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Absurd Novels and the Human Predicament
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13702 |
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EDITORIAL
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8 / 1988 |
1,280 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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The Ark Sakura by Kobo Abe is the subject of THE WORLD & I's book excerpt and commentary this month. There can be little doubt that Abe is both a popular and powerful writer whose absurdist novels appeal to the imagination. Yet why do such absurd plots capture our attention as fully and as forcefully as they do?
Absurdist, even surrealist, novels have a distinguished history of critical success. Franz Kafka's The Trial, The Castle, and The Metamorphosis marked the modern beginnings of the genre. The plays of Samuel Beckett heralded another stage in the absurdist literature. Abe, still an active novelist, occupies an important place in the absurdist pantheon.
We are often told that the reader can bring his own meaning to absurdist novels. For instance, some find in The Trial a foreshadowing of Nazi justice, in which guilt is not related to an offense but simply is a fact of life for the unlucky accused. But it is not unusual that a work of art can be interpreted in more than one way. Surely there are numerous competing interpretations of Hamlet. The role of the reader in interpretation can hardly be the distinguishing feature of the absurdist novel, even though there are fewer constraints on interpretation in such works. Moreover, the central image of The Ark Sakura--an ark that can go nowhere and escape nothing--an escape from nuclear holocaust, is merely the dressing for whatever message or lack of message the novel portends.
The Ark Sakura is clearly realistic in its descriptive detail. Consider Abe's detailed treatment of the eupcaccia. Yet we cannot find the essence of the genre in its endless realistic detail. Hardy and Balzac were realists who did not deal with the absurd. Individual idiosyncracies might crop up in their works, but otherwise the plots had strong similarities to everyday life.
The core of the absurdist novel is the absence of a center in the main characters. If Kafka's protagonist had no center, no sense of identity, then of course he might turn into an insect, or be guilty for no reason. If there is no meaning to life, then of course the hero might find mysterious significance in external objects, for these may be the talismans that bring significance to whatever lacks it. How could there be a criterion of relevance if there is no stable self to which it can be related? The fear of nuclear holocaust in The Ark Sakura--and its characters' urge to escape it--is unrelated to context and merely provides an external setting to link its individual scenes. It doesn't provide a setting for the development either of character or theme.
Literature that is not absurd deals either with stable selves or with understandable social situations. By a stable self I do not mean a self without inner conflict but a self that can find understandable grounds for alternative choices. Sophocles' tragedy Antigone deals with the conflict between old family-centered values and new state-centered values. This creates a dilemma for Antigone, but she is a real person who understands the character of the choices. The heroes (or more properly, antiheroes) of absurdist literature, however, have no grounds for choice or for relationships, although they sometimes seek erratically to make personal connections or to escape vague dangers. Hence, they look for them in external signs. Or they lose their way in the world. Or they wind up in trash
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