The word absurd, like many words in the English language, can mean different things. In Jonah’s blog post,”The Shared Experience of Absurdity”, absurd is the language of humor that connects cultures and disciplines and fosters fun events like Improv Everywhere, bridging the divide between disciplines that is discussed in Moran’s Interdisciplinarity. In Marlo’s blog post, “The Fun Theory”, absurdity was about breaking the monotony of everyday life and changing our behavior for the better. Yet, when I think of “absurd”, I think of the Absurdist novel The Stranger and the Absurdist philosophies of its author, Albert Camus.
The Stranger is a thin novel that manages to do what many novels before and after it have attempted to do: find meaning in human existence. Through the story of apathetic, ambivalent and unattached narrator, Meursault, we see illustrated the philosophy of the Absurd. Meursault drinks, eats and makes love with little emotional attachment yet he also attends funerals for his dead mother and kills strangers with the same unattached sangfroid, indicating that he is a who has found little reason to care about his life and the people who cycle through it. Meursault’s ultimate philosophy of Absurdity, of which author Albert Camus was an early champion, mulls over immortal the conflict of humanity attempting to find meaning in life only to discover that there is no meaning in life. The quest to find meaning in life is not exclusive to novels written by Absurdists and nor are its philosophies. Personally, I saw quite a bit of Absurdist philosophy in Percival Everett’s Zulus. Camus believed that the only way for people to achieve absolute freedom was by accepting the absurdity of life and living in spite of it while other absurdists proposed that the only way to “escape” the absurdity of life was through suicide. In the final moments of Zulus, Kevin and Alice seem to make the choice that suicide is the only escape from their meaningless existence, playing into the vein of characters like Meursault who see no reason behind their lives.
The choice Kevin and Alice ultimately make becomes more understandable when you examine the facets of our own lives today which provide us with meaning and as Camus would say, the ability to go on amidst the absurdity. In today’s world many people find life’s meaning through religion. In Zulus, religion is nothing more than a line on an official form, with people changing their religion daily and routinely as though it were a change of shoes. People also find meaning through their children and their families in today’s world while in Zulus humanity had resigned itself to a slow extinction via female sterilization. Without these meaningful components to aid in the acceptance of life’s absurdity, Kevin and Alice’s choice to exterminate humanity seems slightly less implausible. Their ultimate acceptance of a meaningless life liberates Kevin, Alice and Meursault, freeing them from the apparently meaningless chains of their world and their own quest for purpose.
The word “absurd” has meanings that connect not only to the light, funny parts of life but also the denser, darker questions that continue to pervade literature and life. And as Jonah said in his blog, absurdity does link humanity together whether it be the absurdity of laughter or the absurdity of existence, both definitions certainly do apply.