ebook img

The absurd in literature PDF

368 Pages·2006·1 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview The absurd in literature

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. Published byManchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK andRoom 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 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 by CPI, Bath 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

Description:
Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on
See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.