Category Archives: Grand Hotel Abyss

The streets of London, the camps of Kenya

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Theatre and drama artists, along with the critical press, may be too busy with festivals near and far to respond in their usual manner to a few international crises of the past week (as well as the domestic crisis): that is, to bewail the lack of theatre or drama that wrestles with the political, cultural and spiritual dimensions of all of these crises. There will no doubt be a little hand-wringing about how little the theatre or drama is responding to these global events, as well as new promises and good intentions to respond to them now or in the future. Ultimately, however, the progressive ideology of most theatre artists will paralyze them and render them empty-handed — all of the theatre from Aeschylus’ day to our own has not lessened the potential for these catastrophes in the least, and it won’t do so in the future. Most political theatre struggles with the how, not the why — that is, why the species continues to indulge in the self-destructive, violent behavior that it does, even as science and the intellect have been unable to stem this indulgence either. A few theatre artists, however, do speculate on the reason, rather than the result; Erik Ehn’s Soulographie project, which I briefly noted just a few days ago, does so from a spiritually Catholic perspective. Certainly the work of Beckett (perhaps more in his novels than his later plays, though these too are appropriate to this discussion), Barker, Bond, and Kane have all wrestled with the catastrophic and post-catastrophic vision of the world, and the status of the spirit and body within that world — with violence, starvation, colonialism, power personal, political and corporate. The product of this theatre is experience and knowledge, not progressivist utopias. Hope is a mere word, a cruel insult, one of those that turns to ashes in the mouth when one reads the headlines and meditates on the suffering in Africa and elsewhere.

The Marxist or Hegelian, who conceives of the world as a struggle between thesis and anti-thesis towards the goal of an Absolute culture of the ideal of the state (even if that state, as Marx would have it, evaporates upon the immanence of the ideal culture) or the proletariat, is left with little, perhaps the Nietzschean with less. Turning to any of these three philosophers, one is flummoxed by the lack of recognition of, it seems, irreversible decline and unending spiritual trauma. If I often turn to Schopenhauer in these entries, it is because Schopenhauer’s philosophy recognizes not only the possibility but the inevitability of 21st-century catastrophe: in his thought we have the “why” that we seek. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation comes to seem, more than expository prose, a dramatic monologue of the most sublime tragedy in its structure and lyricism, and the most “realistic,” if one can use that term, in daring to confront the world as it has been, as it is, as it will continue to be. Theatre and drama alone cannot be blamed for this continuing ignorance of the single truth of the world: the willful ignorance infests all art, all science.

Anger, name-calling, and good intentions do not suffice. Our compassionate peace must be in imagination and knowledge, the end of drama and theatre itself, which cannot save the world, if it is worth saving.

In the cocktail lounge of the Grand Hotel Abyss

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A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as “a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.”

Georg Lukacs
July 1962

The Culture Industry creates mythological figures through its electronic factory of celebrity, so Casey Anthony may take her place among the filicides Agamemnon and Medea. The jury determined that Anthony was “not guilty” rather than “innocent” (the latter a verdict which was not available to them, and which saved Anthony; it is a distinction that Beckett himself might have relished). If Anthony killed her child, it was not for the approval of the gods or out of a spirit of revenge, but the very contemporary virtue of the indulgence of the narcissistic self: of convenience and the embrace of the values of suburban-American Dionysianism. She seems, in most part, quite sane, and the madness of a Moosbrugger or a Levi Aron doesn’t apply to her. So what now? She is likely to disappear — and perhaps under a new name, in a new place, she will have her Facebook page and Twitter account, and as a “hot-bodied” very contemporary American girl she will have many many Facebook friends. And even, one day, another child — an ironic fillip that wouldn’t be out of place in an early Howard Barker play.

There have been and will be other Casey Anthonys; the culture almost demands it. The use of the ugly will to reign over nature and compassion, to impress itself violently upon the innocent and the world itself, is chronicled day after day in newspapers. In our arts it is exhibited through noise and arrogant spectacle, but rarely criticized or abjured. That repudiation is absent from the theatre and the other arts, which narcissistically posits the phenomenal self as the all-rationalizing motivation — even its false sympathy and pity seeks the audience’s approval of the self which pretends to them. Not necessarily an American phenomenon, but within America’s own electronic mythology, most present here.