Hallo Friends and Neighbors. I am sitting at my keyboard on a lovely summer morning. The sun is shining into my Garten, a wee patch of green located on a quiet street in Vienna. While the smoke from my cigar rises gently, I contemplate the seeming peace. Outside the tall hedges that surround my oasis the world seethes in chaos. As Kurt Vonnegut writes repeatedly, "So it goes." For me, Vonnegut is a sort of modern Samuel Clemens. He illuminates the foibles of the modern world and human reactions to that world. Kurt Vonnegut is also one of the pillars of Absurdist Fiction. Creeping into my sunny peacefulness, as if on the feet of small furry creatures, is the nagging thought that the last nail may have been banged into the coffin of the Absurd.
In the movie "Brazil" Terry Gilliam offers us a horrific vision of a dark dystopia where the bureaucrats have won, shadowy terrorists explode random bombs, and talking-heads assure the citizens "We've got the buggers on the run." Sound familiar?
The Hollywood folks were horrified with the movie's dark conclusion. They proceeded to chop and edit the thing until they managed to cobble on a happy ending. Gilliam prevailed in a battle over film rights, a battle that mirrors the absurdity of the film. Thankfully, when the legal dust settled, the full-length director's cut survived.
What does this have to do with anything? Good question. Which brings us to a better question. How can human beings create a personal sense of meaning in their lives when faced with the chaos and absurdity of the world around them?
Enter Literature, Theater, and Film of the Absurd.
But wait a just a darn minute, you exclaim. What exactly do you mean by Absurdism? Another good question. Born of the philosophical writings of Søren Kierkegaard, and brought to fruition by Albert Camus, Absurdism is a philosophy dealing with the human struggle to find meaning in a world that is beyond human comprehension. Absurdism posits the idea that humans can, just maybe, construct meaning in their own lives, but only if that meaning directly recognizes the absurdity of the world in which we live. The important caveat is that, while we are struggling to create meaning in our personal lives, we must acknowledge and confront the basic absurdity of the outside world.
Towards that end, humans have created works of fiction that highlight the absurdity of our world. These fictions serve as a coping tool, if you will.
My question is this: Has our world moved so far beyond the representations of the absurd as to make those representations invalid? Has the modern world murdered the absurd? Perhaps a look at some examples will shed a bit of light on this question. Or perhaps we can only muddle everything beyond all hope. Regardless, here are a few of my favorites:
Alices' Adventures in Wonderland is the grandpappy of Absurdist Literature. Lewis Carroll wrote this children's classic in 1865, and it remains a part of our modern culture. Woven through Alice's adventures, one can see the modern world pushing hard against the Victorian world inhabited by the author. There is the Caucus Race, where everyone runs willy-nilly in all directions, everyone is declared a winner, and all will be awarded prizes. Characters refute factual information by simply turning the argument on its head. "Tut tut, my child" says the Duchess. And when all else fails, the Queen calls for everyone's heads to be lopped off. Alice attempts to make sense of this bizarre world and fails, eventually returning from the dream of Wonderland. Awake once more, she contemplates what she has experienced.
In Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa awakens one fine morning only to find that he has been turned into a giant dung beetle. And you thought you had problems with the outside world. Written in 1915, this novella has been called the most Kafkaesque of Kafka's work. To this day, the adjective is still used to describe the dark. twisted aspects of the modern world.
Rather than simply giving up and dying on his back, horrible insect legs stuck up in the air, Gregor tries to make sense of his new environment. The attempts to sort out his world do not go well. Everyone is horrified by Gregor's metamorphosis. When Father Samsa finds Gregor scuttling around the kitchen, he whacks his own son with a thrown apple. Succumbing to injuries caused by apple abuse, Gregor eventually dies. The family is relieved by his death and life goes on.
Outside World 1 -- Gregor's Search for Meaning 0.
Enter Albert Camus, the Godfather of Absurdism. The Plague (La Peste) was written in 1947, when France was reeling in the aftermath of World War Two. In the novel, Camus lays out the fundamentals of Absurdism. Life is absurd and there is only death. Camus posits three choices. One can recognize the absurd nature of life and commit suicide, however the act of taking ones own life is absurd in and of itself. One can make a "leap of faith," ascribing meaning to a higher power, but this is characterized as "Philosophical Suicide." The last choice, Camus' choice, is to accept the absurdity and move on to the end, while working to find meaning in the process.
In The Plague, a small town beset by disease represents the outside world, the absurd universe. The characters in the novel wrestle with the choices of how to deal with the pestilence. They are trapped within Camus' three options of suicide, faith in a divine being, or continuing to work and struggle with the situation as it is. Eventually, three of the characters find meaning in healing others, regardless that the disease has doomed them all.
“Nothing happens, nobody comes … nobody goes, it’s awful!”
And wonderful. Waiting for Godot was first performed in France in 1953. Samuel Beckett strands his characters in a bleak world that makes no sense, a world from which they cannot escape. Vladimir and Estragon (Didi and Gogo) wait for something, anything, to happen. When anything does actually happen, it is disturbing and seemingly without meaning. Or painful. Or both. Godot never does show up, but Theater of the Absurd now has a place in the world.
Joseph Heller's novel
Catch-22 was published in 1961. Often cited as one of the great American novels, as well as one of the great anti-war novels,
Catch-22 is a study in absurdity. The pilots and crewmen of a WWII bomber squadron are the "little guys." They are being systematically crushed by leaders who are morally bereft, leaders guided only by greed and ambition. The core absurdity is the Catch itself,
Catch-22. Flying a bomber in World War Two is crazy. Only a crazy person would do so. If a pilot wants to stop flying, all he has to do is ask permission to stop flying. But if he makes that request, he is not crazy, and therefore has to continue flying missions. As the protagonist Yossarian says, "That's some catch!"
Modern capitalism is embodied in Milo Minderbinder, who says "What's good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country." He hires the USAAF bombers to bomb their own base, with the Germans paying Milo for the bombing. Everyone seems to be in on the scam except for Yossarian.
Throughout the novel, the characters employ circular reasoning and inverted logic to justify the insanity of the world around them. The same inverted logic is used to justify their own actions as individuals trapped in that world. Eventually Yossarian flees, paddling off in a tiny inflatable raft. He takes with him the knowledge that he will have to fight the crazy bastards every step of the way.
What happens when two insignificant human beings struggle to make sense of the events unfolding around them?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
takes two minor characters from Hamlet and casts them as protagonists.
Written in 1964, published in 1967, and performed on Broadway
in 1968, Tom Stoppard's masterpiece of Theater of the Absurd is all
about death.
Things are not going well for
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (or is it the other way around?) and they
don't know why. They don't really know how they got to gloomy Elsinore
Castle, and they don't really like it much. Swept up in the action of
Hamlet when other characters appear onstage, they are left to their own
devices when alone.
What is waiting for them is
death. It is the death of a pair of Untermensch, two men
swept along on the tides of a story that they don't understand and
cannot control.
Sometimes called a great anti-war novel,
Slaughterhouse-Five is a monument to the absurdity of the modern world. It is the story of one character's struggle to transcend that absurdity. Even the notion of an anti-war novel is lampooned, as one of Vonnegut's characters says "Why not write an anti-glacier novel instead?" Whichever type of novel it is, Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969.
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Throughout the course of the novel, he travels back and forth to different points in his life, birth to death, but not necessarily in that order. From the firebombing of Dresden (something Vonnegut experienced in his own life) to being held prisoner on another planet, Billy Pilgrim is able to live and re-live all of the moments in his life. He bounces between them like a time-traveling ping-pong ball. Does he find a meaning or purpose for his life? Maybe, as any good Absurdist would say. So it goes.
Last, but not least, we come to the trials and tribulations of Arthur Dent. First the local Council wants to knock down his house to build a bypass. Then the Vogons blow up planet Earth to make way for a much bigger bypass and, well, things go downhill from there.
Originally a radio show on BBC, Douglas Adams'
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was published as a novel in 1979. Subsequent adventures were added to the original until it became
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Winging around the goofiness of the galaxy, Arthur Dent learns a great deal. Sometimes happy, sometimes very angry, he struggles to find his place in a universe that is totally insane.
There is an answer by the way, but you're not going to like it.
When the world in which we live in is too crazy to comprehend, what are we poor humans to do? How do we cope with madness that is outside of our control? Absurdist Fiction serves to create an alternative universe that is crazier than our own, thus making the actual universe a bit more palatable. But is this concept still viable?
If I think that my world is nuts, contrasting it with an even crazier world helps put things in perceptive. Arthur Dent was worried about his little house being bulldozed by the council. Then the Vogons blew up the whole damn planet. Ha! That poor clueless bastard. And I thought I had it tough. This morning I am pecking away at my laptop. I have not been transformed into a giant bug at whom folks hurl apples. Well bless me, this ain't so bad.
But here's the rub. What happens when the insanity of our own world exceeds our ability to create fictional insanity? Without a blink, I can think of three examples where fictional portrayals of a dystopian world have become disturbingly prophetic. 1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's dark society of "Ignorance is Strength" and "Black is White" is eerily similar to the bizarre concept of "Alternative Fact." The film "Idiocracy," released in 2006, has evolved from a black comedy into a prophesy. Piles of garbage become landsliding mountains of garbage as citizens sit at home watching reality television. The third example is the aforementioned film "Brazil." Reading the news on a typical day, I often feel that I have become a very minor character ensnared in that movie. So it goes.
This is the point where I should trot out a pithy, erudite conclusion, but I confess the lack thereof. I have no answers, only questions coupled with comparisons. Short of the absolute supernatural (and who knows how long it will be before the supernatural becomes the natural) modern society is at least as insane as anything humans can conjecture. Let's say I write a novel about a host of a failed TV reality show and have him become the President of the United States. That book is obviously dead on arrival. How about a nuclear holocaust story set in our own time? Unthinkable? Note even sort-of-kinda. Corporations are people too? Nah, that's been done. How about a dystopia in which humans can only view their world by means of small hand-held communication devices. Bah! Old hat. What is a poor author to do?
But wait, you say, what about Science Fiction? Sure, I am forced to admit that the imaginations of Sci-fi stay ahead of the advances of our crazed modern technology, but by an ever lessening margin. If we use the handy 'Jetsons Measuring Stick,' we see that most of the futuristic gizmos from that 1960's cartoon are commonplace items. Video screens for communication: yawn. Robotic housekeepers? Hell, we have robotic households. The only thing George Jetson had that I don't is that cool car that folds into a briefcase. Lucky bastard. And jet packs! There was an implicit promise of Jet Packs!! Jet packs exist, but the government frowns on the proletariat soaring freely above the surly bonds of earth, the dirty bureaucrats. All I can say is that I do not believe that Science Fiction shares the same function as Absurdist Fiction, even though it may eventually suffer the same fate.
Without a ribbon to tie around this less than pretty package, I am left to drift. If this were a well written murder mystery, there would be some clever plot twist that uncovers the killer. The gasp of the reader as the truth becomes clear. Instead of a murder, I see an inexorable grinding force. That force is the world we humans make manifest, a force outstripping any attempt to fictionalize it. Woe betide the poor scribbler come to grips with the reality that truth is indeed become stranger than fiction. Or, as the wise man once said, "You just can't make this shit up."
