458
LIONEL ABEL
These facts show Genet to be a very strange person, too. Should not
his personal strangeness be related to his plays? But Esslin, out to prove
his theory, disregards the personal facts and concentrates on the "ab–
surdity of our historical epoch." He derives Genet's plays from the
modern feeling of helplessness in facing a mechanized world. Esslin
writes: "A feeling of helplessness when confronted with the vast intricacy
of the modern world, and the individual's impotence in making his own
influence felt on that intricate and mysterious machinery, pervades the
consciousness of Western man today. A world that functions mysteriously
outside our conscious control must appear absurd." Once again Esslin
has trotted out fashionable and very misleading cliches. The world Genet
describes in his plays
is
the product of a virile imagination, almost
Elizabethan in its force and fancy. Genet could be compared to Marlowe,
never
to
Kafka.
Art, it must be admitted, is unable to occupy a central position
in the modern world; thus, the artist cannot be in the very center of
things. But Homer was certainly in the very center of things Greek when
he wrote the
Iliad,
though he wrote it in Ionia; and Sophocles was
in the center of the Greek world when he wrote plays for the Athenian
public. In the modern world, of course, no such priviliged position
is
open to art. To look at all, the artist is probably condemned not to
look all around him. Can anyone be in the center of things in our age?
This is not sure. But this is sure: anyone who is, will not be an artist.
That is why a Homer is utterly inconceivable today. (Hegel notes that
there was not a single tool made by the Greeks which went unremarked
in Homer's
Iliad.
Is it conceivable that any modern poet could sum
up in song all the instruments manufactured in our society? Besides,
to
carry Hegel's point further, every tool Homer described was already an
art
object.) Very probably
art
requires, if it is to be practiced at all
today, that its creator contribute to it his own personal oddity. I suggest
that this is a logical consequence of the marginal situation of art as
such. Political criticism of art, even when sensitive and cultivated, has
proved utterly sterile, and unable to instigate any sort of new creation.
It was based on a fallacy: that politics was central (this is certainly
to be questioned) and that being central, it had the right to insist that
art be central, also; now two things cannot occupy the same place at the
same time-perhaps they can
if
infinitely smaller than miniscule. But
the political critics of modern art and literature were not thinking along
the lines of quantum physics. They were thinking of the art produced
in past epochs when art
was
central. In fact, the history of what we
call modern art and modern literature has been the successive im-
