A Little History of Literature (32 page)

Absurd Existences

K
AFKA
, C
AMUS
, B
ECKETT AND
P
INTER

If you made a list of the most gripping opening lines in literature, the following would surely make it into the top ten:

It is from a short story, ‘The Metamorphosis’, by Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It's probable that Kafka did not much care whether we read this sentence or anything that he wrote. He instructed his friend and exectutor Max Brod to burn his literary remains ‘preferably unread’ after his death – he died prematurely, aged forty, from tuberculosis. Brod, thankfully, defied the instruction. Kafka speaks to us despite Kafka.

The human condition, for Kafka, is well beyond tragic or depressed. It is ‘absurd’. He believed that the whole human race was the product of one of ‘God's bad days’. There is no ‘meaning’ to make sense of our lives. Paradoxically that meaninglessness allows us to read into Kafka's novels such as
The Trial
(which is about a
legal ‘process’ which doesn't process anything), or his stories like ‘The Metamorphosis’, whatever meanings we please. For example, critics have viewed Gregor Samsa's transformation into a cockroach as an allegory of anti-Semitism, a grim forecast of the criminal extermination of a supposedly ‘verminous’ race. (Kafka was Jewish, and just a little older than Adolf Hitler.) Writers often foresee such things coming before other people do. ‘The Metamorphosis’, published in 1915, has also been seen as foreshadowing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, after the First World War. Kafka and his fellow citizens in Bohemia, centred in Prague, had lived under that vast empire. They woke up suddenly to find their identities had vanished. Others have read the story in terms of Kafka's problematic relationship with his father, a coarsegrained businessman. Whenever Franz nervously gave his father one of his works, it would be returned unread. His father despised his son.

But any such ‘meanings’ crumple because there is no larger or underlying meaning in the Kafka universe to underpin them. Yet absurdist literature still had a mission – to assert that literature is, like everything else, pointless. Kafka's disciple, the playwright Samuel Beckett, put it well: the writer ‘has nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’.

With that in mind, consider the opening paragraph of Kafka's last and finest novel,
The Castle
:

Everything quivers with enigma. ‘K.’ is a name, but no name (is it ‘Kafka’?). It is twilight, that nothing-time between day and night. K. stands on a bridge, suspended in the space between the outside world
and the village. Fog, darkness and snow shroud the Castle. Is there anything in front of K. at all but ‘emptiness’? We never know where he has come from, nor why he has come. He will never reach the Castle. He cannot even be sure it is there, but it is where he is going.

Kafka, who wrote in German, lived his life in utter literary obscurity. He worked, for as long as his delicate health allowed, in a state insurance office in his native city, Prague. (He was good at the job, reportedly.) He had studied law but was, by profession, a bureaucrat. He had tormented relations with women and his family. He died before his genius could fully flower, and was for decades after his death merely an obscure footnote in the history of German-language literature.

It was not until the 1930s, well after his death, that translations of his works (
The Castle
was the first) began to appear in English. They inspired some writers, but mystified most readers. He was resurrected as a major literary force after the Second World War, not in Prague, London or New York, but Paris.

Kafka was installed as a patriarchal figure in the 1940s French Existentialists' godless universe. It was their philosophy that triggered the ‘Kafka Revolution’ in the 1960s when everybody discovered the world was either Orwellian or Kafkaesque or possibly both. Kafka no longer mystified, he explained. His time had come.

Albert Camus's opening proposition in his best-known essay, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, is that ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide’. It echoes Kafka's bleak aphorism: ‘A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.’ Why not, when life is pointless? Camus's essay pictures the human condition in the mythical figure Sisyphus, doomed for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, only for it to fall down again. Pointless. Only two responses are feasible in the face of man's Sisyphean fate: suicide or rebellion. Camus appended a long note – ‘Hope and the Absurd in the Works of Franz Kafka’– to his Sisyphus essay, commemorating the writer to whose influence he was indebted.

Kafka's influence is evident in Camus's fictional masterpiece
The Outsider
, written and published under Nazi occupation censorship. The action is set in Algiers, nominally part of Metropolitan France.
The narrative opens bleakly: ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday: I can't be sure.’ Nor does the French Algerian hero, Meursault, care. He cares about nothing. He has, he confides, ‘lost the habit of noting his feelings’. For no particular reason, he shoots an Arab. His only explanation, not that he troubles to come up with explanations, even to save his life, is that it was very hot that day. He goes to the guillotine, not even caring about that. He hopes the crowd watching the execution will jeer.

It was Camus's comrade in philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre, who perceived, most clearly, what drastic things Kafka had done to fiction's rule book. Generically, as Sartre wrote in a digression in his novel
Nausea
(1938), the novel presumes to makes sense, fully aware that life doesn't make sense. This ‘bad faith’ is its ‘secret power’. Novels, said Sartre, are ‘machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world’. They are necessary, but intrinsically dishonest. What else do we have in life other than the ‘spurious meanings’ we invent?

Absurdity took a long time penetrating the Anglo-Saxon/American world. The moment of penetration occurred in August 1955 when Samuel Beckett's play
Waiting for Godot
was first performed in English at a club theatre in London. Beckett was an Irishman, long resident in France, bilingual and steeped in the Existentialism that dominated French intellectual life in the postwar period.

Waiting for Godot
opens with two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, by a roadside. We don't know who, or where, they are. They talk incessantly throughout the play, but nothing ‘happens’. As it transpires the tramps are indeed doing something by doing nothing – they are waiting for a mysterious person, or entity, called ‘Godot’. Is this ‘God’? Towards the end of the play a boy comes on stage to tell the characters that Godot isn't coming today. Estragon asks Vladimir if they should leave and Vladimir replies, ‘Yes, let's go’. The final stage direction is: ‘
They do not move
.’

It's impossible to exaggerate the impact that
Waiting for Godot
had on English theatre and culture in the mid-1950s. On one actor, who performed in the play in provincial repertory theatre, it had perhaps the most significant impact of all. Harold Pinter went
from performing Beckett into writing, as a confessed disciple. Like Beckett, he would go on to win a Nobel Prize.

Pinter's breakthrough play was
The Caretaker
(1960). The action is set in a seedy lodging house with three main characters, two brothers and an outsider – a tramp named Mac Davies. One of the brothers, Aston, has had his brain shattered by ‘curative’ electroconvulsive therapy. This little community intend to do something – build a garden shed, undertake some random house repairs. They do nothing but quarrel. Mac is constantly intending to get his papers from a nearby government office. He never gets them. None of them carry through their plans, any more than Estragon and Vladimir move along their road. The dialogue in
The Caretaker
is reminiscent of Beckett, but Pinter also cultivates a unique use of silence. The breaks in the dialogue build up a mood of vague menace. Pinter's is the art of the eloquently ‘left hanging’.

The least silent of playwrights, Tom Stoppard responded creatively and with firework displays of wit to the comedy in Beckett. Stoppard's first major play was
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
(1967). The action revolves, with dazzlingly clever dialogue, around the two background characters in
Hamlet
who, again like Vladimir and Estragon, do not move. They cannot move. They are only minor characters. All they can do is chatter, which they do incessantly.

The playfulness in the play, and in Stoppard's later works, in some ways evokes the great Italian dramatist, Luigi Pirandello, and plays such as his
Six Characters in Search of an Author
(1921). Playful drama and mind games are, for Stoppard, what Sartre called novels: ‘machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world’. But, in Stoppard's case, they are great fun, not nauseating or menacing. Absurdity has its hilarious side.

Literature is always and everywhere a diverse thing. No single container fits all. The Theatre of the Absurd was revolutionary, but it was
avant garde
(or ‘cutting edge’), and it happened in Europe, and in circumstances where there are few writers and small audiences. There was, simultaneously, an ultra-realistic new style of British drama that was not absurd but angry, and which from
the beginning drew massive audiences, and particularly young ones. The play that launched this new wave in British theatre was John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger
, first performed in 1956, the year after
Godot
, but coming at audiences from a very different direction.

Osborne's hero, Jimmy Porter, is not a Sisyphus figure but an ‘angry young man’ (as Osborne and his ilk came to be called), raging at 1950s Britain – throwing rocks, not pushing them. It was a moment in British history when things were badly falling apart. The British Empire was in its death throes. The colonial war against Egypt, over the Suez Canal, was its final humiliating moment. The British class system was a dead hand throttling the vitality of the nation. Or so Osborne's play asserts. The monarchy was a gold tooth in a rotting jaw, as one of his characters puts it.

In the play, Jimmy lives in a cramped attic with Alison, the daughter of a colonel who was a colonial administrator before India gained its independence in 1947. Jimmy is anger incarnate. He is university educated, but at an unfashionable (not ‘Oxbridge’) institution. He cultivates a noticeably working-class lifestyle but is essentially apolitical. His raw anger discharges on Alison, whom he both loves for herself and despises for her class background. Jimmy's anger – eloquently expressed in furious rants – is, we feel, the raw fuel of revolution. But what kind of revolution? The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan called
Look Back in Anger
a ‘minor miracle’ that presents ‘postwar youth as it really is’. It cleared the way for the youth revolution (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll) of the 1960s.

Absurdism never took firm root in the USA, although there was always plenty of anger to be found on the stage. Dramatists like Arthur Miller, in
Death of a Salesman
(1949), followed Henrik Ibsen's example, attacking the falsity at the core of middle-class life under capitalism. Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee were similarly scornful about marriage in
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947) and
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(1962). The great ‘Expressionist’ American playwright Eugene O'Neill left his play
Long Day's Journey into Night
to be performed after his death (it was first staged in 1956). It portrayed family as a different kind
of hell. American theatre, we may say, found its own way to speak about ‘meaninglessness’.

There are innumerable things to wonder at in the literature of the twentieth century. But not the least of its wonders is that an unimportant clerk, writing in a European backwater, with no desire to be read should, so long after his death, rise as one of the giants of world literature. Franz Kafka would, of course, have dismissed our marvelling attention, and despised us for it.

CHAPTER
34

The Poetry of Breakdown

L
OWELL
, P
LATH
, L
ARKIN AND
H
UGHES