The use of ritual in the theatre of the absurd; a study of Beckett, Pinter, Genet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is commonly felt among literary and theatre-going people today that the Theatre of the Absurd is making a comment on the meaninglessness and formlessness of contemporary life. The way the Theatre makes its comment is new and exciting: it simply places before our eyes meaninglessness and formlessness. And the Absurd is left at that. Directors can concentrate on the bizarre, making the plays, even The Caretaker, into three-hour runs of pointless juxtapositions that leave sophisticated audiences complacent. Too often the plays of Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco are treated as slices of life, without beginning or end. This paper was undertaken in an effort to discover whether there was not more to the Absurd play than imitation of life's daily chaos. Strong ritualistic elements had been noticed during a first random reading of some Absurd plays. A later discovery of Genet and his open experimentation with rituals, led me to suspect that the ritual so obvious in his plays also played a part, though a more furtive one, in the works of Pinter and Beckett. The following close examination of texture and structure has convinced me that the formal element, which distinguishes ritual, makes up the fabric of the Absurd play; and that this studied use of ritual makes the plays of the Absurd the most precise dramatic statements to have been seen on western stages since medieval days. Rather than exemplifying formlessness, the Absurd play often stands witness to the stark purity of formality. .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".