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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Human Condition [1]

The Human Condition [1]

As Paul Tillich has said, speaking in America, the job of a creative critic is to reveal the profound ambiguity of life, but ‘it is an almost irresistible temptation for contemporary creative minds to produce in order to sell.’ Perhaps Peter Shaffer’s and Elaine Dundy’s plays were made to be sold. Thepage 651 plots click neatly on, the characters talk more or less as people do talk, but the ambiguity of life is lacking.

M. Genet’s play is about the human condition as it has revealed itself in the recent Algerian war. It could never be produced on a realist stage, but it has its own grandiose power. In it, very suitably, the living and the dead mingle and converse. M. Genet assumes that men fight wars for private reasons, desiring release from conscious identity by means of a myth; or to put it another way, that in war the powers of man’s sexual nature are given over to a cult of death. His characters – peasants, politicians, soldiers and prostitutes – are never persons in the realist sense. They typify aspects of the conflict.

Such a method demands the powers of a dramatic poet, and M. Genet possesses these in full measure. The play is in many ways a horrifying work. It could hardly be otherwise. How can the savagery of our times be given a dramatic pattern – other than the spurious pattern that belongs to political rhetoric – except by the logic of dreams and nightmares. I found The Screens a haunting and compassionate work of art. The translation by Bernard Frechtman is a valuable gift to the English reader.

The collected second volume of Bertolt Brecht’s plays contains Mother Courage, Saint Joan of the Stockyards and The Good Person of Szechwan. The ironic ambiguity of Brecht’s work, springing from a perception that the obstacles in the path of social justice are as much in man’s nature as in exterior circumstances, is evident in all three of them. Brecht was an unbuyable man; and that is perhaps one reason why his plays never gather dust.

1963 (302)