ART
AND
HISTORY
217
A great and central human aCtIvIty, it is the most communal of all
the arts, the most inclusive and ubiquitous. Its history is very nearly
coeval with mankind's since even before its reputed origin in ritual
the first time a gesture was made which announced that a gesture
was being made, the first time somebody "acted," performing sym–
bolically instead of with a straightforward, useful, physical end in
view, there was the beginning of theater.
From this origin the theater, formalized, diversified and multi–
plied into a wide-ranging institution full of both steadily accumulating
myth and continually renewed technical consciousness, has become
one of our chief public ways of knowing ourselves and even more
of getting round our finiteness. This
is
to say that for a certain space
of time it allows us to be not ourselves but our reflections, imper–
sonations, doubles and dream children, our possibilities and theoretical
incarnations. How can the impulse to bring these things into being,
buckled securely on to a history as it is, ever come to an end?
Yet it may very well be coming to an end in the form in which
we have known it. That latter form may go on making public repre–
sentations of itself, alive in the history outside art, as portrait painters
still go on exhibiting their outmoded visions, but the center of the art
of drama wiII be elsewhere, if any art of drama finds it possible to
survive. For the theater has discovered - or rather uncovered to our
sight - that in the past fifteen years or so its perennial crisis, that
joke, lugubrious weather or occupational disease, has taken on a
deadly edge. The crisis is now one neither of style nor subject nor
economic feasibility nor relevance, but of existence itself. And what
lies behind the widespread failure to become aware of it, to do more
than lament the current doldrums while preserving the core of faith
unshaken, is the tyranny of the idea of historical inevitability and the
gross, fanatic pressure of habit.
To its first Parisian audiences in the early nineteen fifties the
new drama whose principal executors were Samuel Beckett and
Eugene Ionesco came variously as an enigma, a revelation, a curiosity
or a good or bad joke. Without being wholly unprecedented (there
are always precedents for the movements of the imagination; the
avant-garde, Ionesco was later to write, "always constitutes a restora–
tion, a return") these new plays were publicly unprepared for. Having
leaped over the immediate theatrical past, they might have seemed to
