SOURCE: Perry, Curtis. “Vaulting Ambitions and Killing Machines: Shakespeare, Jarry, Ionesco, and the Senecan Absurd.” In Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, edited by Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds, pp. 85-106. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

[In the following essay, Perry traces the echoes of Shakespeare's Macbeth in Jarry's surreal Ubu Roi, and then examines the ways in which both Macbeth and Ubu inform Eugène Ionesco's absurdist Macbett.]

In an interview from 1966, Ionesco acknowledged Shakespeare's relevance to the theater of the absurd in such a way as to deny any more specific personal influence:

Didn't he say of the world that “it is a tale told by an idiot” and that everything is but “sound and fury”? He's the forefather of the theatre of the absurd. He said it all, and said it a long time ago. Beckett tries to repeat him. I don't even try: since he said do well what he had to say, what can we possibly add?

(Bonnefoy 1970, 49)

Disclaimers notwithstanding, Ionesco could not resist repeating Shakespeare. His Macbett, first produced in 1972, restages Shakespeare's Macbeth along lines sketched by Jan Kott and anticipated by Alfred Jarry's notorious farce Ubu Roi (1896): “My Macbeth is somewhere between Shakespeare and Jarry; it is close to Ubu Rex. … It was my friend Jan Kott's book Shakespeare Our Contemporary which showed me the way” (Lamont 1993, 182). As its pedigree suggests, Macbett is intended to be a doubly radical revision of Shakespeare, eager both to demonstrate absurdist elements in Shakespeare's play, and to render ridiculous those heroic aspects of the play that might obscure the meaninglessness of its violence. Accordingly, as several critics have noted, Macbett elaborates Shakespeare's suggestion that rebellion and tyranny may be part of an endless cycle of political violence.¹ When Macol (the Malcolm figure) seizes the throne at the end of the play, his final speech is cobbled together out of the avowal of sin that Shakespeare's Malcolm uses to test the loyalty of Macduff (“My poor country shall have more vices than it had before” [Ionesco 1985, 103-4]).²Macbett thus ends with the promise of “confineless harms” to come (Ionesco 1985, 104).

Macbett, however, is at its most heavy-handed when bent on illustrating what Kott calls the “grand staircase of history,” with its inevitable cycles of political violence (Kott 1964, 75). The earnestness of its political message coexists only uneasily with its flights of parodic whimsy: even Martin Esslin, generally one of Ionesco's champions, tactfully described the play's depiction of the political machine as “far from sensationally original” (1973, 54-55). Beyond its depiction of state violence, however, Ionesco's play is interested in anatomizing the kinds of desires that fuel this political machine, an emphasis borrowed perhaps from Jarry, whose Ubu Roi reduces the Macbeth story to a farce of unchecked infantile appetite. Ionesco's sense of Shakespeare as “the forefather of the theatre of the absurd” is based in part on the way that Macbeth's actions are motivated by desires that lose their objects, so that what begins specifically as ambition to rule morphs into a vague and ultimately insatiable wish to be “Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, / As broad and general as the casing air” (3.4.21-22).³ This transformation in Shakespeare's title character provides a starting point for the absurdist farces of Jarry and Ionesco, with the result that analysis of absurd desire in Ubu Roi and Macbett can still (almost four decades after Kott's book) illuminate ways in which Shakespeare seems both radical and contemporary.

Why Shakespeare? Partly of course because of the familiarity and accessibility of Shakespeare's plays.⁴ Partly because attacking Shakespeare's cultural status has its own inherent shock value. But more importantly, because of Shakespeare's participation in a strand of Renaissance dramatic experimentation that is in some regards analogous to the drama of Jarry and Ionesco. I call that strand the “Senecan absurd” because it seems to me to be part of the thematic inheritance of the Senecan tradition in Renaissance drama best described by Gordon Braden. Briefly, Braden argues that Seneca's tragic heroes strive toward total autonomy, attempting to establish “personal identity as a force that transcends its origins and contexts” by the sheer magnitude of their passionate will (Braden 1985, 34). But, at the same time, these heroes—spurred on by mimetic rivalry—require acknowledged dominion over those around them and thus rely for satisfaction upon the very contexts they aspire to transcend. Hence the restlessness that Braden finds at the core of Senecan ambition (Braden 1985, 60-62). Though Braden's analysis emphasizes the period's interest in greatness of spirit, it seems to me that this same inheritance leads as well to a series of experiments with more nearly absurdist concerns. That is to say that a fair amount of the period's Senecan experimentation explicitly probes the limits of personal autonomy and the instability of mimetic desire, thereby emphasizing both the final inseparability of desire and context, and the radical dehumanizing of autarkic aspiration. The tragic protagonists in such plays—brutal, insatiable, and finally stripped of human feeling—anticipate the concerns of Jarry and Ionesco. Shakespeare's Senecanism makes him Ionesco's “forefather.”

ABSURD DESIRE IN UBU ROI AND MACBETT

Jarry's humor is sometimes called Rabelaisian in acknowledgment of its emphasis on lower bodily appetites and functions (Esslin 1961, 255; LaBelle 1980, 66-70). From the play's notorious first word—“Merdre” (merde with an extra letter, translated by Barbara Wright as “Shittr”)—the play is obsessively scatological.⁵ Pere Ubu features an enormous gut (“he looks like an armed pumpkin” [90]), and an appetite to match. And indeed the play does contain elements of the Rabelaisian worldview described by Mikhail Bakhtin. Here, for example, is the exchange after Mere Ubu first suggests regicide to her husband:

PERE Ubu:
Oh! Mere Ubu, you insult me, and you'll find yourself in the stewpan in a minute.
MERE Ubu:
Huh! you poor fish, if I found myself in the stewpan, who'd mend the seats of your breeches?
PERE Ubu:
Well, what of it? Isn't my arse the same as anyone else's [N'ai-je pas un cul comme les autres (35)]?

(11)

The emphasis on the lower/open body is used here, as in Rabelais, to suggest that everybody is fundamentally the same—wrapped in the same fleshy bodies and driven by the same basic urges. For Jarry, as for Rabelais, this is above all a rhetoric of de-idealization: what is the meaning of manners, rank, decorum if what's important about a person is of the register of appetite and “arse”? Everyone's are the same as anyone else's.

In Rabelais the de-idealizing motifs of the open/lower body are used to criticize pretensions of serious culture in favor of the values of the carnivalesque: communality, festivity, the primacy of the body. The universality of this register leads to a demystifying of desires based on power, position, wealth, and so on, desiderata that fade to relative insignificance next to the urgency of the body in grotesque realism. Not so, however, in Ubu Roi. In Jarry's play, Rabelaisian motifs of grotesque realism coexist with and are even seen as integral to murderous ambition lifted from the story of Macbeth. The exchange quoted above continues as follows:

MERE Ubu:
If I were you, what I'd want to do with my arse would be to install it on a throne. You could increase your fortune indefinitely [augmenter … tes richesses (35)],
have sausages whenever you liked, and ride through the streets in a carriage.
PERE Ubu:
If I were king, I'd have a big headpiece made. …
MERE Ubu:
And you could get yourself an umbrella and a great big cloak that would come right down to your feet.
PERE Ubu:
Ah! I yield to temptation. Clod of a shittr, shittr of a clod, if ever I meet him on a dark night he'll go through a bad quarter of an hour.
MERE Ubu:
Oh good, Pere Ubu, now you're a real man.

(12-13)

Instead of debunking political ambitions, Pere Ubu's lower-body appetites seem inextricable from them. He pursues office with the same boisterous infantile greed that makes him gobble up Mere Ubu's cooking before the king arrives in the play's second scene.

This exchange is typical of Jarry's play in that it cobbles together three different kinds of desire: Pere Ubu's appetite for sausages (the stuff of grotesque realism); his desire for more wealth (mundane bourgeois aspiration); and his interest in the trappings of public authority (carriage, headpiece, umbrella, cloak). Everybody is subject to appetites of the belly, and most people want more money, so Ubu's desire for the outlandish props that represent authority seems the most absurd and the least familiar of Pere Ubu's desires. But the exchange, in which the promise of such props makes Ubu yield, suggests that they capture Ubu's imagination. As a farce of Shakespearean ambition, this accomplishes two things. First, it associates political ambition with the least heroic and most familiar kinds of appetites (the bodily and the bourgeois). Second, it renders the objects of ambition so trivial as to be manifestly not worth striving for. In the world of this farce, ordinary men driven by enormous appetites kill each other for trifles.

By emphasizing the outlandish triviality of the objects Ubu craves, Jarry literalizes what Macbeth himself comes to feel only too late: “There's nothing serious in mortality: / All is but toys” (2.3.93-94). Accordingly, Jarry strips the political ceremonies between Ubu and King Venceslas of the stateliness characterizing the equivalent scenes in Macbeth. The following exchange from Macbeth is a ritual exchange of loyalty and reciprocal support that represents an ideal of civility:

MACB.:
The service and the loyalty I owe,
In doing it, pays itself. Your highness' part
Is to receive our duties; and our duties
Are to your throne and state children and servants;
Which do but what they should, by doing every thing
Safe toward your love and honor
DUN.:
          Welcome hither!
I have begun to plant thee, and will labor
To make thee full of growing. Noble Banquo,
That hast no less deserv'd, nor must be known
No less to have done so, let me infold thee
And hold thee to my heart.
BAN.:
          There if I grow
The harvest is your own.

(1.4.22-33)

Jarry stages a similar scene, but mocks the display of reciprocal loyalty as just another exchange of toys:

THE King:
Pere Ubu, I want to recognize your numerous services as Captain of the Dragoons, and I am making you count of Sandomir as from today.
PERE Ubu:
Oh Monsieur Venceslas, I don't know how to thank you.
THE King:
Don't thank me, Pere Ubu, and be present tomorrow morning at the great Review.
PERE Ubu:
I'll be there, but be good enough to accept this little toy whistle [ce petit mirliton (47)].
(He presents the king with a toy whistle)
THE King:
What do you expect me to do with a toy whistle at my age?

(29)

Ubu treats the whistle as if it stood for his loyalty and gratitude, and as if it were an adequate requital for Venceslas's generosity. And though Venceslas is taken aback, the title of Count of Sandomir seems equally trivial. Everywhere in Ubu Roi, public life is represented as the traffic in trifles and toys. Later in the play, the power of Ubu's monarchy is vested in yet another set of comic props: a hook for executing enemies and a cart called “the phynancial conveyance” (75) for carrying off their money. It is possible that Jarry had in mind Macbeth's own anguished discovery that the props of monarchy—“fruitless crown” and “barren scepter” (3.1.60-61)—add up to nothing in and of themselves. Only in Jarry's play their fruitlessness of such objects is obvious and everybody wants them anyway.

Ubu becomes king at the start of Act 3: “By my green candle, here I am, the king of this country and I've already got myself indigestion and they're going to bring me my big head piece” (59). Ubu's indigestion results from a grasping hunger that, in keeping with the play's conflation of different kinds of appetite, makes him gobble up sausages as readily as he grabs the throne. As king, his grasping appetite leads him to have all the nobles killed in order to take their property. Then, having killed his magistrates and officers, Ubu himself is forced to drag the phynancial conveyance “from village to village” to collect taxes. As he explains his taxation to reluctant subjects, he offers a glimpse of the fantasy that drives his enormous greediness:

I've changed the government and I've had it put in the paper that all the existing taxes must be paid twice, and those that I impose later must be paid three times. With this system I shall soon have made my fortune, then I'll kill everybody and go away. [Avec ce système, jaurai vite fait fortune, alors je tuerai tout le monde et je m'en irai].

(76; 78)

This is a key moment in the farce, since it is the only instance in which Ubu offers any explanation for his ambition beyond the kind of overtly trivial proximate objectives we have been looking at: the carriage, the head piece, the umbrella, the cloak, and so on. But of course this genocidal fantasy is no less absurd. Since the wealth that Ubu extorts is valuable only in relation to an economy involving other people, his greediness is literally inconsistent with his fantasy of universal destruction. Ubu wants to triumph in his world—to monopolize the goods and props that are understood to be valuable and prestigious—but only as a means to achieve a kind of impossible autonomy that would destroy that world itself. We might think of this as a kind of political analogue to Ubu's indigestion: both are included to demonstrate the degree to which his appetites are driven by sheer greediness, and divorced from any pragmatic end (satiation of the body, pleasure, political influence, etc.).

Though crudely (and amusingly) put, this moment in Jarry's play strikes me as a sophisticated response to the paradox of ambition in Macbeth. For Macbeth too strives for the crown only to find that it is a proximate goal standing unsatisfactorily for a fantasy of total autonomy. One wonders, for example, why Macbeth should be so suddenly upset about Banquo's heirs in 3.1, since he knew about the witches' prophesy before killing Duncan and since he has no children of his own. It seems that Macbeth's anxiety has to do with the idea of successors in general. Or, more generally, that he chafes at anything that proves him to be other than “perfect, / Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, / As broad and general as the casing air” (3.4.20-22). Macbeth—like Ubu—grasps hungrily at triumph over others while dreaming of total autonomy.⁶

We might describe this as the paradox of mimetic desire: so long as value is given mimetically by competition with others, total victory can only diminish the desirability of the end. In Ubu Roi and Macbeth, the fantasy of unlimited power and autonomy remains in conflict with the mimetic desire that shapes its approximations. Consequently, as each protagonist aspires toward his impossible fantasy of perfect autonomy, he can do so only by exercising the kind of power over others that comes with domination in the social sphere. The gap between aspiration and action renders political power absurd. What's more, the need endlessly to exert power over others in search of this fantasy transforms both men into dehumanized killing machines. After ascending to the throne, Macbeth vows to act violently and without reflection (“From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand” [4.1.146-48]); Ubu—once he yields to temptation at the beginning of the play—kills gleefully, repeatedly, and without a second thought.

But where Shakespeare treats this struggle for autonomy as a tragic aspect of exceptional heroic ambition, Jarry caricatures the mimetic structuring of desire. Moreover, though the earthy, Rabelaisian elements in Ubu Roi may remind us of bodily appetites that can in themselves be satisfied, there is no sense that a character like Ubu can ever stop short of indigestion. Jarry himself described his play as an “exaggerating mirror” designed to reflect back the vices of his Parisian audience. As such, it uses Ubu's pure greed to lampoon the restless hunger of bourgeois aspirations perceived to have lost all moorings in bodily pleasure or true need (Jarry 1961, 174). This then is Jarry's revision of Macbeth: in order to lampoon the conventionalized aspirations of his audience, he transforms it into a play about the uneasy relationship between mimetic desire for various conventional objects and the essentially self-centered and absolutist impulse behind competitive desire as such. The unbridgeable gap between the former (desire for power over others, for a crown, for money, for esteem) and the latter (desire to be “perfect” in Macbeth, or to “kill everybody and go away” in Ubu Roi) renders the immediate objects of ambition absurd, and commits the desiring subject to a project of serial approximation that goes on without meaning or end.

Jarry studied with Henri Bergson at the Lycèe Henri IV in Paris. It is likely, therefore, that Ubu Roi's penchant for broad caricature and repetitive drives owes something to Bergson's famous theory of comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living” (Bergson 1980, 84). In particular, one can imagine Bergson's ideas influencing Jarry's depiction of Pere Ubu as a killing machine, acting on impulse without introspection or conscience. Such elements of Bergsonian farce may also explain Ionesco's interest in Ubu Roi, since similar ideas lie at the heart of his dramaturgy. Thus, when asked about the mechanical aspects of his plays—the way lines are repeated, for example, or the way that characters' patterns of speech can seem to be driven by cliché—Ionesco too alludes to Bergson:

I realize now that this isn't just a formula or a dramatic device. It's a mode of being. At the start, you have “a little of something mechanical encrusted on the living.” It's comic. But if the mechanical gets bigger and bigger and the living shrinks and shrinks, things become stifling and then tragic, because we get the impression that the world is slipping from our mental grasp.

(Bonnefoy 1970, 108)

Tragedy for Ionesco is the acceleration of the mechanisms of farce in order to imitate the experience of an alienated “mode of being.” In Macbett, these mechanisms are structured and driven by mimetic desire: each of the play's characters is driven to repeat the atrocities of his predecessor while striving for the same inconsequential triumphs. While Jarry is interested in the aggressive and autarkic impulses that find mimetic expression, Ionesco is concerned to show how the conventionality of aspiration dehumanizes his characters. As the objects of their desire lose specificity, the characters in Macbett are rendered interchangeable and reduced to cogs in an automated system of emulation and violence.

Ionesco depicts the mechanized and undifferentiated nature of his characters by relying heavily upon repetition. Macbett and Banco, for example, each deliver the same long and gruesome soliloquy during their initial battle with the rebels (“The blade of my sword is all red with blood” [14-18]). Similarly, denunciations of Duncan first spoken by Candor and Glamiss are later repeated, with only the slightest variations, by Banco and Macbett (4-5, 68). The relationship between the play's repetitiveness and the vacuity of mimetic desire is evident in the exchange in which Glamiss and Candor talk each other into rebellion against Duncan:

GLAMISS:
He's no better than we are.
CANDOR:
Worse, if anything.
GLAMISS:
Much worse.
CANDOR:
Much, much worse.

(5)

Such repetitions evacuate the conspirators of individual personality while, at the same time, the indignation of each conspirator feeds off of the other in a way that underscores the degree to which such attitudes are reinforced by the stated opinions of others. The rebellious impulse, in short, stems from an interchangeable and mimetically structured ambition. This introductory representation of ambition sets the stage for Macbett's rebellious ambition later in the play, about which the same might be said:

MACBETT:
Yes, he's a good king. Though he should be more appreciative of his impartial advisors—like you for example.
BANCO:
Or you.
MACBETT:
Like you or me.
BANCO:
Quite.
MACBETT:
He's a bit of an autocrat.
BANCO:
Very autocratic.
MACBETT:
A real autocrat!

(66)

All who want the crown are conspirators; all conspirators want the crown because the crown is what is wanted. They are interchangeable and mutually reinforcing pieces in a system of recurring rivalry and violence.

Beyond this general anatomy of ambition, Macbett's own desires are given a more thorough treatment in the play. There is no Lady Macbett, in Ionesco's version, to goad her husband to murder. Instead, there is a composite figure—both Lady Duncan and the lead witch—who seduces Macbett and simultaneously gives shape to his rebellious imagination. The crucial scene is staged as a strip tease: the first witch removes a mask and reveals herself to Macbett as the beautiful lady Duncan; then she strips down to a “sparkling bikini” in the manner of a dancer at “la Lido Club or Crazy Horse Saloon” (1985, 56; see also Lamont 1972, 245).⁷ The smitten Macbett offers to be Lady Duncan's “slave,” to which she replies:

(holding out the dagger to him) I'll be yours if you wish. Would you like that? Here is the instrument of your ambition and our rise to power. (seductively) Take it if that's what you want, if you want me. But act boldly. Hell helps those who help themselves. Look into yourself. You can feel your desire for me growing, your hidden ambition coming into the open, inflaming you. You'll take his place at my side. I'll be your mistress. You'll be my sovereign.

(56-57)

Macbett's ambition is given as a kind of irresistible erotic desire, an equation that alludes to Lady Macbeth's association of regicide with manliness. Here, to seize the dagger means to desire Lady Duncan and therefore to be a real man. Such manliness is enfeebling, though: the scene ends in a darkness through which we can see only Lady Duncan's “glistening body” and Macbett rolling at her feet (58).

Many of the play's critics have obscured the function of this scene, either by failing to examine the kind of erotic desire invoked or by decoupling ambition from eros. Nancy Lane does both, for example, when she argues that “the lure of feminine sexuality, rather than political ambition, is the driving force behind Macbett's actions (Lane 1994, 179). In fact, though, what lures Macbett is not “feminine sexuality” so much as the spectacle of the female body in its most objectified and commercially packaged state. A strip tease artist should be simultaneously—and more or less equivalently—desirable to all present. And since in their commercial setting such performances are repeated over and over, their venues operate on the premise that one dancer will do more or less as well as the next: the package is the product in this kind of erotic exchange. Ionesco's emphasis on the sparkles of Lady Duncan's bikini and the glistening of her skin underscores precisely this point. This in turn means that Macbett is seduced not by the specific allure of a specific body and the erotic promise that it holds, nor by “the lure of feminine sexuality” as such, but instead by an empty, ritualized, and universally consumable spectacle.

In the theater, Lady Duncan's costume is bound to seem comically inappropriate, rendering Macbett's erotic desire ridiculous. This effect underscores the scene's serious point: that Macbett's desire is in no way idiosyncratic or personal, since its object is only a conventional trope of desirability. This is in keeping with the play's characteristic use of repetition in that it tends to evacuate the protagonist of individuality, demonstrating that Macbett's erotic desire is just like everybody else's. In fact, Ionesco links erotic desire and political ambition here precisely because the two are similarly structured within the play: Macbett strives for the throne because it's what one strives for; similarly, he lusts after Lady Duncan simply because she transforms herself into an icon of what one lusts after. Taken together, these offer an anatomy of fully mimetic desire in that the allure of each object is finally based on its very conventionality.

Such conventionality, in Macbett, strangles feeling. One of the characteristic comic techniques in this play—and in Ionesco's work generally—involves the juxtaposition of horror and brutality with the most exaggeratedly conventional behavior. As the play's first battle rages in the wings, a woman crosses the stage unconcernedly on her way to do some shopping (19). Candor's army is guillotined on stage while Duncan, Lady Duncan, Macbett, and Banco sit down to high tea (31-36). Banco and Macbett each conclude their descriptions of the carnage of war with the banal observation that “It's been quite a pleasant day” (16, 18). These horrific scenes are designed to convey a deadening of feeling that is in turn part of the play's analysis of the way its characters—forged in the crucible of convention—are driven by the same desires as everybody else.

Ionesco does not lavish attention on Macbett's tyranny in the manner of Shakespeare's play. The scenes that follow Macbett's ascension are comically truncated, as is his fall. But Ionesco does retain some of Macbeth's forceful bravado in the face of all challenges. When his coronation banquet is disturbed (in this case by the ghosts of Duncan and Banco) Macbett responds with self-reliant disdain: “I don't need anyone's help. (To the guests) Get out, you slaves” (98). When Macol appears, backed by a powerful Carthaginean army, Macbett's response is “I fear no one” (99). His confidence, like Macbeth's, is bolstered by a prophesy that seems to promise invincibility: “Silly little sod. Shoo! I killed your fool of a father. I wouldn't like to have to kill you, too. It's no good. You can't hurt me. No man of woman born can harm Macbett” (99). Ionesco ties up some of Shakespeare's loose ends by revealing that Macol is in fact the biological son of Banco and “a gazelle that a witch transformed into a woman,” subsequently adopted by Duncan (99). When Macbett finally realizes that the prophesies are coming true, his response is a tribute to Jarry: “Shit” (101)!

In the context of the play's hasty and intentionally outlandish wrap-up (a gazelle!), Macbett's heroic bravado sounds silly. This is precisely the point, of course. Macbett is most sure that he has achieved something triumphant at the very moment when everything in the play seems most ridiculous. The hastiness of the way these events unspool nicely conveys the vacuity of conventional ambition, compressing Macbett's sense of victory together with the audience's feeling that the game itself has been empty and trivial. For this reason, the nod to Ubu is apt as well. For like Jarry—who makes a farce of the gap between the absolutism of ambitious desires and the trivialized objects that come to stand in for them—Ionesco's comic effect here hinges on the fact that the objects of mimetic desire (the throne, the “sparkling bikini”) necessarily fall short of the kind of triumph Macbett imagines them to represent. Though Macbett is revealed to be striving toward the perfect autonomy of victory (“I don't need anyone's help”), he can do so only by striving for the conventional, the banal, the ephemeral, the absurd. This is the central paradox of mimetic desire in each of these plays. But where Jarry is concerned with the way social convention structures the expressions of a more primitive selfish aggression, Ionesco emphasizes simply the all-pervasiveness of conventionality. That is why there is no one character in Macbett as vivid as Pere Ubu: where Ubu represents a primal and competitive self-regard that motivates conventional aspiration, Ionesco's play sees nothing prior to the conventionality that so interchangeably structures the play's motivating desires.

EMULATE PRIDE AND THE SENECAN ABSURD

Like Ubu or Macbett, Shakespeare's Macbeth strives toward perfect autonomy from within the mimetic structure of political competition. Indeed, from the moment he has it, Macbeth recognizes that the crown cannot be “the be-all and the end-all” (1.7.5). His seemingly pragmatic wish to be safely enthroned quickly gives way to the more explicit and impossible fantasy of being “perfect / Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, / As broad and general as the casing air” (3.4.20-22). Awareness of the impossibility of this desire finally reduces Macbeth's aspirations to “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (5.5.26-28). Macbeth's willingness to explore and to articulate for us the paradoxical nature of such tragic striving is what allows him to hold our interest, and perhaps our sympathy, even after he has become a killing machine.

The most vivid instance of this occurs just after the fiasco of the banquet in Act 3, as Macbeth sets out to revisit the witches:

                                        For mine own good
All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.(8)

(3.4.134-37)

According to the OED, “tedious” could mean something like “painful” or “slow,” but its primary meaning, then as now, was more like “wearisome.” I prefer to understand Shakespeare's use of the word in the last sense, for this makes it a remarkable expression of Macbeth's growing sense that his actions signify nothing. To describe mass murder as merely tedious bespeaks a colossal desensitization, dismissing horrible actions like the killing of Macduff's family as motions that simply need to be gone through. As with Macbeth's allusion to the “bank and shoal of time” earlier in the play (1.7.6), a spatial metaphor stands in awkwardly for moral and temporal registers here. What matters, though, is the directionlessness of the way Macbeth imagines himself by this point in the play. The meaningful directive of his earlier ambition (to “o'erleap” obstacles and achieve the throne [1.4.49]) is replaced with a weary recognition that no direction will lead to the (impossible) end. Except, perhaps, self-destruction: Braden describes how Macbeth's “pursuit of … radical integrity” must culminate in “an annihilation of himself and of all around him, a suicide of the soul (Braden 1984, 292).

This I think is the reason that Jarry and Ionesco found Shakespeare to be contemporary, and why they both returned to Macbeth: not just the play's cynical depiction of state violence, but the way it explores the paradoxes of ambition and mimetic desire, the tragic necessity of the gap between the fantasy of absolute autonomy and the conventional objectives that must stand in for it. Shakespeare himself offers a marvelously compact phrase that captures precisely this irony when, in Hamlet, Horatio describes the heroism of Hamlet's father as being driven by “a most emulate pride” (1.1.83). The heroism of Old Hamlet, as Horatio's phrase unwittingly makes clear, involves two simultaneous and contradictory desires: the desire to be better than other men and the need to imitate their objectives. The same phrase describes Macbeth's predicament, the way his pride's transcendent aspiration is confined by the sheer conventionality of its approximations. For “emulate pride,” more generally, is Shakespeare's name for the mimetic desire that drives masculine ambition, and this in turn is what is developed in the absurdist revisions of Shakespeare offered by Jarry and Ionesco.

But in this regard, Shakespeare is merely the most familiar of the many Renaissance dramatists who seem contemporary. For while the richness of Macbeth's meditations is unique, interest in the heroic pursuit of “radical integrity” and its necessary limitations is in fact something of an obsession in renaissance English drama. The best examples—both of this pursuit and of its absurdity—are found in Marlowe's studies of outsized ambition, in which, as Stephen Greenblatt has nicely described it,

the objects of [the hero's] desire, at first so clearly defined, so avidly pursued, gradually lose their sharp outlines and become more and more like mirages. Faustus speaks endlessly of his appetite, his desire to be glutted, ravished, consumed, but what is it exactly that he wants? By the end of the play it is clear that knowledge, voluptuousness, and power are each mere approximations of the goal for which he sells his soul and body; what that goal is remains maddeningly unclear.

(1980, 217)

This is very like the trajectory of Macbeth's impossible desires, which cannot be satisfied by any of the serial murders he undertakes in search of the be-all and the end-all. The fantasy of Barabas (the protagonist of Marlowe's Jew of Malta [s1590]) to enclose “infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37) bespeaks a worldly greed that, like Ubu's or Macbeth's, is driven by a desire for transcendent autonomy. The absurdity of this desire is registered, in Marlowe, by means of repetition: Marlowe's heroes, driven toward impossible ends by emulate pride, pursue them by means of serialized contests with rivals. Indeed, Marlowe—with his flair for brutal farce and “the mechanical encrusted on the living”—is much closer to the manner of Jarry or Ionesco than is Shakespeare.⁹

Since this kind of emphasis on the ironies of mimetic desire is evidently part of what Ionesco finds compelling in Macbeth, then Shakespeare is “the forefather of the theatre of the absurd” partly because he participates in this larger Renaissance interest in the absurdity of emulate pride. To make this claim is to argue for some intellectual continuity between this radical strain in Renaissance drama and the equally radical theater of Jarry and Ionesco. In each case, the drama reduces conventionally ambitious political actions to the quixotic pursuit of an impossible dream of completion. And though the process can be treated as tragedy or farce, in each case the actions themselves become mechanical and trivial as they are revealed merely to be serial approximations of this fantasy. The intended effect, in each case, is a powerful exposé of conventional ambition, an attempt to lay bare its self-delusions, its destructiveness, and its basic inhumanity.

I call this strain in Renaissance drama the “Senecan absurd,” for it has its roots in Seneca's hugely influential tragedies. On the one hand, Seneca's tragic protagonists strive always to achieve a unique style of transcendent self-realization, and often—as Braden describes—by means of terrible atrocities: “heroic evil is the ultimate autarceia, enforcing and exploiting a radical split between the self's needs and the claims of its context” (Braden 1985, 47). On the other, Senecan drama is full of intimations that the fantasy of transcendent autonomy is necessarily delusional, since such pursuit also requires the world as witness. Thyestes is Seneca's richest exploration of emulate pride, and in the interests of brevity I will confine my remarks about the Senecan absurd to a discussion of that play's murderous desires.

The action of the play pivots around the archetypal sibling rivalry of Atreus and Thyestes, a pair of brothers who have been locked for a lifetime in competition over the kingdom of Mycenae. Thyestes was the first transgressor—seizing his brother's land and wife in the play's prehistory—but he has paid for it since with a long and impoverished banishment. Nevertheless, Atreus castigates himself bitterly for his failure to harm his brother further since, as he puts it, “crimes thou dost not avenge, save as thou dost surpass them.¹⁰ It quickly becomes clear that this is a story of competitive pride, not a story of justice. Indeed, Atreus seems determined not only to do harm to his brother, but also to commit the ultimate crime. In particular, he strives to outdo the revenge of Procne, who killed her children and fed them to their father in retribution for the rape and mutilation of her sister. But, characteristically, competition and imitation are closely linked in Atreus's imagination. His attempt to top Procne is in fact a reenactment of her revenge. After luring Thyestes back to the palace with talk of forgiveness, Atreus kills Thyestes's children and feeds them to their father.¹¹ When the deed is done, Atreus is eerily (if briefly) exultant: “Peer of the stars I move, and, towering over all, touch with proud head the lofty heavens” (163). In keeping with Braden's generalizations, Atreus imagines the sheer horror of his actions as a kind of self-creating transcendence.

The connection between competition and emulation is similarly evident in the delusional way Atreus imagines his brother throughout the play. As Atreus plans his revenge, he suggests on several occasions that Thyestes would happily commit equivalent atrocities if given the chance: “I know what thou complainst of,” Atreus declares in his moment of triumph, “thou grievest that I have forestalled thee in the crime, and art distressed, not because thou hast consumed the ghastly feast, but because thou didst not offer it to me” (181). There is no reason to think that this is accurate, since Thyestes is depicted as a timid man attempting to reconcile stoic precepts with a desire for comfort. But it becomes clear, over the course of the play, that this delusional understanding of his brother's intention is absolutely essential to Atreus's self-fashioning.

Atreus's willful distortions lie at the heart of Seneca's didactic purpose, for they cast light on the disfiguring nature of competitive psychology. Atreus needs to feel that his horrid actions represent a total victory over his brother. The absoluteness of this victory is what allows Atreus to feel himself “towering over all.” But in order to feel that his atrocities represent a victory, Atreus needs to believe that his brother has in fact been competing. Atreus's assertions about his brother seem strange because they seek to serve each of these somewhat contradictory psychic needs: they assert simultaneously that Thyestes has been the mirror image of Atreus—cut from the same cloth, plotting the same revenge, invested as heavily in the contest—and that Atreus's victory has been total. Since the Thyestes we see is not competing, Atreus needs first to assert that there has been a contest, and then that he has won. Once again “emulate pride” seems an uncannily precise description of this pathology, capturing as it does the way that the pride of victory is contingent upon similarity and emulation. Atreus commits his crime in pursuit of a fantasy of self-realization that requires a symmetrical rival in Thyestes.

The last exchanges between Atreus and Thyestes are enormously difficult to unravel.¹² Atreus vacillates between triumph and the uneasy recognition that even this cannibal banquet has been too little:

Crime should have limit, when crime is wrought, not when repaid. E'en this is not enough for me. Straight from the very wound I should have poured the hot blood down thy throat, that thou mightst drink gore of thy living sons—my wrath was cheated by my haste.

(175-77)

In fact, Atreus finds satisfaction only by asserting that watching Thyestes's torment has proven the legitimacy of his own children: “Now do I believe my children are my own, now may I trust once more that my marriage bed is pure” (179). Atreus's concern with the question of legitimacy goes back to the play's prehistory, in which Thyestes has eloped with Atreus's wife. But his certainty here is puzzling because there it has no logical basis: nothing has been said or done to prove the legitimacy of the children. This too underscores the delusional quality of Atreus's mania for revenge. Perhaps Atreus, imagining that his brother too is obsessed with emulate competition, assumes that he would have taken this moment to declare his paternity? There is no indication that Thyestes wants to claim paternity of Atreus's children, so we might say that in this instance, as in the larger revenge plot, Atreus invents a contest in order to declare himself unquestioned victor. Because Thyestes remains unconcerned with the rivalries Atreus invents, however, the impulse behind them cannot be fully satisfied.

The story of Atreus's unsatisfiable appetite is framed, in Seneca's fiction, by the eternally unsatisfied appetites of his ancestor Tantalus—whose horrific afterlife (always hungry and thirsty, food and drink recede from his grasp eternally) makes him a figure for “ever-gaping hunger” (93). The play's first act shows a reluctant Tantalus forced by a Fury to rekindle the cycle of family violence that has plagued the family:

GHOST of Tantalus:
Here will I stand and prevent the evil deed. Why with thy scourge dost fright mine eyes, and fiercely threaten with thy writhing snakes? Why deep in my inmost marrow dost rouse hunger pains? My heart is parched with burning thirst, and in my scorched vitals the fire is darting—I follow thee.
THE Fury:
This, this very rage of thine distribute throughout thy house! So, e'en as thou, may they be driven on, raging to quench their thirst each in others blood.

(99)

This amounts to an almost hydraulic account of Atreus's hunger for vengeance: the Fury fills Tantalus with hunger and thirst; these force him to follow; the pangs are discharged into Atreus where they become murderous bloodthirstiness. Tantalus thus serves a quasi-allegorical function in relation to the play's main plot, as a representation of the kinds of “ever-gaping” competitive appetites that drive the family toward atrocity. This also fits the didactic purposes of Seneca's stoicism, depicting emulate pride not only as delusional but as inherently restless and dissatisfied. Hence, too, the play's interest in structures of endless repetition: since emulate pride cannot find release in total victory, its rage is never spent. By contextualizing Atreus's story with the allegorical nod to Tantalus, Seneca associates this restlessness with endless repetition, eternal grasping at an impossible goal. The implication is that, from one perspective, Atreus and all the cursed killers of his family are killing machines, repeatedly generating horrors in serial approximation of a fantasy of infinite revenge, total victory, and transcendence.

ONE GENEALOGY OF THE ABSURD

Once Thyestes is described in these terms, it is easy to see how the exploration of ambition in Renaissance plays like Macbeth or Marlowe's tragedies extends Seneca's bitter critique. For these plays share with Seneca their depiction of ambition as an “ever-gaping hunger” for a kind of triumph over the world that can never be realized within it. One important implication of this is that Renaissance dramatists were very sophisticated readers of Senecan tragedy, able to mine it for a radical critique of public aspiration applicable beyond the specific excesses of Nero's Rome. It is only because this kind of influence is difficult to pin down that debates over the influence of Senecan tragedy have centered instead on borrowed phrases and comparatively trivial formal elements (Kiefer 1977; Miola 1992, 3-9). More particularly, Macbeth transposes Senecan concerns in (at least) two ways. First, by taking the story out of the family and moving it more overtly into the political sphere. By doing so, the play makes Seneca's critique of mimetically structured ambition more explicitly a critique of public aspiration in general. Second, it builds Seneca's interest in repetition more directly into the plot. Macbeth takes the place of the whole house of Atreus, committing a series of atrocities in an increasingly dehumanizing attempt at perfection. Each of these formal innovations expands upon what is merely allegorical in Seneca's scheme.

Jarry, recognizing in Macbeth a fierce attack on the complacency of social convention, retells it as farce. Ubu takes his cues as to the value of items and positions from others, but his enormous selfishness is driven by a desire to destroy and transcend the world around him. In keeping with this perspective—which allows for no inherent value in the objects of mimetic competition—the objects fought over in Jarry are hilariously trivial. This generalizes Macbeth's ruminations on the meaninglessness of the crown, stripping the story of specific political context and supplying instead a perspective within which any and all public ambitions are mocked.

Ionesco's Macbett keeps Jarry's focus on the triviality of conventional desires but shifts the focus once again. Instead of looking at the selfish and trivial desires of one character, Ionesco emphasizes the degree to which all desires are trivial because conventional. As a result, Ionesco's is a play of interchangeable parts: the endless hunger of Tantalus, Macbeth, and Ubu is replaced by a murderous society in which everyone has the same murderous appetites as a matter of course. This approach emphasizes most fully the dehumanizing tedium of repetitive violence stoked by conventional ambition. Within this world of trivial and violent interchangeability, Macbett's boasts of autonomy and triumph are designed to ring with bitter, Senecan irony.

The formal innovation of Renaissance Senecanism—which makes endless repetition into part of the plot—is extended still further in Ionesco's absurdist revision: in addition to shaping the actions of the plot, mimetic repetition structures the way Ionesco's characters think, talk, and relate to one another. The fantasy of transcendence that generates this repetition in earlier Senecan drama is further attenuated here by the total failure of individuality, but Macbett's hollow ambition is still to stand alone as a fully triumphant and self-sufficient king. Indeed, if one thinks of such repetition as a major formal innovation of the theater of the absurd, used to express a modern alienation from what Ionesco calls “transcendental roots,” then perhaps the affinity between theater of the absurd and Senecan drama will seem almost inevitable (Esslin 1961, xix). I am struck, therefore, by the fact that Camus's influential essay on the Absurd turns to Sisyphus—doomed forever to roll a stone up a hill, doomed to fail, endlessly trying—as an emblem of the Absurd hero. That Seneca and Camus both use the endless torments of the classical underworld to represent the emptiness of worldly action is a coincidence that underscores a real continuity between Absurdist and Senecan concerns.

Literary history is always overdetermined. Shakespeare and Seneca are not the primary influences upon Absurdism, nor would Ionesco or Jarry have necessarily conceived of their relation to Shakespeare in the terms I have proposed. But these affinities do offer some explanatory context for the uncanny sense that Shakespeare is in dialogue with some of the most radical innovations of modern drama. That is to say, they begin to explain what in Macbeth seems modern and why Shakespeare was doing it. More importantly, sketching this chain of influences is designed to demonstrate Shakespeare's participation in a much larger tradition of radical dramaturgy that owes its staying power to a remarkably powerful, adaptable, and therefore vital critique of the absurd desires beneath public ambition. It is my hope that recuperating this genealogy strengthens it, lending a greater cumulative weight to its insistent exposé of emulate pride.

But in order to make use of this perspective, we must attend to the alternative models of desire implicit in these plays. For despite their shared emphasis on eating (the cannibal banquet in Seneca, Macbeth's disrupted feast, Ubu's gourmandizing, tea and carnage in Macbett), these plays tend to lack depictions of healthy appetite. Hunger, we might say, leads directly to indigestion. This too may have Senecan origins: Thyestes's return to court, for example, is depicted as a kind of fatal weakness for comfort, a failure of stoic indifference that makes Atreus's crimes possible. More generally, Braden has argued for a close analogy between the stoic's dream of perfect indifference and the kind of transcendence aimed at by Atreus: both are driven by a desire “to keep the self's boundaries under its own control (Braden 1985, 23). Both, in short, have a fundamental hostility to the demands of neediness. The same hostility permeates the world of Macbeth, where the drunken porter alone stands as an attenuated but crucial gesture toward a Rabelaisian perspective that celebrates instead the self's openness.

The coarseness of Jarry's farce ensures that the registers of bodily need are always present. This means that though Ubu's greed is driven by a fantasy of transcendence, the play's audience can intuit a Rabelaisian alternative to his Senecan drive. But this possibility is forestalled in Ionesco's Macbett, a play that reduces bodily appetites to convention and thus to emulate pride. In doing so, Ionesco reproduces a hostility to pleasure that leaves its audience once again with only the stark choices of Senecan tragedy: destructive emulate pride or complete withdrawal from the world. This nonchoice may explain why audiences have found Macbett comparatively unsatisfying as a piece of dramatic art. For indeed, the grim emphasis on the destructiveness of mimetic desire throughout these incarnations of the absurd underscores for me the importance of an alternative model of desire not based on competitiveness and mimesis. While recovering this Senecan tradition may provide us with a radical and long-standing critique of ambition, it should also lead us to look beyond stoic hostility to need, and to celebrate instead the more immediate desires and satisfactions of the body.

Notes

1. On Shakespeare's interest in cyclical violence see Booth 1983, 91-92, and Sinfield 1986. On Ionesco's reinscription of Shakespeare's political violence see: Lamont 1972, 231-53; Kern 1974; Sessa 1978; Scott 1989, 72-88.

2. See Macbeth, 4.3.46-100.

3. All citations from Shakespeare's Macbeth will appear in this form.

4. Even in France, which did not have a strong Shakespearean tradition until the eighteenth century (Jusserand 1899; Heylen 1993).

5. For the French see Jarry 1962, 33. For the translation see Jarry 1961, 9. I use these editions throughout.

6. This basic argument has been made in several critical vocabularies. See for example Adelman 1992, 130-46, Braden 1984, and Brooks 1948, 22-49.

7. Lamont 1972, 245.

8. On the Senecan heritage of this passage see Miola 1992, 93.

9. On paradoxes of desire throughout the Marlowe canon, see Tromly 1998.

10. Seneca 1961, 105. I use this text throughout. On the excessiveness of revenge in Senecan drama see Kerrigan 1996, 114-17.

11. As has been remarked, this Senecan motif of child killing symbolizes the desire of the hero to kill the future—that which is beyond control, that which necessarily limits perfect autonomy—and is picked up by the images of children and child killing in Macbeth. See Braden 1984, 291-92, and Miola 1992, 108.

12. Perhaps in order to elaborate some of what seems elliptical, Jasper Heywood's translation of Thyestes (1560) adds one final speech in which Thyestes calls for self-punishment. See Kerrigan 1996, 111-12.

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