454
LIONEL
ABEL
THE THEATRE AND THE "ABSURD"
THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD. By Mortin Esslin. Doubled(lY Anchor
Books. $1
A5.
Is the world we live in "absurd?" And has it become so re–
cently? And does our
world~
newly "absurd," require a particular kind
of theatrical art expressing "absurdity?"
If
you are ready to answer "yes," then you are likely to be convinced
by what Martin Esslin says in
his
new book.
Esslin says that out present sense of "absurdity" springs from the
loss of humanly important realities. Of what realities? Well, Esslin thinks
we have lost God. I should like
to
know when this occurred. But Esslin
probably means merely that we have lost a belief in God once natural
to us. Now, I confess to having very little nostalgia for those periods of
history when it was "natural" to believe in God. Was such belief ever
really natural? Soren Kierkegaard, for one, thought that Christian edu–
cation, "natural" in the nineteenth century-this kind of education we
have lost-was the main obstacle to Christian belief; for Kierkegaard,
true belief is always possible, always miraculous.
Is the family gone? At least it is better understood. Is the state
gone? But the state seems to require the efforts and adherence of the
young, and more than ever. Is patriotism gone?
If
so, is the loss grievous?
Yet the figure of Colonel John Glenn, so much with us at this moment,
suggests that patriotism still has no little virility. The cosmonaut, who
orbited the earth three times and saw four settings of the sun in a few
hours, came back to earth to inform us that he is still thrilled by the
sight of the American flag. Did he then go up into weightless space
just for the sake of a fractious parcel of humanity confined to United
States territory in the Western Hemisphere?
If
so, his exploit must
frighten us, much as it thrills us. What a man can do so -well, he still
does not do for men. The world is not so different from what it was.
Is reason gone? Then who would infer anything from our loss of
it? To say that reason is gone is to speak without any hope of being
understood. An "absurd" world would be silent ; it would not be peopled
with plays.
Esslin makes much of another loss: that of our formerly felt intimacy
with the world. And in support, he quotes fIfm Camus'
The M'Yth of
Sisyphus:
A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar
world. But
in
a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of
