Abstract
Is there a God? — We do not know. Is there a soul? — We do not know. Is there life after death or not? — We do not know. Is there any purpose in life? — We do not know. Why am I living? — We do not know. Am I living, do I really exist? — We do not know. What, then, do we know? Is it possible for us to know anything at all? — We do not know. And this systematic “We do not know” is called science! And people clap their hands above their heads and cry exultantly: “The progress of the human mind is incomprehensible.” We no longer need even faith in God, for science has observed that water boiling in a pot lifts the lid, and that rubbed resin attracts straw....1
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References
T. G. Masaryk, Modern Man and Religion. Translated by Ann Bibza and Václar Benes. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1938, p. 28.
Amedee Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art. Translated by John Rodker. New York: Dover Publications, 1952, p. 170.
Laughter plays a central role in the comedy of the absurd. The sense of humor is one of man’s most precious gifts, since it frees him from the oppression of the tragic, the awareness of his own victimization. Laughter, as Horace M. Kallen points out, has the power of joining “compassion to detachment, commitment to withdrawal.” Horace M. Kallen, Freedom, Tragedy, and Comedy. De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University, 1963, p. 48.
A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1946, p. 281.
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited by Oscar Levy. Vol. XIV. The Will to Power. Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1910, I, p. 5.
Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 70n.
For Nothingness, “even when we mean it only in the sense of the complete negative of what is present, in being absent, belongs to being present as one of its possibilities.” Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being. Translated by William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1958, p. 87.
John Cruickshank speaks of “a nihilistic rhetoric” that distinguishes the present age, a rhetoric that renders difficult communication between writers and their readers, since they do not share common ideas about the nature of life. John Cruickshank (ed.), The Novelist as Philosopher. London: Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 4.
Fyodor Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment. Translated by Constance Garnett. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1947, p. 36.
Alexander Pfänder (1870–1941), one of Husserl’s followers in the phenomenological movement, brilliantly analyzed the state of being of those who are governed by provisional sentiments, feelings that are placed, as it were, on probation. That is how they live their inner life, in a state of suspension: “When a person feels extremely insecure, weak, and valueless in his innermost being, when he is filled with diffidence, when he becomes thoroughly aware of the frustrations of his demands on life... he lives on the whole only provisionally. He goes to sleep and gets up, always only provisionally; for: ‘This is still not the proper and real thing.’ He washes, combs his hair, and dresses, but only provisionally. When he learns something or acquires a skill, he does so only provisionally. And only provisionally does he read books and newspapers, look at works of art, and listen to music. He enters into union with his clothes, his rooms, his furniture only quite provisionally....” Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960, I, 187.
Henry de Montherlant, Selected Essays. Translated by John Weightman. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961, p. 135.
According to one philosopher, it does not follow “that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose. On the contrary, the lack of any cosmic purpose may be experienced as liberating, as if a great weight had been lifted from us. Life ceases to be oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.” (Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961, pp. 177–178.) Another philosopher asks: “Why not suppose the world purposely purposeless?” (
Albert Hammond, Proprieties and Vagaries. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1961, p. 16.) Further on he declares: “Evidently a purposelessly purposeless world is not a completely purposeless universe or a purposeless ontology.” (Ibid., p. 17.)
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Odyssey. Translated by Kimon Friar. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958, p. xxi.
Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: The Modern Library, 1938, p. 481.
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, p. 394.
Helmut Thielicke, Nihilism. Translated by John W. Doberstein. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961, p. 54.
Henry de Montherlant “The Hounded Travelers,” in From the N. R. F. Edited by Justin O’Brien. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958, p. 297.
George Santayana, Dominations and Powers. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 50.
Quoted in Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Translated by Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963, pp. 11–12.
Polanyi contends that “though every person may believe something different to be true, there is only one truth.” (Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 315.) Belief of any kind always runs a risk. “We must commit each moment of our lives irrevocably on grounds which, if time could be suspended, would invariably prove inadequate....” (Ibid., p. 320.)
“The anguish of being is that there is something rather than nothing. It is a curious fact that one cannot experience the full wonder and mystery of being without thinking of absolute nothingness.” Robert G. Olson, An Introduction to Existentialism. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1962, p. 31.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1922, p. 187. Quoted in Robert G. Olson, An Introduction to Existentialism, p. 187.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1949, p. 12.
Gunther Anders, the philosopher, makes clear the difference in the moral climate of our age wrought by the invention and use of the atom bomb. Everyone upon awakening each day should think first of the atom and thus shatter the illusion that he lives in a stable world. “The door in front of us bears the inscription: ‘Nothing will have been’; and from within: ‘Time was an episode.’ Not, however, as our ancestors had hoped, an episode between two eternities; but one between two nothingnesses; between the nothingness of that which, remembered by no one, will have been as though it had never been, and the nothingness of that which will never be. And as there will be no one to tell one nothingness from the other, they will melt into one single nothingness.” Burning Conscience. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962, p. 11.
For more than a hundred years “the rebel has insisted that existence is absurd, that man does not live authentically until he accepts the inexplicable.” Wylie Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art. New York: Random House, 1962, p. 65.
Oscar Mandel, A Definition of Tragedy. New York: New York University Press, 1961, p. 28.
Like the Buddhist, the absurdist realizes that truth is not to be identified with any of the visible forms of nature, but unlike the Buddhist he does not believe that the Truth can be attained by means of disciplined contemplation. He has no faith in an absolute Reality, a Unity that reconciles all phenomenal opposites. The absurdist is at one with Buddha and Zen Buddhism in holding that the fundamental reality “escapes any mental representation. Therefore it is indescribable, unthinkable and inexpressible.” (Robert Linssen, Living Zen. Translated by Diana Abrahams-Curiel. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1958, p. 26.) The basic difference, of course, between the literature of the absurd and Buddhism is that the former is an art of sensuous revelation, not a search for salvation. Arthur Koestler condemns Zen as “at best an existential hoax, at worst a web of solemn absurdities.” (
Arthur Koestler, The Lotus and the Robot. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961, p. 233.)
Warren Ramsey, in Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance, defines ironic utterance in terms of opposites. “Not the expected, but the unexpected, and even the contrary of the expected thing, is said.” (Warren Ramsey, Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953, p. 136.) Irony seizes upon the element of the unexpected not only in what is said but also in what is done and in what happens, thus lighting up the not-to-be reconciled dichotomies of existence.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modem World. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948, p. 275.
Richard N. Coe, Ionesco. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961, p. 63.
The Dark Comedy, by J. L. Styan, deals with the development of modern comic tragedy. It points out that comic irony “can prick with a thousand pins in the course of a play, and in its way be as all-pervading as tragic irony itself. Nor need we assume that such tragicomedy as emerges carries less weight than tragedy, is any less moral, or bears any the less relationship to the society which promotes it.” J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy. Cambridge: The University Press, 1962, p. 41.
Eugene Ionesco, The Killer and Other Flays. Translated by Donald Watson. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1960, p. 9.
As Ionesco expresses it: “Une chose dite est déja morte, la realite est au dela d’elle.” (Eugene Ionesco, Notes et contre-notes. Paris: Gallimard, 1962, p. 27.) He voices more or less the same idea when he says that “une forme d’expression etablie est aussi une forme d’oppression.” (Ibid., p. 27.)
For a witty and stinging satire on those writers who would use the drama for purposes of promoting social progress and combatting the dread disease of nihilism, see his plays, Victims of Duty and Amédée. See also Charles I. Glicksberg, The Self in Modern Literature. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964, pp. 106–117.
Harold Pintner, a young English dramatist of the absurd, points out in a program note that there “are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang, 1962, p. 248.
What is noteworthy in twentieth-centruy literature is not only the rise to dominance of the unconscious but also the return to things, the attempt to recapture the purity of perception, without the distortions of the analytical intellect. The fight, in short, is against a rationalism which has confined the world of experience within a Procrustean framework of abstractions. All this led a number of writers to resist the opacity of language, its tendency to harden into traditional forms, so that it lost its expressiveness, its spontaneity. Some went so far as to experiment with what they called a literature of silence. (See Everett W. Knight, Literature Considered as Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957, passim. On the poetry of silence in the theater, see
Joseph Chiari, The Contemporary French Theatre. London: Rockliff, 1958, pp. 28–29.) This fundamental distrust of language, evident also in the work of Samuel Beckett, springs, as in the case of Ionesco, from a loss of faith in the efficacy of reason. Linguistic autointoxication, the belief that words are things, the incorporation or hypostasis of truth — that is the danger the modern writer tries to safeguard himself against; he frequently relies on irony as a device that will help him preserve the purity of his vision. Whereas Swinburne, for example, indulged in irony in the form of brilliant verbal paradoxes, irony, as John Davidson, the poet, used it, became “conceptual and metaphysical....” (
J. Benjamin Townsend, John Davidson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, p. 211.
The comic spirit, according to Bergson, “has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness.” (Henri Bergson, Laughter. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1921, p. 2.) So has irony, particularly in the plays of Ionesco.
David J. Grossvogel, Four Playwrights and a Postscript. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962, p. 97.
The cruel humor contributes to heighten the tragic effect, “for it stresses the role of man as sufferer who does not belong, and who cannot ultimately be taken seriously, because there is no one to witness his suffering.” Leonard Cabell Pronko, Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theater in France. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962, p. 32.
Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1962, p. 136.
See “The Lost Self in Beckett’s Fiction,” in Charles I. Glicksberg, The Self in Modern Literature. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964, pp. 121–133.
Samuel Beckett, Watt. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1959, p. 28.
“More than the ordinary human being, the artist must accept the limitations of being a time-contained being without as an artist an immortal destiny. Art has only a mortal destiny; art brought into the actual presence of the absolute, of the timeless, sinks to nothingness....” Harold W. Watts, Hound and Quarry. London: Routledge & Paul, 1953, p. 295.
Erich Heller, who consistently criticizes the contradictions that inform the ironic vision, speaks of Schopenhauer’s philosophy as “a secular apocalypse: the world is worthless; art is good. Life is no life; letters are the real thing.... Small wonder that so tenuous a salvation should first have been preached with irony. Some time before Schopenhauer became known, the German romantics had founded their ironical church. They too wished to believe in the ultimate reality of poetry, but never quite succeeded in shutting out the harsh voice of the ultimately unreal yet, alas, ever so present real world. The result was irony, that irony which is the idiom of the peculiarly divided disloyalty toward reality as well as poetry.” Erich Heller, “The Realistic Fallacy,” in Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Edited by George J. Becker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 593.
As Michael Hamburger writes: “Hofmannsthal’s difference with the absolutists of aestheticism was not over the belief in the autonomy of the work of art.... but over the belief in the autonomy of the artist.” Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Poems and Verse Plays. Edited by Michael Hamburger. New York: Pantheon Books, 1961, p. xxxix.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom. Translated by Thomas Common. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960, p. 35.
See Charles I. Glicksberg, “The Artist in the Twentieth Century,” Prairie Schooner, XXVII, Winter 1954, pp. 323–330.
Rayner Heppenstall, The Fourfold Tradition. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961, p. 136.
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1961, p. 49.
“For irony is an engine of destructive criticism in only a very limited sense; the ironist himself does not pass judgment but appeals to our sense of truth and justice to do so. If truth be the judge when irony prosecutes, it follows that nothing that is excellent can in this way be hurt....” F. McD. C. Turner, The Element of Irony in Literature. Cambridge: The University Press, 1926, pp. 7–8.
Paul Valéry, Reflections on the World Today. Translated by Francis Scarfe. New York: Pantheon, 1948, p. 139.
Francis Scarfe, The Art of Paul Valéry. London and Toronto: William Heinemann Ltd., 1954, p. 34.
Gide has been left out of this discussion of irony because he tends to use irony, chiefly, as a satiric weapon. He seems to define irony in the sense that the author is critical of his own performance, detached from it, not taken in by the illusion it creates. He himself declares: “With the single exception of my Nourritures, all my books are ironic works; they are books of criticism.” Quoted in Jean Hytier, André Gide. Translated by Richard Howard. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962, p. 120.
Quoted in Charles D. Blend, André Malraux. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1963, p. 186.
In “The Writer and Our Time,” Germaine Brée touches upon the cult of “silence” which appears in Existentialist literature and in the writing of Beckett and Ionesco. She makes the obvious point that literature is “perforce the domain of the articulate.” Stanley Burnshaw (ed.), Varieties of Literary Experience. New York: New York University Press, 1962, p. 76.
Claude Mauriac, The New Literature. Translated by Samuel I. Stone. New York: George Braziller, 1959, p. 39.
E. M. Cioran, “On a Certain Experience of Death,” Evergreen Review. II, Autumn 1958, p. 117.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable. Translated by the author. New York: Grove Press Inc., 1958, p. 3.
Saul Bellow, “The Writes as Moralist,” The Atlantic Monthly, CCXI, March 1963, p. 62.
Vaihinger regarded a “fiction” as “a ‘legitimate error,’ i. e., as a fictional conceptual construct that has justified its existence by its success.” (H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If.’ Translated by C. K. Ogden. New York and London: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925, p. 106.) Contrast this “illusionistic” outlook with Freud’s conception of “the reality principle.” Freud declared: “To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.” (
Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts on War and Death,” in Collected Papers. London: International Psychoanalytical Press, 1950, IV, 317.
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© 1969 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1969). The Irony of the Absurd. In: The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0977-0_13
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