Absurdist fiction


Absurdist fiction is a genre of novels, plays, poems, films, or other media that focuses on the experiences of characters in situations where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question the certainty of existential concepts such as truth or value. In some cases, it may overlap with literary nonsense.
The absurdist genre of literature arose in the 1950s and 1960s, first predominantly in France and Germany, prompted by post-war disillusionment. Absurdist fiction is a reaction against the surge in Romanticism in Paris in the 1830s, the collapse of religious tradition in Germany, and the societal and philosophical revolution led by the expressions of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Common elements in absurdist fiction include satire, dark humor, incongruity, the abasement of reason, and controversy regarding the philosophical condition of being "nothing". Absurdist fiction in play form is known as Absurdist Theatre. Both genres are characterised by a focus on the experience of the characters, centred on the idea that life is incongruous, irreconcilable and meaningless. The integral characteristic of absurdist fiction involves the experience of the struggle to find an intrinsic purpose in life, depicted by characters in their display of meaningless actions in the futile events they take part in.
Absurdism as a philosophical movement is an extension of, or divergence from, Existentialism, which focuses on the pointlessness of mankind and specifically the emotional angst and anxiety present when the existence of purpose is challenged. Existentialist and agnostic perspectives are explored in absurdist novels and theatre in their expression of plot and characters. Major absurdist authors include Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco.

Characteristics

A great deal of absurdist fiction may be humorous or irrational in nature. The absurdist humor is described as a manner of comedy that relies on non-sequiturs, violation of causality, and unpredictable juxtapositions. However, the hallmark of the genre is neither comedy nor nonsense, but rather, the study of human behavior under circumstances that appear to be purposeless and philosophically absurd. Absurdist fiction posits little judgment about characters or their actions; that task is left to the reader. Also, the "moral" of the story is generally not explicit, and the themes or characters' realizations — if any — are often ambiguous in nature.
Additionally, unlike many other forms of fiction, absurdist works will not necessarily have a traditional plot structure. The conventional elements of fiction such as plot, characterization, and development tend to be absent. Some scholars explain that this fiction entails a "going away from" a norm. There is also the case of the questioning of the validity of human reason, from which perceptions of the natural laws arise.
The absurdist fiction also does not seek to appeal to the so-called collective unconscious as it is fiercely individualistic and almost exclusively focuses on exploring an individual's or a being's subjective feelings of its existence.

Overview

The absurdist genre grew out of the modernist literature of the late 19th and early 20th century in direct opposition to the Victorian literature which was prominent just prior to this period. It was largely influenced by the existentialist and nihilist movements in philosophy, and the Dada and surrealist movements in art. Existential and nihilistic philosophical influences on absurdist fiction were resultant of the post-war disillusionment. Absurdist fiction novelists and composers demanded freedom from the conventions prevalent in the 1940 philosophical movement in France. Other historical events that impacted the literary movement's style and philosophy include the atomic bomb and the Cold War.
Psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of British Columbia published a report in 2009 showing that reading absurdist tales improved test subjects' ability to find patterns. Their findings summarized that, when people have to work to find consistency and meaning in a fragmented story, it increases "the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities".

Context and origins

, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus, Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme and Cormac McCarthy are considered to be the most well-known composers of absurdist fiction. Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist, and a notorious absurdist. Writers that influenced Kafka include Friedrich Nietzsche, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens and more. Kafka's most popular fictional stories include "The Judgment", published in 1912; The Metamorphosis, published 1915; "In the Penal Colony", published 1919; and "A Hunger Artist", published 1922. The Trial, written between 1914 and 1915, is recognised as Kafka's most well-known fiction. In its "mythic symbolism of a world gone berserk", Kafka's use of mythology, comedy, aphorism and surrealism epitomise the distinctive features of absurdist fiction. Franz Kafka's influence on absurdism was so great that he is referred to by some as the "King of the Absurd" and a leader of the absurd movement. Others argue that Kafka was predominantly a Surrealist, however Kafka clarifies his unique style as "the blend of absurd, surreal and mundane which gave rise to the adjective 'Kafkaesque'". Samuel Beckett was also an early absurdist; an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. Beckett's well-known Waiting for Godot, premiered in 1953, is classified within absurdist theatre using techniques of tragicomedy. The characteristics introduced by Beckett included bitter humour and despair, and a vivid and spontaneous improvisation on the absurdity of theatre. Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian French playwright, one of the foremost composers of French avant-garde theatre and a leader of absurdism. Ionesco's The Chairs was branded as a "tragic farce" by Ionesco himself in its experimentation of absurdist motifs, existentialism and nonsensical verse, of which elaborates on incommunicability in our human lives.

Ideology

The term "absurd" has roots in the Latin "absurdus", meaning "contrary to reason" or "inharmonious". The term elaborates on the concept of the modern word corresponding to the identification of the irrational and incongruous nature of everyday life. The ideology and philosophy behind the absurdist fiction genre stems from nihilism and existentialism extracted from the 20th-century world. Søren Kierkegaard, known as the "father of existentialism", was a prolific Danish writer who opposed conventional boundaries of philosophy, psychology, theology, fiction and literary criticism. Kierkegaard's philosophy contends with the plausibility of Christendom, and inherently disputes the sense of purpose it prompts in personal life. The concept of the absurd was used by Kierkegaard to term the point in which faith becomes indefensible, yet valid for those who employ it, and it alone. Kierkegaard heavily influenced the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Existentialism as a philosophical approach or theory emphasises the single individual's existence and the concept of an individual as a free agent in determining their own meaning or purpose in life. On the other hand, nihilism is the recognition that life has no intrinsic meaning. Absurdist fiction in relation to existentialism expresses what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose, therefore all communication breaks down. Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Soprano is an absurdist fiction text which emphasises in depth the notion of mankind's inability to communicate with each other. Friedrich Nietzsche was a cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and a Latin and Greek egg scholar who also yielded profound inspiration in Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. Nietzsche is another primary influencer on the philosophy and ideology behind the absurd. His interest in nihilism, in particular his views on Christianity and God, alludes to the traditions of the Western world in their reliance on religion as a "moral compass" and source of meaning. Nietzsche claimed that this dependence is now unviable, appearing in his book The Gay Science, published 1882, translated in 1974. The writings of Nietzsche influenced absurdist fiction in the influence on Sartre and Albert Camus. Particularly, Camus' understanding of nihilism was heavily motivated by the conception that Nietzsche put forth of life and death and the nihilistic perspectives of such.

Absurdist fiction in novels

French writer Albert Camus is the novelist that most literary critics date the concept of absurdist fiction to, with Camus' most famous novel, L'Étranger, and his philosophical essay "The Myth of Sisyphus". The Bohemian, German-speaking, Franz Kafka is another absurdist fiction novelist. Kafka's novel The Trial was published in 1925 after Kafka's death in 1924. Kafka's novel encompasses mankind's inability to engage in communication in a purposeless world.

Examples

Examples of absurdist fiction writers include:
Individual absurdist works include:
  • Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe
  • Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
  • Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat and The Hothouse by the East River
  • Edward Albee's Seascape and The American Dream
  • Joseph Heller's Catch-22
  • Thomas Pynchon's V. and The Crying of Lot 49
  • John Irving's The World According to Garp
  • Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
  • Plays by Eugène Ionesco
  • Some early plays of Harold Pinter
  • Some works by Tom Stoppard
  • Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin's Tarelkin's Death
  • Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos
  • Netflix TV series BoJack Horseman
  • Lars von Trier's Riget
  • Brian Patrick Butler's Friend of the World
  • Noah Baumbach's White Noise adapted from the novel written by Don Delillo
  • Adhik Ravichandran's Good Bad Ugly
Examples of notable absurdist filmmakers include: