En Attendant Crow: Hughes with Sartre, Camus and Beckett

Abstract

‘En attendant Crow’ addresses Hughes’s relationship with absurdism and existentialism, drawing a comparison between Crow and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett. This chapter reads Crow, written in the depths of depression following the death of Sylvia Plath, as a response to the absurdist/existentialist dilemma of suicide, which Camus posits as the fundamental question of philosophy. Hughes’s response to this existentialist crisis, like the responses of Sartre, Camus and Beckett, is to insist upon the importance of confronting the abyss with a desire to survive. The laughter of Crow, in particular, is where Hughes and the existentialists come closest together, and it is this, ultimately, that cements the survival of Crow in the face of annihilation.