The absurd in literature

368 Pages·2006·1 MB·English

by  Cornwell

The absurd
in literature

The absurd in literature
Neil Cornwell
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave
Copyright © Neil Cornwell 2006
The right of Neil Cornwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 0 7190 7409 6 hardback
EAN 978 0 7190 7409 7
ISBN 0 7190 7410 X paperback
EAN 978 0 7190 7410 3
First published 2006
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset in Sabon with Gill Sans display
by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester
Printed in Great Britain
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We are overwhelmed by a flood of words, by polemics, by the assault of the
virtual, which today can create a kind of opaque zone ... The question of
sin has been displaced from the centre by a question that is perhaps more
serious – the question of meaning and meaninglessness, of the absurd.
(Paul Ricoeur)
You may not be interested in absurdity, ... but absurdity is interested in
you. (Donald Barthelme)
But I sometimes picture my poor soul
As a translator locked up by a madman,
Forced to decipher an absurd text,
Struggling to find meaning.
(José Carlos Somoza, The Athenian Murders
[La caverna de las ideas], 2000)

Contents
Preface page ix
Abbreviations xiii
PART I Introductory
1 The theoretical absurd: an introduction 2
The philosophical absurd 2
Jokes, humour, nonsense and the absurd 14
The socio-linguistic absurd 23
2 Antecedents to the absurd 33
From the ancients ... 33
Madness: mysteries to Shakespeare 36
Nonsense, Swift and Sterne 41
Romantic grotesque to ‘higher’ realism and pre-Surrealist
nonsense 43
PART II Growth of the absurd
3 The twentieth century: towards the absurd 66
Introductory pointers 66
‘Post-Impressionists’ in England 69
Avant-garde theory and practice 74
Disparate European prose: Western and Eastern
proto-absurdism 86
4 Around the absurd I: twentieth-century absurdist practice 99
Fernando Pessoa and the ‘pessimistic absurd’ 100
Antonin Artaud and the ‘cruelty’ of the absurd 107
Camus and the Dostoevsky connection 114
viii Contents
5 Around the absurd II: the Theatre of the Absurd 126
Ionesco and others: the French-language scene 128
Pinter and others: the English-language scene 133
The East European scene 143
(Soviet) Russia: the OBERIU 143
(Cold-War) Poland and Czechoslovakia 147
PART III Special authors
6 Daniil Kharms as minimalist-absurdist 158
A Kharms sketch 158
The Kharmsian canon 160
A poetics of extremism 163
Logic of the black miniature 166
Pursuing the red-haired man 169
Kharmsian others? 175
7 Franz Kafka: otherness in the labyrinth of absurdity 184
Kafka and the other(s) 185
Kafka in the other(s) 189
Falling and cawing in the labyrinth 198
8 Samuel Beckett’s vessels, voices and shades of the absurd 215
In the wake of Kafka? 215
The prose 220
The drama 226
Further shades of the absurd 232
9 Flann O’Brien and the purloined absurd 251
The hydra-headed man 251
At Swim-Two-Birds: juvenile scrivenry as metafictional absurd? 259
The Third Policeman: questions, mysteries, answers 264
PART IV In conclusion
10 Beyond the absurd? 280
The prosaic absurd 280
Beyond the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’? 291
Popular culture 299
That miscellaneous and ubiquitous absurd 301
Conclusion 309
Bibliography 314
Index 337
Preface
A distinguished bishop, a priest and a peasant are in a great cathedral. In
turn the priest and the bishop approach the altar rail, beat their chests and
declare, ‘I am nothing. I am nothing.’ The humble peasant, moved to
imitate, shuffles to the altar and says the same thing. The bishop turns furi-
ously and hisses in the priest’s ear: ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’
This ‘apocryphal’, or anyway anonymous, anecdote has been said to be
somewhat akin to contemporary theology, ‘with theologians competing
verbosely as to who can say the most about saying the least about God,
thus abasing human reason, and showing all the more their awareness
of the glory and otherness of the Creator’.1 This brief narrative obvi-
ously represents a satire on the hierarchical attitudes to be found within
institutionalised religion: church officialdom, class and education.
Reason is indeed abased, as the peasant’s claim to being ‘nothing’, while
slavishly following supposedly superior example, is preposterously
denounced as arrogance. Humour is added by the mildly unbecoming
phraseology of the bishop: with regard to his own position, and to the
other circumstances of the incident. ‘Hell’ may seem an inappropriate
concept to introduce, and irony comes from the perception of preten-
tiousness in what is apparently an act of extreme servility, or even
genuine self-abasement. These comments are fairly obvious. However,
what else, if anything, might tip this text into the category of ‘the
absurd’?
Satire, humour and incongruity are always potential ingredients of the
absurd. The abasement of reason, particularly within a disparate setting
of humility, ‘glory’ and ‘otherness’, also goes some way in the direction of
the absurd. The clinching element, however, may be seen to lie in the
controversy aroused by the assertion of a condition of being ‘nothing’: the
negation, or at least the indignant questioning, of a claim for negative
ontology in the implicit light, or reflected glory, of a metaphysical cosmol-
ogy, with associated ritual, that may itself be illusory – or, in other words,
based on ‘nothing’.
x Preface
It may be time already, though, for a lighter piece, and a lighter approach.
PECKLE AND BRACES (GRANARTHUR)
How many body peoble wash ‘Peotle and Plaices’? In a recent
Doddipottidy Poll, a roaming retorter intervined asking –
‘Do you like Big Grunty better more than Gray Burk’?
To these questiump many people answered
‘On the other hand who are we to judge? I mean who are we?’
In this rather contrasting piece by John Lennon (from In His Own Write,
1964), one of a group of short skits of television reviewing, the linguistic
register puts the text well towards the nonsense end of the humour spec-
trum. Almost seeming to cry out for translation (‘People and Places
[Granada]’), the discourse (as well as being anyway not untypical of
Lennon’s ‘style’) in this case owes something to the Liverpool comedian
Ken Dodd. However, the existential (or identity) question posed (or
lapsed into) at the end, bearing at least some comparison with that (or
those) raised in the first anecdote, nudges it firmly in the direction of the
absurd.
Many of the same, or similar, points will be seen to recur in the discus-
sions which follow – discussions of absurdists writing in English, as
indeed of many others who certainly have demanded translation. There
will be a stream of questions and answers (and questions that won’t be
answered – ever!); perceptions of ‘nothingness’, or ‘the void’; and tremors
from extremes of identity crisis (or multiple identity). Chaos will abound,
and the ‘abyss’ will loom; but there will be profusions of stories – old and
new, linear or circular, tall stories, non-stories or stories destroyed. The
Infernomay lurk, along with such timeless motifs as ‘the ship of fools’, or
‘the dance of death’. Absurdist moments and startling notions will burst
forth: ‘man wakes up one morning as gigantic insect’ (courtesy of Kafka's
Metamorphosis). Or they may prompt amused perplexity, like the idea of
‘a 53 year-old architect with a tragic sense of brick’ (Donald Barthelme,
Paradise). Through a variety of devices, we shall need to attune to what
Gary Adelman (167) has termed (in relation to Kafka and Beckett) ‘that
cannonade effect of exaggeration rumbling to absurdity’. Occasionally
even just a title might almost provide sufficient indication: try There Is No
Such Place as America(by Peter Bichsel), or The Bus Driver Who Wanted
to be God (Etgar Keret).
The present book, while endeavouring to present, to a degree at least, a
historical survey of absurdist writing and its forebears, does not aspire to
being a comprehensive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain
historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and works, before
moving on to discuss aspects of the oeuvres of a small and select number