The Mutual Impacts of Modern Literature and Absurd Theatre

This paper aims to explain the role of Absurd Theatre, as an innovative form of dramatic composition in the first half of the 20th century, in evolving novels and literary traditions after 1960s. The main problem of this research is finding some reliable limits of mutual impacts by which it could be possibly said that Absurd Theatre and New Novels had many interchangeable effects through the time. The key question is how Absurd devices have had an impact on the style of novel writing, if it could be claimed that this type of theatre had emerged at the period of a historical passage into Postmodernism from Modernism. Inspired by an evolutional structuralism method, this study intends to describe the key factors of mutual stylistic interactions between Nouveau Novels and Absurd Drama. To this purpose, a statistical population of recognized writers and dramatists has been selected to realize a comparative reading of their features. Focusing on some masterpieces of Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras’ novels, the comparison confirms how these movements influenced on each other and how it would be possibly rearranged and re-interpreted today. The features such as Deviation of Norms and Styles, Humanism as well as Scientism are among the most important criteria that prove the main hypothesis of the research. They are basically literary devices or approaches which have transferred to theatre and performance. The paper first reviews the historical evolution of Modern Literature and shows how modern style of telling stories influenced on some other types of artistic forms. It explains that Absurd Drama was significantly inspired by modern approaches of European literary criticism. The “Estrangement effect” of Epic Theatre and “Defamiliarization” of Formalist poetics are two of the main reasons of emerging Absurd techniques during 1930s. The research summarizes then the key features of Modern Novels at a tentative table and presents some operational descriptions for subsequent assessment. It will finally prove that the literary focus on Body and Movement, Claustrophobical arrangement of fictional scenes, and Performative aspects of language are all made under influence of Absurd devices. In effect, it could be said that Absurd drama developed literary language of New Novels in terms of performability and theatricality.