryConsultantsin Ameri-
can Cultural History for 3-year terms, beginning Jan-
uary 1, 1967. The Libraryof Congress has a number
of honorary consultants in various fields; they pro-
vide counsel on such matters as acquisitionsand serv-
ice to scholars in their particularbranches.