Absurd

The absurd is a style of writing that is influenced by humanity’s isolation and a lack of logic in
the universe.

The latter is defined as having no meaning, and therefore, events and actions are not tied to
logical chains of events. Absurdist fiction is a genre of literature that came to prominence in the
1950s and 60s. Like other modernist movements, it was inspired by disillusionment with war and
how things “were.”

Definition of the Absurd

The word “absurd” refers to a literary genre and style of writing that focuses on the
meaninglessness of the universe and humanity’s attempts to make sense of it. The best examples
of the genre show the main characters’ struggle to find any meaning in life. Rather than come to
some revelation about their purpose, they remain adrift, knowing that the universe is nothing but
chaos. The stories often lack a traditional plot structure, mimicking the lack of structure the
characters’ worlds have. In many cases, a character spends the narrative making decisions that
are baseless and suffering consequences that they disregard.

The word “absurd” comes from the Latin meaning “deaf” and “stupid.”

History of Absurdism

Absurdist literature has its roots in Romanticism, Existentialism, and a broader disregard for old
societal norms and religious traditions. Absurdism focuses on the pointlessness of life, just like
existentialism does. The “absurd” occurs when a human being tries to make sense of a life that is
senseless. It’s a study of human behavior. The writers who are most often tied to absurdism are:

 Franz Kafka
 Jean-Paul Sarte
 Albert Camus
 Samuel Beckett
 Donald Barthelme
 Eugène Ionesco
These authors were influenced by the works of writers like Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe,
and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Characteristics of Absurdism

 Nontraditional plot structure

 Humorous or irrational events
 Non-Sequiturs
 Unpredictability
 Purposeless actions
 Questioning of the meaning of life
 Individualistic
 Explores subjective feelings about existence
Examples of the Absurd

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Trial is a chilling novel written by Franz Kafka between 1914 and 1915. It tells the story of a
man who is arrested for a crime that’s never revealed to him. No matter how much he pleads
with the few mysterious people he encounters, no one ever tells him what he’s being prosecuted
for. Unfortunately, the novel went unfinished and came to an abrupt end. Here is a famous quote:

‘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.’
Here, the priest turns K’s words against him. There’s nothing the man can say to convince those
around him that he didn’t do anything wrong.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis is one of the best-known examples of absurdist fiction. The novel
follows GregorSamsa, who, after waking up on what seems like a normal morning, finds himself
transformed into a giant insect. Samsa doesn’t spend too much time worrying about what
happened. Instead, he attempts to get out of bed, get his work materials together and head out on
his next business trip. He has his family to take care of, and his inconvenience can’t get in the
way of that. Of course, things are so simple, and he is confined to his room by the family he’s
taken care of all his life. They neglect and abuse him, eventually bringing about his death. Here’s
a quote from The Metamorphosis:

If they were shocked, then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm. But if they
took everything calmly, he he, too, had no reason to get excited and could, if he hurried, actually
be at the station by eight o’clock.
These lines demonstrate how quickly Gregor’s thoughts move from his new body to the duty he
has to his family and his job. Throughout the novel, Kafka does not supply readers with an
explanation as to why Samsa woke up in this form or what it all means. It’s just something that
happened and that the involved characters have to deal with.

“Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett

“Waiting for Godot” is Samuel Beckett’s most famous play. It was written in the 1950s and
focused on Vladimir and Estragon as they wait for Godot to arrive. The latter never turns up, and
during their endless wait, they engage in discussions about a wide variety of topics. Today, the
play is considered to be one of the most important of the 20th century. Here is a well-known
quote:

We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A
diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. …In an instant, all will vanish
and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.
These lines are spoken by Vladimir and are a great example of the meaninglessness of their task
and how it represents life more broadly.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Stranger is Albert Camus’ most commonly read literary work. It’s a novel that has
fascinated readers for generations. It tells the story of Meursault, an unusual man living in
Algiers who floats from one part of his life to the next without conviction or too much
emotion. He believes that life is meaningless, a central tenant of absurdism. He doesn’t express
sorrow when his mother dies, carries on from one task to the next without commitment or
consideration, and when invited to go somewhere, agrees without much caring what happens to
him there.

The climax of the book occurs when Meursault shoots a man on the beach. He does not
contemplate the action, nor does he worry about it after it’s over. The following lines appear at
the end of the novel, specifically from the version translated by Matthew Ward:

And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of
hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle
indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself-so like a brother, really-! felt that I had
been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less
alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and
that they greet me with cries of hate.
In these lines, Meursault is finding peace in the fact that nothing in his life matters. The “gentle
indifference” of the universe is not something to be feared or worried over. It affects him just as
it affects others, and in accepting it, he “was happy again.”
What does absurd mean in literature?
In literature, it refers to a style of writing in which authors focus on the meaninglessness of the
universe and human life. Illogical events happen, and the characters make senseless choices.

What is absurd drama in English literature?

It is a form of drama that uses absurdism to tell a story about life. It focuses on confusing plot
points, events, and choices. Characters might do things on stage that the audience was not
expecting. It often leaves audiences with more questions than answers.

How is absurdity used in literature?

It is used to explore the meaning of life and whether the actions human beings take have
consequences. Often, characters run into absurd situations and are faced with strange, seemingly
pointless events in their lives that change everything.

What are the elements of absurdist literature?

Irrational events and actions, unstructured plots, surprising choices on behalf of the writer and
characters, exploration of philosophical topics.

What is the theater of the absurd?

The theatre of the absurd is the designation used for absurdist drama after World War II.
Important productions include “The Room,” “Waiting for Godot,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?” and “The Homecoming.”

Related Literary Terms

 Drama: a mode of storytelling that uses dialogue and performance. It’s one of several
important literary genres that authors engage with.
 Aside: a dramatic device that is used within plays to help characters express their inner
thoughts
 Dramatic Monologue: a conversation a speaker has with themselves, or which is directed
at a listen or reader who does not respond.
 Melodrama: a work of literature or a theatrical performance that uses exaggerated events
and characters.
 Mood: the feeling created by the writer for the reader. It is what happens within a reader
because of the tone the writer used in the poem.
 Moral: the meaning or message conveyed through a story.
Nihilism vs. Existentialism vs. Absurdism
The birth of Modernity’s Meaning Crisis and two responses to it
In the 19th and 20th centuries, modernity came into its fullness and with this maturation the vestiges of
the religious worldview began to fall away revealing a crisis of meaning that we’ve come to call Nihilism.
This emergence of Nihilism prompted philosophers to ask in earnest once again the long-since
clichéd philosophical question—what is the meaning of life?

Out of this renewed engagement with meaning, three trends emerged. There was the root
problem—Nihilism i.e. the realisation that there is no objective meaning to our lives. And
wrestling with this problem we have two responses: Existentialism and Absurdism. In this
episode we are going to explore what Nihilism is and how these two schools of thought have
attempted to manage the crisis it represents.

A Divine Purpose

For the religious individual, life has an objective meaning.

In the Judaeo-Christian traditions, the history of this world is bookended by God’s creation on
one end and the Judgement Day of Heaven and Hell on the other. For the Buddhists and Hindus
there is the story of karma and the endless cycle of birth and rebirths that it results in. The end
point in this system is not a Heaven/Hell dichotomy but liberation known as Moksha in
Hinduism and Nirvana in Buddhism.

In these Eastern and Western systems of belief, humanity has a privileged place in reality.

But as the modernist worldview comes to its full fruition, it casts off the residual holdovers from
the religious mindset and this objective meaning dissolves. As we develop a better and better
model of reality and no longer need to rely on divinities to provide an explanation of the world,
we begin to jettison these divinities and the beliefs attached to them.

As Nietzsche has pointed out, Christianity prized truthfulness and sharpened this virtue in its
adherents only to fall on the very sword it had honed. In the 19 th century modernity lurched into
the secular mode with a number of explosive works.

The Birth of the Meaning Crisis

In the 1830s, David Strauss published his Life of Jesus and it went off like a stick of dynamite in
a fireworks factory. It quickly became a controversial literary phenomenon that eroded the belief
in the Bible as a historical book. 1841 saw the publishing of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of
Christianity that explored the idea that God was a psychological projection of humanity.
Feuerbach whose name means fire brook was a major influence on Karl Marx who said that:

“There is no other road for you to truth and freedom except that leading through the brook of
fire”
Following Strauss and Feuerbach the real stake in the heart of the religious narrative was the
publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859.
This cultural trend culminated at last in the catastrophic event that Nietzsche’s Madman talks
about in The Gay Science. Nietzsche’s madman — like the anecdotal Diogenes — lights a
lantern in the bright morning and goes into the marketplace searching for God only to be mocked
by the townsfolk with all the sarcasm of triumphant modernism. And then the madman gives a
speech to the people that echoes God’s speech at the climax of the Book of Job:

“Whither is God” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his
murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the
sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its
sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not
plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down
left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? […] Do we not hear anything yet of the
noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s
decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most
powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe
this blood off us?
— The Gay Science §125
This passage from Nietzsche is like the clarion call of Nihilism. It proclaims the undermining of
the objective values. Backward sideward forward up down all these are the ways we orient
ourselves in the external world. The death of God throws our entire relationship to reality—our
life’s compass—into disarray.

The Meaning of God’s Death

To put it more philosophically, God was the foundation of external values and of objective
meaning. Without God, without divinity, the external world lacks a telos it lacks a purpose and a
meaning by which we can orient ourselves. The objective ground of morality and of human
purpose has fallen away and this vacuum is disastrous.

And so, this is the crisis that Nihilism speaks to. By fully leaning into the implications of Biblical
criticism, and the insights of Copernicus and Newton and later Darwin, reality is no longer
geocentric and anthropocentric. And with the lawful universe that Newton began to expose and
the evolutionary story that Darwin uncovered, there is no need for a god except maybe in the
narrow, denuded role of Aristotle’s Uncaused Cause or as the animating spark that set life in
motion.

The material explanations for the external world proved far more effective than the religious
ones and so these religious stories were consigned to the trash heap.

The trouble was that these dodgy religious explanations were attached to the grounding of human
morality and meaning. The death of God heralded a meaning crisis.
What is Existentialism?

This is the root problem out of which existentialism and absurdism grew. Before we look at the
response of each school it’s worth addressing why there is so much confusion around the
difference between Existentialism and Absurdism.

The trouble lies with the usage of the term Existentialism itself which is used more or less
broadly depending on the writer. In some definitions Camus and his Absurdism are sub-schools
of existentialism whereas for others they are completely distinct.

Existentialism often includes thinkers in the 19 th century such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche who
far predate the origination of the term in the mid-20th century.

To complicate matters further, you have people who are often categorised as Existentialists such
as Heidegger and Camus who publicly declared that they were not Existentialists. And so, the
exact definition of Existentialism is a bit nebulous.

For the purposes of this episode, Existentialism is going to centre on the philosophy of Jean-Paul
Sartre. Sartre is the philosopher most synonymous with Existentialism for a number of reasons.
He not only defined the term Existentialist and coined many of its key terms and phrases but he
was one of the few philosophers who self-identified as an Existentialist.

The Existentialist Response

In tackling the problem of Nihilism and the absence of objective meaning, Sartre’s Existentialist
response was to first define what it is to be human. And this is where his famous phrase
of existence precedes essence comes into play.

Essence is a term that goes back to Ancient Greek philosophy. For Aristotle, the essence of a
thing is its defining characteristics. This notion of essence is tied up with the related idea of telos
which is the purpose of a thing. Hence: the essence of a knife is to cut, the essence of a cup is to
hold liquid, and the essence of a boat is to sail on water.

In the classical view of philosophy, the essence of a thing precedes its existence. If a cup can’t
hold liquid it’s not a cup since it is lacking the aspect that is essential to it.

Before the figurative death of God, it would have been said that our essence precedes our
existence. Humans had a specific purpose—for Aristotle we were essentially rational, for
Christians we were a fallen people that must aspire to salvation. But with Nihilism the bottom
fell out of these illusions and what was revealed is that there is no objective meaning. There is no
purpose that exists that is greater than humanity.

And so we are faced with a void of meaning. We live in a meaningless universe and so how do
we define what we are? What is the essence of being human? For Sartre, the essence is defined
by our existence, what we essentially are is what we do, how we act in the world. As he puts it
in Existentialism is a Humanism: “man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself ”
He says that

“there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive of it. Man is not only that which he
conceives himself to be, but also that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of
himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is
nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of Existentialism”
And so, faced with the void of meaninglessness that Nihilism presents, the Existentialist answer
is that we must create our own meaning through our actions. There is no objective meaning and
so we create our own by the way we live our lives.

That is the Existentialist answer to the problem of Nihilism.

The Absurdist Response

The Absurd is an idea that we find in Kierkegaard but is fully developed into a philosophy by
Albert Camus in his book length essay The Myth of Sisyphus.

Absurdism is his response to the problem of nihilism. He opens The Myth of Sisyphus with one
of the most iconic lines in the history of philosophy:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life
is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
In facing into the problem of Nihilism, we are asking whether the lack of objective purpose
means that life is not worth living.

The Absurd is key to Camus’s framing of the question. The Absurd is the meeting between two
things: the cold apathetic and meaningless objective reality on the one hand and humanity’s
inherent drive for meaning on the other. The Absurd arises from the meeting of our hunger for
meaning with a universe that is meaningless. It is the tension between this drive for meaning and
the impossibility of satisfying it.

We are all immersed in this absurd tension and according to Camus we have three alternatives
for dealing with this problem:

1. Suicide: The first option is to commit suicide. If life has no meaning then why keep
living? Camus finds this option unsatisfactory. He points out that there is no more
meaning in death than there is in life and that it simply evades the problem.
2. The Leap of Faith: The second option is to take a leap of faith—to believe in some
doctrine or ideology that tells us there is a meaning we must have faith in. This can be a
religion like Christianity or an ideology like Marxism. We swallow a pill of bullshit and
in return we get reprieve from the Absurd. Camus terms this option philosophical suicide.
3. Absurdism: Camus finds these two options insincere and so he proposes a third option—
to embrace the insatiable tension, to embrace the Absurd, to lean into it. This third option
is Absurdism.
Absurdism is a rebellion against meaninglessness. We do not escape from the Absurd through
death or philosophical suicide. We meet the Absurd as it is, without escape, and with integrity,
and we maintain the tension of the Absurd in us without turning away.

Absurdism vs. Existentialism

Camus incites us to a life without consolation—a life characterised by acute consciousness of
and rebellion against its own mortality and its limits. He looks at the Existentialists and rejects
what he ultimately sees as their escapism and irrationality, saying that:

“they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced
hope is religious in all of them”
Absurdism means holding aloof of the temptation to create meaning or to buy into some
meaning. The Absurdist rebels against this false satisfaction of our hunger for meaning. Instead
Camus says that we must hold the tension, hold the space of Absurd meaninglessness. As he puts
it:

“the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very
existence is an act of rebellion.”

Sisyphus: the Absurd Hero

Camus’s philosophy of Absurdism is best captured in an image—that of the Greek mythological

figure Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the founder of the Greek city of Corinth. He was known to be the
craftiest of all humans and craftier than Zeus himself.

When he was sent to the underworld, he managed to trick his way out. In some stories he tricks
Thanatos, in other stories Hades and in others Persephone. He escapes and returns to the Earth
and revels in the pleasure of the world before eventually being returned to the Underworld where
he is punished to roll a boulder up a hill and watch it roll back down again at which point he
returns to the bottom of the hill and repeats the process quite literally ad infinitum.

There’s three reasons why Sisyphus is Camus’s icon of Absurdism. There’s his love of life seen
by his cheating his way out of the underworld and returning to enjoy the pleasures of the world
once again which is strongly antithetical to the life-denying brand of Nihilism.

A second reason is Sisyphus’s punishment—the absurdity of rolling a rock up a hill only to see it
roll back down again and being forced every time to roll it back up again knowing the inevitable
outcome. Sisyphus is stuck in an eternal cycle of absurdity.

The third reason Sisyphus is Camus’s embodiment of Absurdism is that he is a rebel. He outwits
death and the gods to return to life. He rebels against the fundamental order of things he rebels
against the gods.

All of these points come together in Camus’s great line that closes out his book:
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus
teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is
well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each
atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The
struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus
happy.
And so Absurdism is not about finding a meaning to life but about rebelling against the absurdity
of life, it’s about standing aloof of the demand to find a meaning, rebelling against the absurd
game itself and affirming life for what it is. It is to struggle with integrity because this struggle
towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. Faced with the crisis of meaninglessness that
Nihilism presents, the Absurdist doesn’t throw a tantrum and kill themselves, the Absurdist
doesn’t grab on to the nearest life raft and commit philosophical suicide. The Absurdist affirms
the struggle and enjoys life for what it is. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

In Summary

So to summarise: Nihilism is the realisation that there is no objective meaning. Existentialism

answers this by saying that it is possible to create our own meaning through the choices we make
in our lives. Absurdism on the other hand says that we shouldn’t seek to create our own meaning
but we should stare into the face of the Absurd and rebel against this meaninglessness.