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The Sleep of Reason
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12482 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1987 |
2,652 Words |
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Peter Shaw
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IMPORTANT NONSENSE
Lionel Abel
Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1987
232 pp., $22.95
Lionel Abel has been an intimate witness to some of the most important intellectual and artistic developments of our time. He knew the leading intellectuals in New York when Marxism flowered in the thirties. During World War II he met the émigré Europeans who were profoundly influencing American styles of thought. After the war he was in Paris among the group that developed existentialism. Back in New York in the 1950s, he was in renewed contact with the abstract expressionist painters whose revolution triumphed in that decade. In the early 1960s, as a playwright and again an intimate of those forging a new movement, he participated in the birth of Off-Broadway theater and the Theatre of the Absurd.
Abel's account of these experiences appeared a few years ago in his memoir, The Intellectual Follies. Now, Important Nonsense offers his account of intellectual developments from the early sixties to the present in the form of essay written during the period. An essay on comedy and one on Sophocles carry forward the drama criticism of Abel's Metatheatre (1963).
Abel has arranged the essays of Important Nonsense neither in the order he wrote them nor by category. As a result, he has staked out less claim to attention as a cultural critic than he might have. He contents himself with suggesting in a brief, offhand preface that the essays exposed some of the "important nonsense" of our period. His purpose has been to cast a skeptical eye over thinkers and ideas of the times and to analyze their limitations. And it seems fair to say that in this somewhat casual, belletristic intention can be found both Abel's considerable strengths and his self-imposed limitations as an essayist.
A Prophetic Grasp of the 1960s
If one makes a chronological rearrangement of Abel's essays, there emerges a powerful, even prophetic grasp of how the culture and politics of our time were transformed in the early 1960s. For example, writing in Dissent in 1966, a few years after the Broadway production of Peter Weiss's play The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, Abel put his finger on how the run of that play contributed to the atmosphere of the times. His essay, "Who's Not Mad? On Marat/Sade and Nihilism" studied the critics, the audience, and director Peter Brook's dramaturgy as much as the play itself. Abel was especially concerned with the climax, during which the inmates of the insane asylum that holds de Sade during the French Revolution break out and cavort about the stage. At this moment, he observed, "there was an unmistakable feeling of solidarity with them on the part of the audience." Abel recognized in this feeling the beginning of a widespread sympathy for the combination of madness and revolutionary sympathies that would emerge within a few years as the cultural style of the late 1960s. In fact, contained in the audience's identification with the madness on stage, as Abel put it, was "the depth of the contemporary situation." He went on to argue persuasively that audiences and critics of the play had suffered a failure of taste not only in their enthusiasm for this scene, but in their overvaluing the play as
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