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RICHARD
GILMAN
exhibit connections with an older experimental mode, but to have
identified that, to have said, ah yes, Surrealism, would have been
entirely mistaken. For
The Bald Soprano, The Lesson
and
Waiting
for Codot
were not surrealist in any meaning which the word had
previously possessed. Their movement was precisely toward the infra–
real: nothing "above" or "beyond," no cozying up to the presumed
divinity in the automatic operation of the mind, no raid upon
dreams or other sources of transconsciousness. "The surreal is here,"
Ionesco was to say, "within the grasp of our hands, in our everyday
conversation."
He might still use the word - any word which pointed to a
renewed freedom for consciousness or an attempt to transform its
bases would do; later "absurd" would be fastened on himself, Beckett
and others - but what was at issue was that the "real," as it became
the material for the dramatic imagination, brought with it a power
of cliche and conventional iconography to which the imagination had
increasingly succumbed. Art had been added to reality; and reality
had revenged itself, as it always does, by sending back to the aesthetic
field of operation its own face distorted by artifice. Reality in drama
was reality as previous drama had imagined and shaped it. To break
this deadlock meant for playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco to deal
cannily in their different ways with just what Surrealism had so
strenuously repudiated: matter-of-fact vocabularies, ordinary
mises–
en-scene, anti-dream.
A grossly upholstered English sitting-room, a language professor's
seedy studio, a scrubby piece of anonymous ground were the new
arenas in which was taking place the latest attempt to deliver the
stage from everything predictable and reassuring, everything here–
tofore aesthetically legitimized, whether it was the consolation of a
mirror image or that of an exotic dream, that the theater had been
offering for so long. A couple who establish that they are married
to one another by tracing their steps back to having awakened that
morning in the same house, in the same room and finally the same
bed, and who find this an "extraordinary, bizarre coincidence"; two
·tramps whose major "actions" consist in eating radishes and carrots
and in taking off and putting back on their shoes, who perform a
play which seems throughout to be waiting for known dramatic prin–
ciples to start operating: such were the new characters and plots
