Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)
STUDIES - Péter Egri: From the British Grotesque To the American Absurd: the Dramatist's Dilemma
Albee seems to have adopted, adapted, developed, changed and reversed both of Cooper's solutions in a single play. His first ending is Cooper's quiet acquiescence. What Mrs Toothe has to say to Jenny and Richard about the place in the garden where —along the cesspool line —Jack has been buried can be considered the equivalent of Cooper's second conclusion: "The grass will grow over; the earth will be rich, and soon — eventually —everything in the garden ... will be as it was. You'll see." 2 8 Albee, however, appears to have been dissatisfied with such a peaceful, if ironical, solution at the end of such a violent play, and makes the otherwise dead Jack return in dirty clothes and with sod in his hair to draw the conclusion, speaking about himself as somebody who was, in the past tense. At this point of the plot he is an "Absurd Person Singular", to quote and adapt the title of Alan Ayckbourn's play. Since Jack now is neither alive nor a ghost but a persona standing for the author's idea, ideal and ironical position, he clearly corresponds to Bernard rebelling against his part. Is Jack's resurrection dramatically acceptable? The answer to the question cannot be given in terms of everyday likelihood. The problem is a matter of artistic plausibility, of how far Albee has been able to create a dramatic medium in which such a solution is organic. Not only has Albee used the traditional dramatic structure of exposition, imbroglio, culmination and dénouement, crystallized by Sophocles, dynamized by Shakespeare, cross-bred with an analytical research of the past by Ibsen and Shaw, embedded and blurred in a more or less deterministic milieu by Hauptmann and O'Neill, and pointed and simplified in their well-made plays by Scribe, Sardou, Rnero, Jones, Boucicault and Belasco. Albee has also relativized this structure. Jack's return after his death is no less a corroboration and relativization of the dramatic climax of his murder than is George's announcement of the death of the imaginary son in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The simultaneous use, misuse and abuse of the dramatic tradition results in an ingenious fusion of a realistic framework and an absurdist texture, which characterizes 2 8 E. Albee, Everything in the Garden, p. 197. 35
