BOOKS
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posItIon on the public of bizarre standpoints, unexpected attitudes,
peculiar effects. This has gone on for a fairly long time but it has only
recently become a general trend in the theatre. Of course, Strindberg
was as peculiar as Beckett or Genet; but he was more exceptional in
the early part of this century. It is now to be expected that personally
peculiar people will create the art which persons of sensibility are able
to enjoy. Does this mean that a theatre created by "peculiar" persons
should be called the Theatre of the Absurd?
I think the important point
to
make here is that this development
in
the theatre is belated, and follows some fifty or seventy years after
personal oddity had vindicated itself in other fields-painting, poetry,
and the novel-as essential to the production of authentic art. In fact,
I would suggest that one reason good art has for so long a time been
"advanced" art is that artists relished the freakishness attendant on being
"ahead" of others. One way of being peculiar is to be in advance like
the crane which, Laut:reamont says, flying first, forces all the others to
look at its behind.
But for the theatre-and Esslin does not see this at all-the need
to
be
a bizarre, eccentric individual involves the creator in a dialectic,
as it perhaps does not involve any other type of creator-painter, poet,
or novelist. Admitted that it is an advantage if you want to create to be
personally strange: still, in the theatre your personal strangeness has to
have an immediate effect on an audience composed of very different
persons, who have to react to the play presented before they have had
a chance to be converted to it by the intimidating force of cultural
opinion. I do not think the dialectic I have indicated should come
to
an end. I think it is this dialectic which has made the plays of both
Beckett and Genet more available to us than their novels were.
If
Beckett had not turned to the theatre, he would have remained the
eccentric writer of morbid tales in monotonous, if good, prose.
If
Genet
had not turned to the play form, he would have remained a writer of
lyrical pornography. The dialectic imposed
by
the theatre has made it
possible for these "strangers" to speak in a language pleasing both to
them and to us. It is this dialectic which makes the new plays more
interesting to me, at least, than the new poems or novels. Of all modern
works it is the new theatre pieces which are, and have to be, I suggest,
the least "absurd."
Lionel Abel
