What is Gained is Loss: Emotional Dissonance in The Zoo Story

Absurdism is, to varying degrees, life exaggerated. It is a theater that “subverts logic [and] relishes the unexpected and logically impossible” (Culík). Aspects of normality are taken to extremes and turn from trivial to uncomfortable. In a note on Kafka, Eugene Ionesco writes “Absurd is that which has no purpose, or goal, or objective.” And yet this purposeless, goalless, and objectiveless narrative structure still provides an insightful look into human nature. Coined by Martin Esslin and derived from Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, the Theater of the Absurd defines the human situation as meaningless. Though, despite nonsense language at times and bizarre situations, Esslin writes, “Not only do all these plays make sense, though perhaps not obvious or conventional sense, they also give expression to some of the basic issues and problems of our age, in a uniquely efficient and meaningful manner, so that they meet some of the deepest needs and unexpressed yearning of their audience.” This theater rooted in the avant-garde, the “experience of World War II”, and “the disappearance of the religious dimension from contemporary life” depicts human existence as it really is: irrational and ridiculous (Culík). Rather, it depicts emotion as it really is. The situations themselves vary from highly unlikely to absolutely implausible but the plays carry an air about them suggestive of the isolation involved with being human. In fact, the prevailing tone of Absurdist theater expresses the inability to connect and subsequently with loneliness and alienation from society.

In Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story Jerry is man who longs for connection. He lives a solitary life in a sickening roominghouse in the Upper West of New York City. Once thin and handsome, Jerry is now at a time in his life where the those facts are hardly still evident and his appearance reflects his emotional wear. He meets Peter on a bench in Central Park. Peter is married man with two daughters, two cats, and two parakeets who lives comfortably; he “wears tweeds, smokes a pipe, [and] carries horn-rimmed glasses.” Jerry approaches Peter asking him if he would like to hear about his recent trip to the zoo. The encounter is frustrating for the both of them as neither of them are quite able to understand the other. Constantly alluding to his trip to the zoo, but never revealing what actually happened there, Peter becomes irritated with Jerry. It is evident that Jerry’s actions are intentional; he is pressing Peter’s buttons and removing him from his literal and also ideological comfort zone on purpose. In the final few moments of the play Jerry begins forcing Peter off of “his” bench, gradually and calmly at first and building up to a forceful climax leaving Peter hysterical and presumably teary-eyed. Jerry challenges Peter to defend himself and his pride to prove that he is not, as Jerry calls him, a “vegetable.” The play ends with Jerry tossing a knife to Peter and charging at him, impaling and killing himself and leaving Peter shocked and stunned. In his final gasps of breath Jerry tells Peter what happened at the zoo:

I think... I think this is what happened at the zoo... I think. I think that while I was at the zoo I decided I would walk north... northerly, rather... until I found you... or somebody... and I decided that I would talk to you... I would tell you things... and the things I would tell you would... Well, here were are? you see? here we are. But... I don’t know... could I have planned all this? No... no, I couldn’t have. But I think I did. And now I’ve told you what you wanted to know, haven’t I? And now you know all about what happened at the zoo. And now you know what you’ll see on TV, and the face I told you about... you remember... the face I told you about... my face, the face you see right now. Peter... Peter? Peter... thank you. I came unto you and you have comforted me.

Though their meeting is bizarre and seemingly unrealistic it contains a certain amount of truth to way that people respond and interact with each other. Peter’s failure and lack of desire to understand Jerry is not just about their chance encounter on a bench in Central Park, it is about chance encounters on benches everywhere; it is about human interaction and the impossibility of really being able to understand anyone else. It’s about what it’s like to be lonely when you’re not alone. Ultimately, for Jerry, Peter, and the audience, as Jerry says “what is gained is loss.”

Contact Without Communication

One could argue that Jerry serves as a Christ figure, “the park bench might indeed be a church pew, where strangers share in a parody of the Mass” (Mann 23) and although I disagree with any religious parallels that could made of The Zoo Story, Jerry is indeed responsible for providing Peter with autonomy. Peter is a man who is trapped in a childlike state, unable to intelligently articulate himself. He behaves the way he believes that a man in his position should behave, confined to a specific way of thought and communication. Mary Castiglie Anderson writes in Edward Albee: An Interview and Essays, “ Peter has no way of articulating his personal feelings and sensibilities, and without that ability, Peter, it may be argued, lacks any real identity or place within his world. What Jerry effects within the play is the initiation of Peter into an adult world of feelings and the responsibilities which are attendant with their expression.” The idea of Peter entering emotional adulthood idea brings up the theme of disparity in The Zoo Story, both social and linguistic. The idea of who we are versus who we want to be. Peter wants to be an adult, even though in many ways, he is not. He can only become what he wants at the cost of another person, someone he would never associate with due to socioeconomic factors. In Albee’s idea of social disparity Peter cannot exist without Jerry and Jerry cannot exist with Peter; the rich cannot exist with the poor and the poor cannot exist without the rich. Anderson writes, “ Peter in his innocence and Jerry in his ‘over-sanity’ (Albee’s term) both lack completeness; each provides the other with a ‘missing half’.” Anderson also writes that “ Peter and Jerry reveal different aspects of one personality and represent very real people in a very real situation.” Albee himself has claimed the Jerry and Peter represent two sides of himself: “the one who lived back in Larchmont, and the one who lives in New York City.”

This play can no doubt be read as a story about class. Jerry lives in a tiny room in a roominghouse on the upper West Side. Peter lives in the east 70s, a world completely separate from the one in which Jerry inhabits. In Peter’s world he has parakeets and a wife to worry about, ignorant of people like Jerry. When Jerry is talking about his horrible landlady Peter even replies “ I find it hard to believe that people such as that really are.” It is as though Peter might as well be saying that he can’t believe that there are people who don’t have a wife and children and parakeets. Peter’s lack of ability to understand Jerry serves to say that it’s not that people can’t understand each other it’s just that sometimes it’s easier not to, it’s easier to ignore them. Jerry quips, “ I don’t know what I was thinking about; of course you don’t understand. I don’t live in your block; I’m not married to two parakeets, or whatever your setup is.” It could be argued that much of the conflict in this play is based on this social distinction. Their inability to communicate stems from their inability to connect on a social level. The only time Peter even tries to make sense of Jerry is when he believes that he is from the Village. Assuming that Jerry is just an eccentric artist, Peter is suddenly okay with their “situation,” but once he finds out that he is actually from the upper West Side, his response is one of fear. Jerry is no longer a harmless eccentric; he is dangerous and poor. This speaks in volumes about human nature: that we are threatened by that which we don’t understand.

Disparity in a linguistic sense also plays a significant role in Peter and Jerry’s relationship and with what I think Albee is trying to communicate with this play. (On a tangential side note, I find it fascinating that Albee chose Absurdism. In a play about how hard it is to effectively and truthfully communicate, he used a narrative form that is difficult itself to understand.) Physically and financially Jerry is in far worse shape than Peter, although he is able to articulate himself much better and he is at times almost even poetic. Though the educated and supposedly “better” Peter is, as stated above, almost incapable of intelligently expressing himself, both in terms of eloquence (of which he has little to none) and the truth in what he saying. Toward the end of the play when Jerry is trying to force Peter out of his bench, Peter defends his pride and property by hysterically yelling at him to the point of tears, “ GET AWAY FROM MY BENCH.” His biggest defense is that he is an adult and deserves the bench although his behavior suggests otherwise. This discrepancy between idea and experience is similarly seen in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when at the end of the play Estragon says “let’s go” yet the stage direction reads “they do not move.” This is true of life as well. Meaning is not always obvious. Esslin says of conventional drama that “every word means what it says, the situations are clearcut, and at the end all conflicts are tidily resolved.” But life itself is not like that. I don’t mean to imply that there is a lack of emotion in conventional drama, but I think there is certainly a lack of sincerity. There’s something very black and white about a play like Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, it’s very emotionally exploitive, like watching a kitten get hurt. We sympathize with the characters not because they are necessarily relatable, but because they are so tragic and innocent, you can’t watch them without feeling pity. Whereas The Zoo Story contains gray areas. It conveys emotion without pity. It lacks innocence and conventional tragedy. And because of that it is sincere and it is real in a way that realistic conventional drama could never be. It seems that a major distinction between Jerry and Peter is where they are categorized in terms of dramatic style. It seems obvious that Jerry belongs in the world of the absurd with his repetitive style and seemingly nonsense stories. But Peter, he is a man of more conventional ways. It’s almost as though, with Jerry’s arrival, with his presence to complete Peter’s “ other half,” Jerry brings him into his absurd world. Just as Peter provides Jerry with existence, Jerry does the same for Peter.

Linguistic disparity, as Julian Wasserman points out, also applies to Jerry’s aforementioned pornographic playing cards. Jerry talks about the cards saying, “when you’re a kid you use the cards as substitute for a real experience, and when you’re older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.” Wasserman points out, “What is important here is that, whether one begins with ideas and moves toward experience or whether one moves in the opposite direction , a disparity remains.” I think that Albee pin points almost perfectly one of the most discouraging things about being human: that we are not really ever fully content with what we have. The reality will never live up the fantasy and the fantasy will never live up to the reality.

Although, fantasy and reality, as seen through Jerry’s relationship with his “fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage” landlady, are not necessarily contingent upon one another. Jerry describes himself as the “ object of her sweaty lust.” “

I have found a way to keep her off me. When she talks to me, when she presses herself to my body and mumbles about her room and how I should come there I merely say: but, Love; wasn’t yesterday enough for you, and the day before? Then she puzzles, she makes slits of her tiny eyes, she sways a little, and then Peter... and it is at this moment that I think I might be doing some good in that tormented house... a simple-minded smile begins to form on her unthinkable face, and she giggles and groans as she thinks about yesterday and the day before; as she believes and relives what never happened . . . and I am safe until the next meeting.

Sometimes the fantasy can be the reality. Wasserman asserts, “For the landlady, one may indeed say that memory is the equivalent of the event.” Perhaps the meaning of this situation is that memories themselves are based on fantasy. We remember things the way we wished the reality had been. Life is not the linear narrative that we sometimes remember it to be. We forget the unhappiness and disappointment, and replace that with foggy memories of a reality that may have never been.

For Jerry, though, the real experience is necessary. He needs the experience in order to exist and, in turn, to die. Jerry is a man on the periphery of society, a man that someone like Peter views as little more than a pebble in his shoe. In a social sense, Jerry is already dead. He looks to Peter to justify and prove his existence. Heidegger makes the point that for a person to really exist they must be part of a larger community, there must be some sort of encounter with others. It can be argued that Jerry’s interaction with the other residents of the roominghouse would suffice, but they are all loners, they are all as socially dead as Jerry is. Heidegger’s “ being” surpasses biological existence. Jerry’s desire for existence through interaction is so interesting because in the end he decides to take his own life, and I think that that begs the question that if “being” surpasses biological existence, can “ being” exist without it? I think that it this case it can. Jerry stresses the idea that “we have to know the effect of our actions.” As long others are affected by our actions we will continue to exist. Though Jerry dies, it is doubtful that Peter could live out his life without ever being affected by his interaction with him and so Jerry continues to exist through the interaction he felt was necessary in life. Jerry looks to Peter to exist and escape the fantasy of a connection, although there are very fantastical elements to their meeting. It’s separated from reality in a very realistic way. The Zoo Story can be seen as an unlikely allegory for the impossibility of human connection, but at the same time, there is something eerily plausible about their encounter. As I noted above Anderson points out that it is “a very real situation,” in fact, I think that to suppose this situation could never happen negates, in my opinion, the entire point of the play. To say that it couldn’t and to say that people like Jerry don’t exist contradicts the entire message. Mussoff says of The Zoo Story that “ it is impossible to identify with these characters whom we do not really understand, whose motives and backgrounds we do not know,” but I wholeheartedly disagree, I believe the exact opposite is true of Jerry. We are aware of his motivations and of his background, in fact he talks in great length about both. He represents a life of loss, which on a very simple level is incredibly relatable. Perhaps the reason this play is so unsettling is because we can see ourselves reflected in its characters and we can empathize with them. Esslin writes:

The human condition being what it is, with man small, helpless, insecure, and unable to ever fathom the world in all it’s hopelessness, death, and absurdity, the theater has to confront him with the bitter truth that most human endeavor is irrational and senseless, that communication between human beings is well-nigh impossible, and that the world will forever remain an impenetrable mystery.

There is truth to Jerry and Peter, and, appropriately, it is frightening that their encounter is not so different from any other.

The World is a Zoo

The Zoo Story is not only a reference to Jerry’s rather unimportant a trip to the zoo, but also his experience with Peter. Jerry went to zoo because he wanted to “find out more about the way that people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other." It’s curious to note the zoo itself is not an intrinsic element of the narrative. The existence and function of a zoo perhaps is, but for Jerry’s purpose having actually gone to the zoo is a negligible element of his story. As Mel Gussow writes, “For Jerry, life is a zoo.”

Perhaps more than with Peter, arguably Jerry’s most important relationship in the play is with his landlady’s dog. It is through the dog that the subjects of love, guilt, and destruction are addressed within the story. The horrible landlady’s equally horrible dog attacks Jerry every time he comes into the roominghouse, though curiously never when he goes out. Jerry says,“ From the very beginning he’d snarl and then go for me, to get one of my legs." This continues for sometime until Jerry decides that if he can’t “kill the dog with kindness[. . . ] he’ll just kill him.” His attempt at kindness is not meet and so, though disgusted with himself, he tries to kill the dog. However, the “murderous” amount of rat poison he kneads into a hamburger is only effective enough to make the dog deathly ill without actually killing it. Ultimately, Jerry is glad that the dog lived, as he says, “not just because I’d poisoned him” but rather he “wanted the dog to live so that [he] could see what [their] new relationship might come to." Once healthy, Jerry says of his subsequent encounter with the dog:

I loved the dog now, and I wanted him to love me. I had tried to love, and I had tried to kill, and both had been unsuccessful by themselves. I hoped... and I don’t know why I expected the dog to understand anything, much less my motivations... I hoped the dog would understand. It’s just... it’s just that... it’s just that if you can’t deal with people, you have to make a start somewhere. WITH ANIMALS! Don’t you see? A person has to have some way of dealing with SOMETHING. If not with people... if not with people... SOMETHING!

We see how important the idea of connection is for Jerry. Ultimately, his attempts to connect failed and he says of it, “we neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other. And, was trying to feed the dog an act of love? And, perhaps, was the dog’s attempt to bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?”

I would like to end on a note by Esslin, which I think is the basic core of The Zoo Story and Absurdism in a general sense,

Ultimately, a phenomenon like The Theater of the Absurd does not reflect despair or a return to dark irrational forces but expresses modern man’s endeavor to come to terms with the world in which he lives. It attempts to make him face up to the human condition as it really is to free him from illusions that are bound to cause constant maladjustment and disappointment.... For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions—and to laugh at it.

.