lOOKS
)
light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is
deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks hope of
a promised land to come. This divorce between man and
his
life, the
actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity.
I think it is absurd to take anyone--even Camus-for an authority on
the "absurd." And, in fact, the quotation above, which Esslin has used
to buttress his view, is fairly close to nonsense. Imagine: Camus prefers
a world that can be explained by faulty reasoning-but why then use
the term "explained?"-to one inexplicable by good reasoning. He wants
the world to be familiar; Aristotle thought it should excite wonder.
And how could the world ever he deprived of illusion, which is so large
a part of it? Camus himself had plenty of illusions, one of them being
that we are bound to have a feeling of absurdity
if
denied the memory
of "a lost homeland" and of "a promised land to come." Is it absurd not
to have had a good background or to be without real prospects? Sad,
perhaps; but it is one thing to call the world sad, quite another to call
it "absurd." The first statement is without philosophical pretension.
The world can no more become "absurd" than it can sin, starve,
or fall down. There are many absurdities in the world; most of them
were always there.
But was there always a Theatre of the Absurd? I claim there was
not and that there is no such thing now. Esslin claims that
(1)
there
was a Theatre of the Absurd in the past and
(2)
the group of con–
temporary dramatists whom he has singled out write the kinds of plays
they do in response to a particular crisis the world is going through at
this time. But the two claims refute each other. Esslin maintains that
there is a particular spiritual crisis, and that a certain kind of dramatic
art has been produced in order to express it; but he cannot maintain,
then, that forms of theatre like those being produced now long ante–
dated the crisis. Yet in a chapter entitled "The Tradition of the Absurd,"
Esslin ranges through past history for prototypes of the new kinds of
plays now being written. The mimes of the Middle Ages, the court jesters,
the clowns of Shakespeare, the harlequinades which entered into the
British music hall and American vaudeville, the Commedia dell'Arte,
the nonsense verse of Lear and Lewis Carroll are all called on to account
for the character of specifically modern works, which character, in turn,
is supposed to
be
due to a special contemporary predicament. Esslin
writes: "This is not the place for a detailed study of Shakespearean
clowns, fools, and ruffians as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd."
No,
it
is
not.
