Epilogue

Epilogue R. J. Kaufraann It is common to differentiate the idiom of the Absurd from the traditional one in terms of the putative incoherence of the former as opposed to the latter’s use of ordering principles which implant a sense of coherency in the listener’s mind. There is something to this. The traditional dramatist had an implicit obligation to lead his audience towards catharsis, which is another name for comprehension. Catharsis is that thrilled sensation of command which arrives when we find the complexities of the plot, or the moral agon of the hero resolved intelligibly. Whatever intricacies characterize traditional plotting, however great the demands of the artist on his audience’s intelligence, the reward of new access, of THE INTELLIGIBLE, is predictably there at the end. The moment of recognition for the hero, or the chorus, or the survivors was allowed to proceed, or follow, or to stand at any con­ ceivable angle of ironic declination to the corresponding moment for the audience. There was no structural orthodoxy in this matter; but, the audience was not cheated of this moment: Oedipus judges his own case, translates confused " meanings” into a self-judging action, and this action— his blinding— then provides a new focal point of meaning for the audience; Othello does the same; Macbeth bleeds the world of the play of all meanings previously canonized by Western culture, but the larger peripety of the play engulfs him in the greenness of a natural order in which meanings beyond his capacity to destroy are asserted to inhere. If the tale of human existence signifies nothing to him, this is not true for the audience. Ibsen’s two early heroes, Brand and Peer Gynt, make a pincer-like assault on the validity of self-commitment and both are answered by natural orders more responsible than themselves with large evidences of the relevance of Editor’s Note : Professor Kaufmann’s remarks were written for the preceding section of commentary. We think, however, that his re­ sponses to the questions in that section serve as an appropriate Epilogue to this special issue. 230 R. J. Kaufmann 231 love that abides in the voice of the avalanche as it does in the heart of Solveig. The question is not whether these dramatic answers merit wholesale metaphysical assent from us, but whether they are traceable to a root idiom which is ultimately Aristotelean. They do fulfill the demand for “action” ; they do provide an ending which makes of all but a statis­ tically negligible number of traditional dramas something very like an embodied “analytical proposition.” The agon of the hero is framed by certain boundary conditions which are revealed as moral and which knit what the hero chooses to what happens to him. In short, they join a subject to a predicate; their moral syntax has a comforting predict­ ability which seems to us more than an arbitrary conjunction. Most importantly, then, traditional drama— however subversive it may be of our artificial and unjustified social sentiments, and it can be very harsh on any moral synthesis reflecting too provincial or super­ ficial a reading of the nature of things— acts in vindication of our logical capacities. We can make envelopes of sense to enclose almost any concatenation of events if we have enough “structuralist” stamina. There is some “ theory” to cover each set of existential facts, if our imagination is honest and tenacious enough to discover it, while pre­ serving the artistic particularity of each dramatized set. Traditional drama authenticates social or cultural propositions and provides a special celebration of logical coherency thereby. The idiom of the Absurd repudiates these exercises in rehabilitating received coherencies. But this is not to say it is incoherent. Deviant from cus­ tomary moral syntax, yes; devoid of coherency, no. The loci of coherence are different. Entropy itself when seen from a high, intel­ lectual vantage point is a mode of coherence; despair when derived from a convinced cultural skepticism is coherent in the extreme; even solipsism has a congested but definitive coherence bestowed by the exclusive and sovereign self of the solipsist. The idiom of the Absurd undercuts, slices up, breaks into all the techniques of displacement...