Semillas y plantas de vivero Producción y comercio de semillas

For the first step towards a more coherent understanding of the discourse of the absurd, we can look back temporarily to an early point in the rapid growth of literary criti-cism on the topic through the latter half of the twentieth century. Weinberg (1970) offers a useful formalization of the academic inconsistencies I have been describing in this chapter so far. Following Esslin closely, she distinguishes between those novels which convey existentialist concerns through a conventional narrative structure and those which strive to achieve a more innovative expression of the absurdity of the human condition. In the former, realist category she includes Camus’ L’Étranger (1942) and Sartre’s La Nausée (1938), as well as later works such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Bruce Friedman’s Stern (1963). Weinberg goes on to explain:

These novels are informed by a vision of absurdity and have at their centre a passive, rationalistic, or hopelessly ineffectual victim-hero, dominated by his situation rather than creating or acting to change it. They have a more or

JOANNA GAVINS

less realistic surface, with somewhat surrealistic elements. Realism of detail, rather, underscores the madness of the world, its grotesque comedy.

(Weinberg 1970: 10) Weinberg claims that, by contrast, in novels like Thomas Pynchon’s V (1963), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), and John Barth’s The End of the Road (1958), the same philo-sophical themes that form the focus of the realist texts listed above are made manifest through what she terms a “stylized absurd surface” (Weinberg 1970: 11). She goes on to explain:

The absurd surface exaggerates. Through exaggeration and repetitions; grotes-queries; unique, exotic, bizarre or strange symbols . . . the absurdity found in life is transcribed through surreal descriptions. Special surrealistic situations, too, are created to embody the inexplicable; and somewhat common situa-tions, such as those of war, are exaggerated and distorted to produce a height-ened effect of the sort experienced in dreams.

(Weinberg 1970: 11) Weinberg’s separation of absurd prose fiction into two distinct categories, one realist and one non-realist, is a clear extension of Esslin’s original classification of existential-ist and absurdexistential-ist drama towards an account of prose fictional forms. The core value of this approach is that it allows us to differentiate between literature of the absurd and numerous other twentieth-century texts which may also make use of a non-realist narrative structure. Although many novels of the last one hundred years or so may, for example, display a disrupted chronology, or contain surrealistic elements and situ-ations, not all of them communicate the existentialist unease which, according to Weinberg, must be present in order for a text to be considered truly absurd.

In order to explore the workability of these ideas in more detail, I turn now to a text which might be considered a perfect example of the kind of the combined expression of existential anxiety through stylistic experimentation which Weinberg describes.

Rudolph Wurlitzer’s novel Nog was first published in 1968 and rapidly became a text with cult status for the counter cultural movement at that time. The text is written in the first person, focalized by a narrator who is, at first, nameless. The opening para-graphs are as follows:

Yesterday afternoon, a girl walked by the window and stopped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me. I had been breathing in and out, out and in, calmly, grateful for once to do just that, staring at the waves plopping in, successful at thinking almost nothing, handling easily the three memories I have manufac-tured, when that girl stooped for sea shells.

(Wurlitzer 2009 [1968]: 11)

THE LITERARY ABSURD

Nog remains a fixed homodiegetic narration throughout (in Genette’s [1980] terms), and the reader’s only access to the world of the fiction is through the perspective described in the extract above. This perspective is unremarkable to begin with: it describes a realistic beach scene in, for the most part, conventional simple past tense narrative. Save, perhaps, for the puzzling mention in the extract above of three memo-ries which have been “manufactured,” the opening of Nog is initially unchallenging in its style. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes more and more clear that the narrator of Nog may not be entirely reliable. He does not approach the girl on the beach, but instead goes to a local roadhouse, where he relates his desire to move on from the unnamed Californian town in which he lives and begins to describe his memories of a character called Nog. Nog is described as “one of those semi-religious lunatics you see wandering around the Sierras on bread and tea” (Wurlitzer 2009 [1968]: 12), of Finnish extraction, who the narrator says sold him a giant rubber octo-pus, housed in a water-filled bathysphere, balanced on the back of a truck. Over the course of the first chapter, it becomes apparent that the narrator has been traveling around the countryside for a year, showing the octopus at fairs. Along with the some-what surreal image of the octopus itself, there are a number of other elements of the narrative which suggest that the narrator’s version of events may not be trustworthy.

For example, in the middle of an otherwise straightforward account of a conversation between Nog and the narrator about the octopus, the narrator tells us that Nog has

“a yellow light that had lately been streaming out of his chest from a spot the size of a half dollar” (Wurlitzer 2009 [1968]: 12). Later on in the same scene, the narrator interrupts his detailed description of the octopus itself, saying “Nog is not quite clear enough. I have to invent more. It always comes down to that. I never get chance to rest” (Wurlitzer 2009 [1968]: 13–14).

Despite recurrent incidents such as these, in which the narrator clearly points to the fabricated nature of his account, the fixed focalization means that the reader must persevere with his version of events in order to form an understanding of the narrative world. Over the course of the rest of the opening chapter, the narrator’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic as he goes on to describe a second encounter with the girl on the beach, who takes him to a party where there is a storm and where, yet more bizarrely, he meets an old colonel attempting to build a sea wall from drift-wood to keep back the encroaching tide. Nog’s narrator is the epitome of Weinberg’s

“hopelessly ineffectual victim-hero” throughout these pages, as he stumbles without apparent motivation from one disorienting episode to another: he aids the colonel’s Sisyphean quest for a while; he stumbles back to the party and misunderstands the hospitality of the female host, Sarah, and undresses completely in front of her; he fills a bath with a selection of drugs from a medicine cabinet and mixes them with water, which he says is “a very reviving thing to do” (Wurlitzer 2009 [1968]: 21); he gets into Sarah’s bed and goes to sleep; he is woken by Sarah’s boyfriend, with whom he plays table tennis for a while before flinging a basket of table-tennis balls at him and tipping over the table, all without explanation. The first chapter of Nog closes with the following paragraph:

JOANNA GAVINS

What I should have done was get rid of the octopus, what I have been trying to do is get rid of the octopus, what I am beginning just now to remember is that I did get rid of the octopus. I see it now for the first time. I either took it back to the party and put it in the bathtub or danced with it on the beach.

No, I did bring it back to the beach but not to dance with. I took off my terry cloth bathrobe and ran down to the truck and got the octopus out of the bathysphere, its tentacles waving all over me. Struggling in the rain and wind, I dragged it back and pulled it up on the sea wall. Such a spectacle gave the colonel enough of a jolt to finish the sea wall. Then together we threw it in the sea, and I went home and went to bed. It was something like that, I can remember something like that, a storm, a party and then the octopus. There was an octopus, although I know deep down that the octopus is still up on blocks. I know too that nothing happened and I haven’t traveled with the octopus. But I shall move on anyway, perhaps to New York. I remember great things about New York.

(Wurlitzer 2009 [1968]: 25) The key stylistic feature through which the narrator’s bewilderment and general unre-liability is expressed here is the use of modality. The stability of key deictic elements (e.g. the octopus) and story events (e.g. building the sea wall) is undermined through the use of modalization. Specifically, there is an abundance of epistemic modality, the overall discourse function of which is to express degrees of knowledge and belief, rang-ing from absolute certainty to complete lack of confidence. In Nog, the narrator desta-bilizes unmodalized propositions which have preceded this paragraph as he reveals his uncertainty through the repetition of modal verbs such as “I remember” in these clos-ing lines. Where earlier in the chapter unmodalized forms predominated, such as “I bought the octopus, and for a year I traveled through the country with it” (2009: 13), from here on, with increasing regularity through the rest of the novel, contradictory degrees of belief are expressed: “what I am beginning just now to remember is that I did get rid of the octopus” (2009: 25).

Simpson (1993) has identified an identical narrative style at work in another clas-sic absurd text, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1955). Molloy’s unreliability as a narrator is similarly communicated through fluctuating and conflicting modalization, at some points stating definite commitment to the truth of particular propositions, often swiftly followed by expressions of confusion and doubt (see also Gavins 2000, 2003, and 2010 for analyses of the absurd effects of modalization in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Police-man [1967], Donald Barthelme’s Snow White [1967], and EmPolice-manuel Carrère’s [1998]

The Mustache respectively). The narrator of Nog makes recurrent use of perception modality in particular, a type of epistemic modality referring to the senses (for exam-ple, “I see it now for the first time” [Wurlitzer 2009: 25]). He also emphasizes the instability of his narrative through the creation of multiple hypothetical alternatives, such as “I either took it back to the party and put it in the bathtub or danced with it on the beach” (2009: 25). Although he often eventually assigns reality to one of the

THE LITERARY ABSURD

alternatives he constructs (e.g. “No, I did bring it back to the beach but not to dance with” [2009: 25]), the faltering modality in the rest of the text once again undermines the dependability of this commitment.

The patterns of modalization in Nog are by no means the only stylistic feature through which the novel’s absurdity is communicated. The narrative structures iden-tified above are offered simply as typical examples of elements of the text’s “stylized absurd surface” (Weinberg 1970: 11). The experimentalism of the novel increases as the story progresses, with disrupted chronology, a constantly shifting use of tense, and the construction of impossible spatial deixis all making frequent appearances through-out the rest of the book. It gradually emerges that the narrator is Nog (although this only becomes clear through other characters’ references to him, rather than through any helpful information he provides), as he continues his hapless journey from one absurd situation to another – through drug abuse, free love, and even murder – never providing a dependable explanation of his actions or their consequences.

Nog, then, can be seen to occupy a position towards one extreme of a cline of absurd experimentalism. At the other end of the spectrum, the absurd begins to blend with existentialism, as the “realistic surface” starts to dominate over more “surrealistic ele-ments” (Weinberg 1970: 10). In these texts, the exploration of common philosophical themes through conventional narrative forms takes precedence over linguistic innova-tion. Whether or not the gradual nature of this blend and the inevitable fuzzy bound-aries it creates between literary categories causes insurmountable critical problems depends on the extent to which one is determined to adhere to Esslin’s (and Wein-berg’s) segregation of the two phenomena. It would certainly seem that the majority of non-professional readers in the twenty-first century have no such difficulties and are often willing to accept and apply the labels “absurd” and “existential” interchangeably.

This is likely due, in part at least, to the fact that many of the same stylistic features outlined in experimental literature of the absurd can also be found, albeit in a “weak-ened” form, in the sorts of realist texts Weinberg discusses. Consider, for example, this extract from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which Weinberg uses as a typical example of a text containing “realism of detail” (1970: 10):

When I finally got down off the radiator and went out to the hat-check room, I was crying and all. I don’t know why, but I was. I guess it was because I was feeling so damn depressed and lonesome. Then, when I went out to the checkroom, I couldn’t find my goddam check. The hat-check girl was very nice about it, though. She gave me my coat anyway. And my “Little Shirley Beans” record – I still had it with me and all. I gave her a buck for being so nice, but she wouldn’t take it. She kept telling me to go home and go to bed. I sort of tried to make a date with her for when she got through working, but she wouldn’t do it . . . I didn’t feel too drunk any more when I went outside, but it was getting very cold out again, and my teeth started chattering like hell.

I couldn’t make them stop. I walked over to Madison Avenue and started to wait around for a bus because I didn’t have hardly any money left and I had

JOANNA GAVINS

to start economizing on cabs and all. But I didn’t feel like getting on a damn bus. And besides, I didn’t even know where I was supposed to go. So what I did, I started walking over to the park. I figured I’d go by that little lake and see what the hell the ducks were doing, see if they were around or not, I still didn’t know if they were around or not. It wasn’t far over to the park, and I didn’t have any place else special to go to – I didn’t even know where I was going to sleep yet – so I went.

(Salinger 1951: 153) Like Nog, Salinger’s text has a fixed homodiegetic narration throughout. Although there are countless existential and absurd novels which do not, the narrators of those which do have a greatly increased chance of exhibiting some form of unreliability.

Readers of these kinds of text, as I have already stated above, have only one point of access to the world of the novel and are forced to view events through this perspec-tive. Holden Caulfield is one of the most notoriously challenging first-person focal-izers in literary history and, while his account may not display temporal, spatial, and conceptual disruption to the extent that has been identified in Nog, it nevertheless employs other linguistic techniques similarly to destabilize the dependability of the narrative. Note, for example, in the extract above how the use of modality presents a picture of uncertainty once again. Holden comments, “I was crying and all. I don’t know why, but I was. I guess it was because I was feeling so damn depressed and lone-some,” expressing a relatively weak epistemic commitment to his own interpretation of events. Particularly towards the end of the extract, Holden talks more and more about what he does not know and is unsure of (“I didn’t even know where I was sup-posed to go . . . I still didn’t know if they were around or not . . . I didn’t even know where I was going to sleep”). He also has a habit of trying to play down the significance of certain actions and events throughout The Catcher in the Rye, e.g. “I sort of tried to make a date with her for when she got through working, but she wouldn’t do it.” Once again, this serves only to exaggerate the highly subjective nature of Holden’s focaliza-tion, further undermining his reliability as the filter through which the reader must witness the textual world.