Retreat Into Reality

Extract

That fine and distressing drama of Gian-Carlo Mcnotti, The Consul, does more for us than underline the tragic fatuity of the modem political world: it underlines the fundamental unreality of that world. The baby dies, the husband and wife, unable to reach each other, die: because they and the world are smothered by paper, the ‘forms’ without which nobody can stir, and nothing can be done, and which are never completely obtainable. The hypnotice dance scenes, the dream-sequences, are far less unreal than this ‘real’ world which destroys life and love and all the deep human realities and leaves only an emptiness through which there shrills an unanswered telephone.

That is the pattern of our world, whether the precise regime we live under is expressing a deliberately cruel tyranny, or a benevolent stupidity, or a stupidity which is neither particularly benevolent nor particularly cruel but just subhuman. But when humanity is thus forced into an unreal mould, and debarred from all escape into reality, it will look for escape in further unreality: in drugs or neuroses, in fantasy-worlds of its own making which ape the world it has lost, in destruction—perhaps self-destruction —as a substitute for creation. So the night-club replaces the home; loveless sexuality replaces marriage; toys of one sort or another replace the children who should have played with them; hooliganism, savagery, murder and suicide become more and more common.

Obviously a world such as that cannot endure. It must either end in complete destruction, or it must undergo some radical change.