Abstract
This article traces how postwar reception of existentialism shaped an American understanding of the absurd and the theater of the absurd. It focuses on a series of postwar issues of Yale French Studies (YFS), one of the foremost publications for discussion of existentialism in America at this time: from the inaugural 1948 issue of YFS on existentialism (no. 1), to the 1955 issue that was devoted to the theme Foray Through Existentialism (no. 16), and finally to the 1959 issue on humor that includes the first articles in YFS on the theater of the absurd (no. 23). In the very first issue, the absurd is connected to the memory of the Second World War. However, in subsequent issues, in addition to linking the absurd to the war, contributors to the journal see the absurd as the catalyst to the question of the role of language in existentialism and in the theater of the absurd. This reception reveals how the theater of the absurd not only began to be seen as part of existentialism in its earliest reception in America, but furthermore, it reveals how looking at existentialism through the lens of the theater of the absurd can actually distort the teachings of existentialism. Articles by Henri Peyre, Jacques Guicharnaud, and Serge Doubrovsky, as well as unpublished texts in Guicharnaud’s personal papers, show a concretization of reading the absurd as one of the central concepts of existentialism, and one that anchors or even fixes the idea of France of the Second World War as the absurd world. They reveal how a moment in time can be read into a movement.
Published first as Julia Elsky, “The Absurd: Postwar Reception and Wartime Echoes at Yale French Studies”, in Yale French Studies 135/136 (2019): 46–62.
I thank Lauren Du Graf, Clémentine Fauré, Diana Garvin, Christopher Davis, and Jennifer Row for their generous comments on this article. I am grateful to Zoe Egelman for her expertise on the Guicharnaud Papers. I am especially grateful to Alice Kaplan for her advice on this project.
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Notes
- 1.
Fulton (1999, pp. 22–23). The journal is not the first place to have published on the movement, but the devotion of an entire inaugural issue to the topic announced the importance of the journal for introducing existentialism. Other articles on the movement had appeared in previous years and at the same time. To name just a few, they include Herbert Marcuse’s “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’être et le néant” (Marcuse 1948), a three-part series of articles by Marjorie Grene in The Kenyon Review (Vol. 9, nos. 1–3), and Leo Spitzer’s article “Man’s Need for Faith in Man” in the special section of The American Scholar on The Humanities Today and Tomorrow (Spitzer 1947–1948).
- 2.
Although Peyre refers to the article as it appeared in Vogue, it was also published in 1946 in Dorothy Norman’s Twice a Year (Camus 1946b) in Lionel Abel’s translation, directly followed by an article by Harry Slochower on Thomas Mann. I thank Lauren Du Graf for this reference.
- 3.
Jacques Guicharnaud Papers, Folder Notebook: 1943 Mar–1944 Apr, f. 22. Diary entry dated Jan. 12, 1943.
- 4.
Jacques Guicharnaud Papers, Folder 6: Notebook 1955–1956, ff. 3–4. Entry undated.
- 5.
Jacques Guicharnaud Papers, Folder 1, Notebook: 1943 Mar–1944 Apr, f. 17. Diary entry dated Oct. 5, 1942.
- 6.
Jacques Guicharnaud Papers, Folder Notebook: 1943 Mar–1944 Apr, f. 58. Diary entry dated Jan. 24, 1944.
- 7.
Jacques Guicharnaud Papers, Folder Notebook: 1944 Jan–1945 Jul, pages unnumbered. Entries dated April 14, 1944; May 22, 1944; May 12, 1944.
- 8.
Jacques Guicharnaud Papers, Folder Notebook: 1943 Mar–1944 Apr, f. 55. Diary entry dated Dec. 21, 1943.
- 9.
Doubrovksy (1989, pp. 71–79). In this same work of autofiction, Doubrovsky also evokes traumatic memory of surviving the war.
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Elsky, J. (2020). The Absurd: Postwar Reception and Wartime Echoes at Yale French Studies. In: Betschart, A., Werner, J. (eds) Sartre and the International Impact of Existentialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38482-1_3
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