The Absurd in Literature (review)

The difficulty facing any archeologist of the absurd is expressed in the following quotation from Ionesco, which Neil Cornwell cites in his new study, The Absurd in Literature: “I have been called a writer of the absurd; this is one of those terms that go the round periodically, it is a term that is in fashion at the moment and will soon be out of fashion. It is vague enough now, in any case, to mean nothing any more and to be an easy definition of everything” (126).

In both his introduction and conclusion, Cornwell acknowledges the problematic provenance of the term, which applies equally to a range of literary and philosophical positions. In his attempt to comprehend it, Cornwell deploys two critical models, one historical, the other structural. The first of these argues that twentieth-century absurdism represents the full expression of latent tendencies that appear in writers from Sophocles to Dostoevsky. The second regards the absurd as timeless, as an archetypical response to the reality of death and the impossibility of knowledge: “The absurd, then, is born of nihilism, out of existentialism, fuelled by the certainty of death (anxiety, dread, and death being the scourge of the existentialists)” (5). The historical paradigm is evident in the first half of this quotation and likewise in the title that Cornwell gives to the second section of his introduction, “Antecedents to the Absurd.” Cornwell’s competing attitude displays itself in the moments in which he discovers what he describes as “affinities” between one text and another. Speaking, for example, of Daniil Kharms, Cornwell writes as follows: “The writing of Kharms can also be closely linked to that of writers both contemporaneous to him, whose work he may be highly unlikely to have seen, and of a later period—without there being any possibility of his work being known to them” (175). The tension elicited through the competing claims of these two models is never fully resolved, and what remains a major complication is whether or not the absurdist elements that Cornwell is so adept at spotting belong to a prolonged unfurling of humanity’s engagement with the incomprehensible or whether they are merely false cognates that assume, in retrospect, the status of premonitions.

Cornwell’s refusal to define the absurd in absolute terms, or to limit its range of associations, allows him to dwell upon a series of texts that are not usually read as absurdist, such as Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, which is invoked as precursor to later developments in absurdist epistemology. This is one element of Cornwell’s study that distinguishes it from Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd. Esslin is so rigorous in his definition that he dismisses both Camus and Sartre. Unfortunately, Cornwell’s generosity collapses unnecessarily a series of finer distinctions that are essential. It is without question that “nonsense” and “absurdity” have affinities with one another (as Cornwell notes on page 18). But the terms must remain distinct if they are to mark varied engagements with the concept of intelligibility, or what Cornwell describes as “the incomprehensible patterns of orderly disorder” (312).

In spite of this complication, The Absurd in Literature is impressive in both its scope and scholarship. Of particular interest is the chapter on Daniil Kharms, the twentieth-century Soviet miniaturist whom Cornwell has struggled, in this study and elsewhere, to bring to prominence in the English-speaking world. What emerges from Cornwell’s portrait of Kharms is an artist whose works suggest the very complication that his study engages, but does not resolve:

For all his only too obvious absurdist credentials—the incongruity, the linguistic highlighting and the stress of language games, the logical inversions and the near (or sheer) nonsense—the Kharmsian oeuvre remains in a state of spiritual tension. The horrific surrounding reality of the epoch in which he lived merges into the beyond—both of this world and of a further dimension. His interest in ‘heralds’ or visitors . . . and an apparent concern with...