The theater of the absurd, in my view, has two genetic components which determine its life as long as it persists in the way we know it from Beckett and Ionesco. One is its innovative dynamism which opposes it to the theater of the naturalist tradition. The other component is its indebtedness to the philosophy of existentialism which itself is based upon the collective experience of World Wars I and II. Hence, there is a component inherent to the dynamism of the drama itself, and a component imported from outside literature into the world of art.
As to the first, there is evidence in Ionesco's theoretical writings that the drive for innovation is one of the major forces in the genesis of the theater of the absurd. Our century has eradicated taboos and traditional concepts in the arts more thoroughly than have previous millennia…. [Drama] has done away with motivated action, the element without which playing theater earlier would have appeared senseless. The motivation (be it psychological, ethical or sociological) has been destroyed either entirely or in part, so that the remaining fragments of a "meaningful" action have lost their logic. Ionesco and Beckett criticism have used the terms "non-action" or "anti-action," that is to say that the audience is no more involved in the déroulement of changing human interrelations, but that it is now increasingly fascinated by the way the familiar item called action is being torn apart. The process of destruction is now being focused upon. The defamiliarizing device has become fully autonomous, whereas in the traditional theater the device had merely a subsidiary function.
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