Absurdity: When things don’t make sense and all you can do is sob-guffaw instead
Cyan James
How absurdity helps us make sense of things
‘Absurdity’ sprouted from Latin, originally referencing an out-of-tuneness. That meaning hints at the ‘offness’ of today’s absurdities and how they make us want to sob, giggle, and yank out our hair, maybe all at the same time. Absurd things are maddening and perplexing; they can be ridiculous, cruel, wrenching, or pathetic, and it isn’t always clear how one is supposed to respond.
A hedgehog with French fries impaled on its spikes trundles by: absurdity. A former dear friend pretends not to recognize you on the street: another absurdity. Sometimes it feels absurd to simply be human. What, after all, is the point?
Erg. The big question.
Philosophers have been kicking that one around a bit. There’s a lot to be said on the matter. In brief, I lean toward the phenomenological interpretation where meaning hinges on how richly our senses enable us to experience our world. How well we feel and interpret sensations, in other words, is the stuff of meaning.
But you might feel closer to the way the absurdists see life, as a twisted experience that may not hold objective meaning at all or may just be like hearing the echo of some greater power laughing throughout the empty chamber of one’s entire lifetime. What can you do but laugh back as if you are in on the joke?
A classic story about what happens when a man is accused of a crime no one will even name. Confusion, resignation, and absurdity mingle here to darkly comedic and chilling effect..
Sometimes it’s your circumstances that are absurd; sometimes it’s what’s going on inside you. For O’Briens war-cracked characters, it’s both. His novels asks when war in all its precise horribleness is not absurd.
The world weighs heavy and seeing how other characters try to carry the load might prove helpful.
We humans can be exceedingly petty, and life can hinge on this pettiness, which is both absurd and utterly relatable. Here Gogol pokes fun at our idiosyncrasies, even when they’re not always so very funny.
You just can’t seem to catch a break and prefer to see someone else mired in strange life issues for a change.
Visiting aliens leave mounds of junk human raiders risk their lives to retrieve in this existential thriller. But to what purpose? No matter how hard they try, they seem no closer to understanding.
You feel forced to spend your precious energy on stuff that just doesn’t compute; you’re being smothered by a fog of stomach-churning ambiguity.
Absurdism has its lighter side, too. Here, Link puts absurdity through its paces, cracking a whip of fairytale logic while beaming a klieg light on our all too human foibles.
We adopt all kinds of coping mechanisms to ward off our absurd insecurities, as DeWitt illuminates in this novel about characters sheltering within their self-constructed bunker of knowledge.
You, too, are a fact-hoarder but can’t jam the bits of knowledge together in a way that makes satisfying enough sense.
In The Trial, Kafka pits a decent narrator against inexplicable punishments. He is castigated for being late to meetings he didn’t know he was supposed to attend and ultimately put on trial for a crime no one will tell him about. To what end? He doesn’t know.
There is no such thing as justice, Kafka hints. Or maybe justice is easily distracted or plays by rules that make no sense. This leaves us open to being buffeted like the narrator, forced into wrenching a narrative from recalcitrant facts. How unsatisfying!
It’s no coincidence that several of the absurdist authors I’m featuring are Slavic – not only do Russia and the Balkans have deep experience with totalitarian governments, inexplicable events, and mysterious regimes, but their authors have also developed a sophisticated literary response. They have long grappled with the nature of obscured power while also having to devise a code-talking way to discuss this dilemma. That, I think, is why they wield absurdist symbolism so adroitly. Witness, for example, Kafka’s protagonist as he tries to extricate himself:
“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak”
As K discovers, when everything seems arrayed against you, the most effective form of resistance may be to refuse to behave as others wish, even if it harms you to do so, because at least this preserves as sense of dignity and meaningfulness that helps prevent you from crumbling beneath an onslaught of ridiculousness. As K concludes: “It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.”
Kafka also acknowledges that clarity can cut multiple ways. Answers can be Schrodingesque, existing and not at the very same time. To admit this does not exactly lead to resolution, but perhaps provides some relief. After all, “The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.”
Some readers say The Trial is about anxiety, others say it’s about totalitarianism. I’m guessing Kafka would say ‘Yes. And.’ I’m also thinking he would be laughing, the same way he used to laugh out loud when reading sections of his work to friends. There is humor in the bleakness, at least from his perspective, so it can be OK to laugh at K’s benighted plight. In the end, gallows humor is a fragile yet potent way to cope with absurdity, what Viktor Frankl calls one of the “soul’s weapons” against despair.:
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
In the convolutions and absurdities of life, is there anything you can laugh at? Perhaps not, but there could be some surprising ways humor could help.
A bunch of soldiers fumble around in a mist of muddy shit and machine-gunned memories where bad and beautiful things happen for no apparent reason. Hailed as a modern masterpiece, Tim O’Brien’s ode to absurdism endures as a way to dissect the awful meaninglessness of war.
Told in a series of unordered short stories, his dream-like sequences yield insights in a slant-wise fashion that bends facts out of shape to support more overarching truthfulness. Some of these facts are emotional ones, such as what urges soldiers keep fighting:
“They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.”
Other facts are metaphorical, such as the intangible things the soldiers carry: “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.”
A central technique O’Brien employs to ratchet up the tension in each segment is to juxtapose sensations we wouldn’t normally pair.
“You’re pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy […] but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs—the whole world gets rearranged—and even though you’re pinned down by a war you’ve never felt more at peace.”
This technique heightens the out-of-tuneness that can reach a frantic pitch in wartime but that can pervade more peaceful moments as well. You are literally or hypothetically splattered with literal or emotional mud and blood, staring at the most gorgeous palm tree you’ve ever seen. This kind of absurdity encapsulates how life can come at you so hard and fast and full of high-octane stimulus, all you can do is wield the well-worn military maxim: ‘It is what it is.’
I particularly appreciate the short story “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” for depicting that most absurd of things – a woman drawn to the worst of war – in a way that doesn’t feel like a mockery and that resonates with strangely aggressive longings I’ve felt before.
In general, O’Brien fends off questioners who want him to pin down exactly what is “real” and what is “made up” in his stories. If it’s emotionally convincing, he asserts, it’s true enough to be useful. I like this while also admiring the meta-realistic twist inherent in the absurdity of it: that ‘false’ things are the truest things we know. Facts, after all, are only things that happen, while the meaning unfolds in the telling of them. In short, the Things They Carried stuffs its rucksack full of absurdity and zips it up with black humor, and we are all the better for it.
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
A powerful exploration of group dynamics and how the fear of embarrassment or rejection can compel us to keep doing terrible things, The Things They Carried can help you ask yourself:
Is there anything you want to stop doing in life? Any bad habits you’d like to change, any friends you may need to step away from, any place you’d like to make a stand?
How would life change if you could accomplish this change?
What’s one thing you can do to step toward making this change real?
Who can you ask to buddy up with you and help hold you accountable as you make this change? Who will keep you on track?
Are there people missing from your life? Certain kinds of friends you need? Mentors? How could you find these people?
Read The Things They Carried when:
“Real” life doesn’t yield any clarity, no matter how hard you squeeze it. Read it when you’re suffering, when you want to observe how someone else tries to carry the weight of decisions, or when you’re all shaken up inside, joy and dismay and confusion tumbling inside you like stray electrostatic socks in the dryer.
Here we have a drone of a man who commits two transgressions against the universe: he fails to savor his life, and then he dares to be too fine. It’s the story of a clerk twisted up by circumstances who just can’t catch a break.
Another absurdist classic, Gogol’s The Overcoat is an opportunity to contemplate the dangers of taking yourself and your own needs too seriously. Do what you can to take care of yourself, The Overcoat mutters, and it may still come to naught. Worse, you may end up feeling like an absolute fool. Worst yet, the world will go on without you.
It would be hard to stomach if Gogol didn’t sugarcoat it with mordant humor.
“Utterly nonsensical things happen in this world. Sometimes there is absolutely no rhyme or reason in them: suddenly the very nose which had been going around with the rank of a state councillor and created such a stir in the city, found itself again, as though nothing were the matter, in its proper place, that is to say, between the two cheeks of Major Kovalyov.”
Life gave Gogol a heavy dose of absurdism. He failed at acting, wasn’t much good with lovers, hated his own nose, made catastrophic decisions, and seemed happiest when sipping “gogol-mogol,” a concoction he invented from goat’s milk and rum. He could’ve turned bitter, but decided to write it out instead, giving us a pathway out of vanity and into acknowledgment of how little the things we make such big fusses about add up to in the end. (Gogol, I should mention, was somehow buried without his skull, absurdist to his own personal end.)
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
Pedantically, Gogol’s narrator fails to enjoy life as much as he could. What little enjoyments might you be failing to savor as much as possible?
Read The Overcoat when:
Everything endeavor seems pedantic or doomed to comedic failure. Reflect on how little you control the outcomes of your actions and see if you can see the amusement and relief in that.
Here’s another Everyman story, though this time around our Joe must pick through lethal remains abandoned by aliens after they make a brief visit to the earth…and find it completely uninteresting. A fun toe-dip into the idea that we matter much more to ourselves than to anyone else out there in the universe and a gentle mockery of the sci-fi trope about aliens salivating to slaughter us. What if we are just ants to them instead? Oh, the absurdity of our endless self-importance, our assumption that all narrative revolves around us.
Written nearly 50 years ago, Roadside Picnic still gestures toward how we seem so ready to believe that gadgets hold our salvation. Our science still fails us, however, often turning out to be a Pandora’s box, a hollow disappointment, or just a trinket. So much effort and such scanty reward! Knowledge remains a slippery and dangerous fish, this book hints, and we’re still pretty clumsy fishers.
Maybe our self-awareness is to blame?
“The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places.”
Or maybe all the self awareness in the world still would not be sufficient.
“Man is born in order to think (there he is, Kirill, finally!). Except that I don’t believe that. I’ve never believed it, and I still don’t believe it, and what man is born for -I have no idea. He’s born, that’s all. Scrapes by as best he can.”
By addressing the scraping-by, the necessity of survival, Roadside Picnic invokes the question of agency. Do our lives actually contain meaningful choices or are we pawns to fate and physics? It’s the question that dogs cynicism, determinism, fatalism, Calvanism, and a good many other -isms, and the fact we can’t seem to figure it out just continues to highlight the epistemological absurdity of our existence.
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
Roadside Picnic asks if we have meaningful agency. What do you think?
> If you have choice, what’s one choice you could make for the better?
> If you lack meaningful choice, what attitude or philosophy is best suited to that interpretation? Does cynicism serve you? Does Stoicism get you where you want to go? Does Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offer any relief?
Read Roadside Picnic when:
It feels as though you’re just going through the motions…and the motions might kill you. Or when you feel a greater or possibly ridiculous realization is glimmering just beyond your fingertips.
A little more:
Roadside Picnic has proven enduringly influential. Sift through the stories it has inspired:
It feels as though you’re just going through the motions…and the motions might kill you. Or when you feel a greater or possibly ridiculous realization is glimmering just beyond your fingertips.
A little more:
Roadside Picnic has proven enduringly influential. Sift through the stories it has inspired:
Absurdity has a lighter, more digestible side, a side that is on kaleidoscopic display in Kelly Link’s 2015 short story collection “Get in Trouble.” The short story format lets you rifle through a variety of sometimes whimsical, sometimes haunting scenarios, most of which are steeped in fanciful absurdism.
Contemporary fiction has been flirting with “new absurdity,” meaning it’s finding more ways the bizarre and outre can help us understand ourselves. Fairy tales and reinterpretations of myths are having a comeback; retellings, twists, and myriad strains of magical realism abound.
Playfulness figures large within Link’s work, like coating life’s absurdities with sprinkles. It works well for Link’s narrators, who are often traversing the emotional topography of puberty. It’s a sticky transitional time for us all, a passageway Link hangs with funhouse mirrors to show us ourselves warped and rippled. The stories branch and percolate in strange ways, whispering that meaning may be made of the smallest breadcrumbs.
“God has an inordinate fondness for stars and also for beetles. The small and the very far away.”
Where Link’s stories could get themselves into trouble by playing the joker card of absurdity to release themselves from the narratorial responsibility to play by the rules of cause and effect, they instead ground themselves in pop culture realism. The emotions depicted within them ring true, if not the characters themselves. Fortunately, fiction has never needed to rely on grimly realistic situations to get a few good points across.
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
Metaphors and symbols are powerful ways to crystallize meaning. If you’re facing a tough situation, maybe you could relabel it a monster, a badger, or something else that makes it more endurable?
Read Get in Trouble when:
You’d like to nibble on lemony fairy tales that gambol to their own beat.
Here is a novel unafraid to advance the argument that intellect can indeed provide meaning. The Last Samurai’s two main characters, a polymath, polyglot mother nurturing a genius of a son, could come off as a bit insufferable. And sometimes they do. Yet they are wracked by challenges, too, and knowing how to conjugate verbs in ten different languages or delve into astrophysics doesn’t necessarily give them the practical guidance they crave.
Instead of giving up, they glean advice from repeated close watchings of Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai.” If you pay the tribute of close enough attention, DeWitt seems to aver, if you try hard enough, think rationally enough, you’ll map a deontological way through the universe. Eventually. It’s an alluring thought, one rife with hope.
In its pursuit of meaning, The Last Samurai piles up facts, indulges in idiosyncratic lists, puts no bounds on the intrinsic rewards of more and yet more knowledge, heaped up and running over.
In some passages this approach seems brilliant, at others, pedantic. You admire the fireworks going off inside the narrator’s head, yet also wonder if all the light and smoke lasts. If you marshall enough knowledge, does it become a life-long feast of sustenance, a shielding suit of armor, or a folly?
Maybe the attempt to know everything is also somewhat absurd, no matter how skilled you become? I don’t know whether or not DeWitt would concur, but it’s a beguiling question to contemplate. Maybe, at least sometimes, it’s also OK to stop trying so very hard?
“There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant– life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people.”
Where’s the bibliotherapy?
If knowledge provides escape, as The Last Samurai hints, it may be time to master a new discipline, language, or skill. Can you pick up coding? Learn to make a new meal? Knowledge spices life and often proves more rewarding than other, “lighter” pursuits we adopt when we want to relax. That’s because learning often helps us escape self-awareness, immersing us in a different mental landscape. Plus it involves earning tiny endorphin surges of accomplishment, which acts as a natural reward and painkiller.
Read The Last Samurai when:
You’d like to hitch yourself to a different mind and friction-burn your own brain raw, like being dragged behind a monster truck spewing sparks. This is a spectacle of a book, sometimes a jouncing spectacle, but it swings big and provides some existential comfort simply via the force of so many motley concepts strewn across so many pages.
Absurdity can stymy or plague us, but it can also make us laugh. It gives us a way to acknowledge how powerless and bereft of choice we sometimes feel while also bashing us into laughter. It’s great, it’s weird, it’s hard to live without.
Daniil Kharms’s ‘Symphony No. 2’. Short, acerbic, and completely absurd.
Lewis Carroll’s beloved and much bellowed “Jabberwocky,” this nonsensical poem that nonetheless makes sense. Did you know we never had the word ‘chortle’ until Lewis Carroll coined it?
JABBER, an online engine that generates likely-sounding, yet absurd, “English” words:
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