Dissertation for Graduate Study

 Full article published in a Naropa University Literary Journal, August 2011 

Section I: Introduction; Absurd Conversations from the Padded Alley

“The absurd was born out of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” 

-Albert Camus

     During the birth of philosophical criticism in the mid 1800s, Denmark transformed from a rigidly hierarchical and feudal society to a philosophically thinking one. Out of this robotic bureaucracy came an explosive outlet of great thinkers and philosophers—people like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Freud—that pushed beyond the boundaries of the basic breakdown of thought. Intellectuals and scholars pulled from the ideas of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German idealist who followed in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant, and wrote on “a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a ‘logical’ standpoint.” (Stanford Encyclopedia, Kierkegaard) This logic became the proclivity behind which one could bend or change intellectual perception, and that became key to gaining perspective. As a result, a surge of defining different thought processes bore new distinct ideals creating multifarious philosophical criticism, from which Absurdism was born. 

     Similar to Existentialism, Absurdists believe that no meaning can be found in the intrinsic value of life, yet meaning may only be attributed to the daily pursuit of the here and now. “In this context; absurd does not mean ‘logically impossible’, but rather ‘humanly impossible’.” (Stanford Encyclopedia, Kierkegaard) Or rather, the absurd arises out of a constant conflict between the human mind and the environment that exists. Thus, the need to find any inherent meaning in life is absurd because of ever changing circumstantial outside environment coupled with the vast uncertainty of the human mind make any meaning impossible, and completely illogical. Its origination was adapted and explored by Soren Kierkegaard. In 1849, Kierkegaard published one of many philosophical concept novels, The Sickness unto Death, which mainly dissects the relations between god, being, and the Self. This became the first true diagnostic of Absurdist philosophy in history. In the novel, Kierkegaard breaks down the Self and man’s relations to the Self, describing man’s constant need to relate himself to unpredictable and random sequences of events that is life. This is, in itself, a form of what he calls a despair, because it has no correlation to the Self yet it has everything to do with the Self, meaning that though human drama does not affect our consciousness, because of its personal affect to us, it then affects our consciousness. In essence, man’s need to relate to human drama pulls him further away from his actual Self, when in all actuality, man’s existence is his Self and the only meaning lies in the consciousness of that existence. But without the constant recognition of the consciousness, which is impossible, there will always be the inevitable draw back again into human drama and back into this despair. He called this contradiction, a synthesis. This, he defined, as the sickness unto death, and this became the birth of the absurd.

“Despair is a sickness in the spirit, in the self, and so it may assume a triple form: in despair at not being conscious of having a self (despair improperly so called), in despair at not willing to be oneself, in despair at willing to be oneself.” (Kierkegaard)

     As a prominent writer and French philosopher of the early twentieth century, Albert Camus reintroduced Absurdism into the world by drawing upon the ideals of the great philosophers who preceded him. In 1945, he published The Myth of Sisyphus, a comprehensive essay which depicts the absurdity of myth. According to Homer, Sisyphus, a mortal, was testing his wife’s loyalty and devotion by asking her to kill him. When she did as he asked, Sisyphus was cast down to Hates where he begged Pluto to allow him severance to go back to earth to shun his wife for her foul deeds. Once in the human world, however, Sisyphus was so enthralled by the warmth, water and beauty of earth that he no longer wanted to return to the darkness of the underworld. After many evaded warnings and urgings of the gods, Mercury finally came and snatched Sisyphus back from the world from which he had come and he was scorned to a fate of rolling a giant boulder up a mountain repeatedly for all eternity. In his essay, Camus describes Sisyphus relating to his reader by the imagery that presents itself when reading the myth. One can almost see Sisyphus’ face constricted as he toils to push the rock; the grip of his soiled hands; the inflammation of his flexing muscles. But, where Camus brings insight to the reader is in the unwritten. In this fate, once Sisyphus rolls the boulder to the top of the mountain, there is a moment when that boulder must take its time to roll back down the mountain and Sisyphus to follow to continue his fate. In that time, that space where Sisyphus no longer struggles with his rock, it is here where Camus reminds us that Sisyphus is in complete consciousness and therefore greater than his fate. It is here where no outside circumstances or influences control the man, so, though his pursuit may be meaningless, Sisyphus is not and inevitably becomes our absurd hero.

“All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will hence forth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which became his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the nights has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.” (Camus)

Here, Camus is able to breakdown myth in several ways leaving the reader with only two contradictory points: (i) the human ability to think will surpass all religion, god, destiny or fate, and (ii) that nothing inherent in our outside environment can control or mediate our existence and therefore meaning cannot be attached to the pursuit of life, but merely to the circumstance in which we currently exist. 

     The rise in Absurdism came with the rise in integral criticism in art. It followed the Surrealist movement, piggybacking on Existentialism for quite some time. In fact, it wasn’t until later in the twentieth century when renowned theater critic, Martin Esslin, was so moved by the Absurdist play that he coined the absurd into its own dramatic criticism, by publishing his book, Theater of the Absurd, in 1962. In this novel, Esslin closely examines what is necessary for the elements of an Absurdist play by separating the meaninglessness of the absurd from that of Existentialism. 

“A well-made play is expected to present characters that are well-observed and convincingly motivated: [Absurdist] plays often contain hardly any recognizable human beings and present completely unmotivated actions. A well-made play is expected to entertain by the ding-dong of witty and logically built-up dialogue: in some [Absurdist] plays dialogue seems to have degenerated into meaningless babble. A well-made play is expected to have a beginning, middle, and a neatly tied-up ending: [Absurdist] plays often start at an arbitrary point and seem to end just as arbitrary.” (Esslin)

In an Absurdist play, one thing must always remain constant, the world of the play must only exist as it is on the stage, whether the reality itself is incomprehensible, which would leave the artist with ample room for perception and interpretation in his own creation. Language can be reassembled to create a genuine instrumental for logic, breaking grammatical laws to set up a seemingly nonsensical barrage of dialogue that accents the mundane interactions in the day-to-day existence. If going to attend an Absurdist play, one must not bring any prenotions of the world as it exists to them into the theater because those exact notions may have no meaning or relevance to the play itself. Rather, just like the Absurdist man, it is the relation that brings us back to the Self and this is as equally true on stage. Playwrights were able to accomplish just this by creating plays with no explanation to their comprehension. It wouldn’t be until the end of the play that the audience would realize that the world was a dream or a fantasy, leaving all possibilities limitless to develop illogically.  

     This gives the artist an empty canvas, a white surface to create anything the mind desires. Artaud created taboo horrors and nightmares. Beckett mocked scientific and philosophical language. One playwright in particular, Alfred Jarry, wrote the infamous Ubu Roi, an absurdist comedy based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In this sense, one can begin to understand Absurdist plays as a story board, pictures or images made to represent a scene, as opposed to a logical transgression from moment to moment. The understanding is found in the whole of the message without the need to walk the audience to the same conclusion. Thus the audience is forced to their own consciousness in order to perceive the author’s intention here.

     With close integration of these artists, I propose that the use of comedy in the absurd changes the audiences’ perspective of the critical elements of an Absurdist philosophy, evoking not just an intellectual awareness but emotional comprehension of an Absurd reality. I will deconstruct the intentions of three absurdist minds—Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud, and Samuel Beckett—translating the text of plays, breaking down psychological motives, and transcribing manifestos, defining meaninglessness into something fathomable. It is here that I will find a spattering of hidden significance to relate to the mere meaninglessness of life, and argue that comedy is the highest form of literature ever written, a modern edification of the precipice between the real and the actual, the ‘human’ and ‘extra-human’ realities. I will argue that it is within comedy that an artist can find that medium, forever satisfied in walking the fine line between one’s self in society and the perception of one’s self in this meaningless reality. In conclusion, this creates a purpose, underneath all of life’s lack of meaning, comes this sense of reason and necessity through an ultimately logical apprehension of life, a greater overall understanding in our natural desire for knowledge.