The theater of the absurd
5
ART AS THE UPPER STORY LEAP
We observed that from Rousseau’s time the dichotomy was drawn between nature and freedom. Nature had come to represent determinism, the machine, with man in the hopeless situation of being caught in the machine. Then, in the upper story, we find man struggling for freedom. The freedom that was being sought was an absolute freedom with no limitations. There is no God, nor even a universal, to limit him, so the individual seeks to express himself with total freedom, and yet, at the same time, he feels the damnation of being in the machine. This is the tension of modern man.
The field of art offers a variety of illustrations of this tension. Such tension affords a partial explanation of the intriguing fact that much of contemporary art, as a self-expression of what man is, is ugly. He does not know it, but he is expressing the nature of fallen man, which as created in the image of God is wonderful, yet now is fallen. As man strives to express his freedom in his autonomous fashion, much, though not all, of his art becomes meaningless and ugly. In contrast, much industrial design is becoming more orderly, with real beauty. I think the explanation for the growing beauty of some industrial design is that it has to follow the curve of what is there—it follows the form of the universe. This also illustrates how science as such is not autonomously free but must follow what is there. Even if the scientist or philosopher says that all is random and meaningless, once he moves out into the universe he is limited, no matter what his philosophic system is, for he must follow what he finds there. If science does not do this, it is not science but science fiction. Industrial design, like science, is also bound up with the form of the universe and therefore is often more beautiful than “Art” (with a capital “A”), which expresses man’s rebellion, ugliness and despair. We now come to some of the various expressions of art as the upper story leap.
POETRY: THE LATER HEIDEGGER
Heidegger could not accept his existentialism and changed his position—after he was seventy. In the book What is Philosophy?1 he ends with the admonition “but look at the poet.” When he says “listen to the poet,” he does not mean that we are to listen to the content of what the poet says. Content is immaterial—one might have six poets all contradicting each other. It does not matter because the content is in the area of rationality, the lower story. What matters is that such a thing as poetry exists—and poetry is placed in the upper story.
Heidegger’s position is as follows. A part of Being is the being, man, who verbalizes. Consequently, because there are words in the universe, one has the hope of some kind of meaning to Being, i.e., what is. One just notes that the poet exists and, in his mere existence, the poet becomes the prophet. Because poetry is with us one hopes that there is more to life than merely what you know rationally and logically to be the case. Here then is another example of an irrational upstairs without any content.
ART: ANDRÉ MALRAUX
Malraux is an intriguing man. He came through existentialism, fought in the Resistance, took drugs, led a very rough and tumble life at times, and finally turned out to be the Minister of Culture of France. In his book The Voices of Silence2 the last section is entitled “Aftermath of the Absolute,” and in it he shows that he understands very well the shift that has been caused by the modern death of a hope of an absolute.
There are a number of books at the present trying to come to terms with him. In the October 6, 1966 issue of The New York Review of Books several are dealt with. In this issue we find the following comment. “All Malraux’s works are torn . . . without help of resolution, between at least two positions: a basic anti-humanism (which is represented, depending on the circumstances, by intellectual pride, the will to power, eroticism and so on), and an ultimately irrational aspiration towards charity, or rationally unjustifiable choice in favor of man.”
In other words, there is a “torn-ness” in Malraux—in the upper story is placed something in art which has no rational basis whatsoever. It is the aspiration of a man separated from rationality. On the basis of rationality man has no hope, yet you look to art as art to provide it. It affords an integration point, a leap, a hope for freedom in the midst of what your mind knows is false. You are damned and you know it, and yet you look to art and try to find a hope that reasonably you know is not there. This review goes on to say, “Malraux is rising above such despair by eloquently summoning himself and others to see the identity of man in the timelessness of art.” So Malraux’s total work—his novels, his art history, his work as the French Minister of Culture—is a gigantic expression of this chasm and leap.
The system that surrounds us, of dichotomy and the leap, is a monolithic one. In England, Sir Herbert Read is in the same category. In The Philosophy of Modern Art3 he shows he understands when he says about Gauguin: “Gauguin substituted his love for beauty (as a painter) for man’s love for his Creator.” But in his understanding he also says that reason must give place to the mystique of art—not only theoretically but as the starting place of education for tomorrow.4 In Sir Herbert Read, art is again put forth as the answer achieved by the leap.
PICASSO
Picasso furnishes another example. He had attempted to create a universal by means of abstraction. His abstract paintings had gone so far that it was no longer a matter of distinguishing a blonde from a brunette, or a man from a woman, or even a man from a chair. Abstraction had gone to such an extent that he had made his own universe on the canvas—in fact he seemed at that time to be successfully playing at being god on his canvas. But at the moment when he painted a universal and not a particular, he ran head on into one of the dilemmas of modern man—the loss of communication. The person standing in front of the painting has lost communication with the painting—he does not know what the subject matter is. What is the use of being god on a two-by-four surface when nobody knows what you are talking about!
However, it is instructive to see what happened when Picasso fell in love. He began writing across his canvas “J’aime Eva.” Suddenly there was now a communication between the people looking at the picture and Picasso. But it was an irrational communication. It was communication on the basis that he loved Eva, which we could understand, but not on the subject matter of the painting. Here again is the leap. On the basis of reason, as the painter tries rationally to make his own universal, communication is lost. But it is restored in a leap which is contrary to the rationality of his position. Yet because he is still a man he must leap, especially when he falls in love.
From that time on, it is possible to take Picasso’s work and follow the curves of the paintings as he fell in and out of love. Later, for example, when he fell in love with Olga and married her, he painted her in a most human way. I am not saying the rest of his paintings are not great. He is a great painter, but he is a man lost. Picasso failed to do what he set out to do in his attempt to achieve a universal, and his whole life after this has been a series of tensions. When he fell out of love with Olga his paintings changed again. Then, a few years ago, I saw some of his work when he fell in love again, with Jacqueline. I said at the time, “Picasso is in a new era—he loves this woman.” True enough he later married her—his second marriage. Thus, in his paintings of Olga and Jacqueline, in a manner contrary to almost all of his other work, he expresses the irrational leap in the symbol system of the form of his painting, but it is the same irrational leap which others express in words. In passing, let us say that Salvador Dali did the same thing by painting connotation Christian art symbols when he took the leap from his old surrealism to his new mysticism. In his later work the Christian symbols are painted using their connotative effect, rather than verbalized, as in the New Theology. But this makes no difference. It is based on a leap, and an illusion of communication is given by using the connotative effect of the Christian symbols.
BERNSTEIN
We are showing that we are faced with an almost monolithic concept today, of dichotomy and leap, and that once the leap is accepted, it really makes no difference what you place upstairs, or in what terms or even symbol systems the upstairs is expressed.
Leonard Bernstein, for example, in his Kaddish5 indicated that music is the hope upstairs. The essence of modern man lies in his acceptance of a two-level situation, regardless of what words or symbols are used to express this. In the area of reason man is dead and his only hope is some form of a leap that is not open to consideration by reason. Between these two levels there is no point of contact.
PORNOGRAPHY
Modern pornographic writing is explicable in these terms too. There have always been such writings, but the new ones are different. They are not just dirty writings of the kind that were always available—many of today’s pornographic works are philosophic statements. If one takes the works of somebody like Henry Miller, one finds that they are a statement that rationally and logically even sex is dead, yet in later writing he leaps into a pantheism for a hope of meaning.
Another element in modern pornographic writing comes out in the works of Terry Southern. He is the author of Candy and The Magic Christian. Despite the dirt and destructiveness he is making serious statements. Candy is called Candy Christian. This is significant. He is smashing the Christian position. But what does he put in its place? In the introduction to a book called Writers in Revolt6 he takes the following line. He calls the introduction “Towards the Ethics of a Golden Age,” and proceeds to show how Western modern man is falling to pieces. He shows how modern man is only psychologically orientated. He has in particular one clever sentence in this statement of our culture’s psychological orientation. “Its implication, in terms of any previously operative philosophy or cultural structure prior to this century, is shattering, for its ultimate meaning is that there is no such thing as crime: it destroys the idea of crime.” He does not mean, of course, that we no longer have crime. He means that with psychological orientation “crime” does not exist. No matter what it is, it is not seen as crime, nor as morally wrong.
Evangelical Christians tend to write off such people and then get into trouble over understanding modern man, for in reality these people are the philosophers of the day. Our university chairs of philosophy are in effect largely vacant. The philosophy is being written by the Southerns of this modern world. When you come to the end of this introduction I have quoted, you are left breathless at a terrific piece of writing. You feel like screaming and saying, “Well, then, what is there?” The fantastic thing is that the end of the introduction says that they are writing pornographic material today in the hope that finally an ethic for the golden age will drop out. Thus pornographic writing is now put in the upper story. They conceive of pornography as the ultimate release—it is the leap to freedom. They are smashing away at the downstairs deadness and say that they will not have its tyranny. And although there is of course much trash as well, there is in these serious pornographic writings, struggling with this problem, the hope that pornography will provide a new golden age. This is Rousseau and the autonomous freedom coming to a natural conclusion. Remember that in the Renaissance there was the dualistic separation like this:
LYRIC POETS—SPIRITUAL LOVE
NOVELISTS AND COMIC POETS (PORNOGRAPHIC)
But now rationalistic humanism has progressed logically to a total dichotomy between the upper and the lower, like this:
THE AUTONOMOUS PORNOGRAPHIC AS THE ONLY HOPE OF FREEDOM AND OF MAN
RATIONALITY—MAN IS DEAD
This again is a mysticism with nobody there, a mysticism that flies in the face of rationality. There is nothing, and yet, driven by his aspirations—because he is made in the image of God—man tries all these overwhelming acts of desperation, even entertaining the hope that a golden age will drop out of Soho.
There has also been written recently a serious pornographic work in which, because there is no God, a woman puts herself into a man’s hands to be beaten. The work states explicitly that, since no God exists, she wants to be possessed by someone, and thus in her alienation is glad of the beatings and pain as a proof of possession by something, someone.
These people are in total desperation. We are fighting for our lives. If we love men, this is no age for a lack of comprehension, no age to play small-sized games, and no age to fall into the same thought-form of duality without realizing it.
THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD
This note of desperation is reflected in the Theater of the Absurd. The stress on the absurd recalls the whole structure of Sartre’s thought. Man is a tragic joke in a context of total cosmic absurdity. He has been thrown up with aspirations which rationally have no fulfillment in the universe in which he lives. But this outlook as expressed in the Theater of the Absurd goes beyond Sartre. Sartre says the universe is absurd but uses words and syntax as they are normally used. The Theater of the Absurd, however, deliberately uses abnormal syntax and the devaluation of words to shout the more loudly that all is absurd.
Martin Esslin, well-known for his work in the BBC, has written a book on this subject which has a very interesting introduction, “The Absurdity of the Absurd.”7 He says that there are three steps in the Theater of the Absurd. The first step is that you say to the bourgeois: Wake up! You have been asleep long enough. Wake him—kick his bed and pour a bucket of water over him through the absurd theater. Then, as soon as he is awake, look him in the eye and tell him there is nothing there. That is the second step. But there is a third step, once again an upper-story mysticism. This upper-story mysticism is an attempt to communicate “above” communication. As such, it is parallel to the Happenings and Environments following Marcel Duchamp, the battering of the senses by much electronic music, far-out cinema, the psychedelic elements in the latest Beatles records, and some elements in the theories of “cool communication” by Marshall McLuhan. This is not the place to deal with this subject in detail, but it is my conclusion that this communication, “above” communication, with no continuity with the rational, cannot communicate content, but must be taken seriously as a vehicle of manipulation. However, we can see that of the three steps in the Theater of the Absurd, two are toward pessimism while the third is again a mystical leap without any roots at all in the first two steps.