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This book offers a comprehensive account of the absurd in prose fiction. As well as providing a basis for courses on absurdist literature (whether in fiction or in drama), it offers a broadly based philosophical background. Sections covering theoretical approaches and an overview of the historical literary antecedents to the ‘modern’ absurd introduce the largely twentieth-century core chapters. In addition to discussing a variety of literary movements (from Surrealism to the Russian OBERIU), the book offers detailed case studies of four prominent exponents of the absurd: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Daniil Kharms and Flann O'Brien. There is also wide discussion of other English-language and European contributors to the phenomenon of the absurd.
1 The theoretical absurd: an introduction Now I knew that Jean-Paul Sartre and Mr Camus were right when they claimed it is the Absurd that matters. The Absurd with a most capital A . . . (Jeanette Winterson, ‘Holy Matrimony’, in The World and Other Places, 1998) The philosophical absurd The ‘Absurd’ (which henceforth will normally be spelt without the capital letter and mostly without quotation marks) appears not to be, as such, a fully accredited philosophical category. That is to say, at least, that it is not accorded its own entry in the major philosophical
5 Around the absurd II: the Theatre of the Absurd I have been called a writer of the absurd; this is one of those terms that go the rounds periodically, it is a term that is in fashion at the moment and will soon be out of fashion. It is vague enough now, in any case, to mean nothing any more and to be an easy definition of anything. (Eugène Ionesco, ‘Notes on the Theatre’, 1953) You can’t be a rationalist in an irrational world. It isn’t rational. (Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw, 1967) In his lecture on ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’ delivered in 1966, Jacques
4 Around the absurd I: twentieth-century absurdist practice Absurdity is divine. ... Let’s absurdify life, from east to west. (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, c.1912–35) IN SLEEP, nerves tensed the whole length of my legs. Sleep came from a shifting of belief, the pressure eased, absurdity stepped on my toes. (Antonin Artaud, Le Pèse-Nerfs, 1925) But an absurd attitude, if it is to remain so, must remain aware of its gratuitousness. (Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942) Given that ‘absurdism’ is a term that, generally speaking at least, has been
2 Antecedents to the absurd only the finite being cannot think the thought of annihilation (The Night Watches of Bonaventura, 1804) Long before his existentialist followers, the man from the underground proclaimed the majesty of the absurd. (George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 1959) From the ancients . . . It has become a commonplace to trace the antecedents of the absurd back to the older stages of Greek theatre (the so-called Old Comedy), or indeed beyond that. Roberto Calasso, in his Literature and the Gods, would trace the roots of ‘absolute literature
10 Beyond the absurd? It made as much sense as anything else . . . (Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961) There were answers everywhere you looked. There was no question about it . . . (Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1967) The prosaic absurd? A survey of the absurd in prose writing of the second half of the twentieth century, unless, or until, accorded a full book-length study in itself, is inevitably going to be selective, inadequate and arbitrary. The present concluding chapter to this book can be no exception in that sense – especially as
right: Tom ‘can’t save the Goddamn world’ because he has no idea what that world is. Given its innate absurdity, maybe he simply dreamt the whole thing. Although some commentators have argued that the commercial and critical failure of Everybody Wins compelled Reisz to eschew the cinema for the theatre throughout the rest of the decade, in a 1999 interview with Bob Cashill he cited other reasons for his
3 The absurd drama of modern death denial Six months after the outbreak of the First World War, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay that endeavoured to shed light on the mental distress it had caused. For Freud, this was connected to the general attitude to death prior to the war – an attitude rooted in denial. ‘We showed an unmistakeable tendency to put death on one side, to eliminate it from life. We tried to hush it up […]. [In] the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality’ (1985 [1915]: 77). The circumstances of war inevitably made it
8 Samuel Beckett’s vessels, voices and shades of the absurd Yes, no more denials, all is false, there is no one, it’s understood, there is nothing, no more phrases, let us be dupes, dupes of every time and tense, until it’s done, all past and done, and the voices cease, it’s only voices, only lies. (Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 3, 1945–50) To move wild laughter in the throat of death?’ [Love’s Labour’s Lost, V, 2, 841] precisely sums up the humor of Beckett’s plays. (Hersh Zeifman, 1990) In the wake of Kafka? W.G. Sebald (in literary critical mode
This book portrays human beings in Denmark who attempt to produce a meaningful "system" and make sensible decisions, but reproduce a bureaucratic system that at any moment has the potential of appearing utterly absurd. The first two portraits introduce the reader to the municipal and ministerial reality respectively. The randomised controlled trial known as Active-Back Sooner was a central component of the Danish Government's Action Plan on Sickness Benefit. The next two portraits show how upon arrival in one of the municipal units charged with the implementation of the trial, the original project design undergoes mutations. The book documents how contradictory decisions were being made from minute to minute, all generated by attempts to make the interventions sensible and purposeful. It shows how attempts to rectify counterproductive or inexpedient practice the trial's purpose begins to multiply. The book portrays that the recognition of the absurdity of the labor market effort offers a holistic analytical position from which to appreciate the sum total of the labor market effort. The final two portraits follow the privately employed social workers as they do their utmost to make something sensible take place. The fundamental urge to make sensible decisions is the very thing that creates the grounds for institutional absurdity while being in itself the only stable source of meaning.