Allegory and the Absurd in Post-1950 Drama

This chapter examines the dramatic writing of Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Harold Pinter (1930–2008), Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), and Jean Genet (1910–1986), alongside the theoretical writings of Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), to consider how they mobilize allegorical structures to instigate (or to frustrate or otherwise expropriate) meaning-making processes. Challenging Martin Esslin’s influential conceptualization of these authors under the umbrella of ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, this chapter instead examines these authors through the lens of de Man’s analysis of the allusiveness of allegorical function and Artaud’s writings on stage language. De Man and Artaud provide a frame for approaching the ways that these playwrights sanction our release from the expectations of ‘understanding’, to instead experience and relish the challenge of the unreliability of meaning.