Beckett and the Tragic

Any discussion of the tragic in the modern period must consider where those writers who have been characterised as belonging to the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ stand in relation to it. ‘Absurdist’ writing has a strong relation to Modernism, most obviously through the work of Samuel Beckett, but it is a form of Modernism that in the second half of the twentieth century sees little if any grounds for hope or optimism. Does absurdist writing have any links with the perspectives on the tragic previously discussed or should it be seen as post-tragic, that is departing quite fundamentally from the tragic as a concept or tragedy as dramatic form? The creator of the phrase, ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, Martin Esslin, defines it thus in his book of the same name:

Albert Camus had used ‘absurdity’ to describe the human situation in 1942 in his book The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity’, and Eugène Ionesco had defined it thus in 1957: ‘Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose … Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless absurd, useless.’ For Esslin ‘[t]his sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition’ characterises the absurdist writers he discusses in his book. The question is what relation this has, if any, to the tragic.