Edited by: Kavya Mittal
“All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.” You aren’t likely to forget such powerful words in the near future.
How about, “All mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service.” Try sleeping comfortably at night, your head filled with the last screams of your dying mattress.
“Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming.” Ponder over the curious framing. Picture it. Mull it over in the middle of the day.
These quotes, chosen from the works of Lewis Carrol, Douglas Adams, and Sir Terry Pratchett respectively, are absurd. They are great works of writing, yet they are inscrutable and extremely bizarre. You really should read them — I’d recommend them to anyone with a sense of humor. In particular, if you would tolerate my enthusiasm for a little longer, you most definitely ought to read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Ah, that most amazingly strange book. When I first picked it up, I thought it must contain some grand subject matter, befitting the long name it is given. Or perhaps, it is some kind of travelog, or a star-gazers guide, or some other serious discussion on fact and reality. However, what I found while reading the book, was that it contained all of these and more, told through the lens of literary insanity. This series narrates adventures of a mild-mannered human and his alien friend, bouncing around a galaxy of inexplicable things, bumping into amorphous life forms and getting into scrapes.
This book is truly absurd. Beautifully, wonderfully absurd, and ever so freeing in its absurdity. This is the art of having a thought and running with it, as far as it can go, until it rounds the planet and doubles back on itself again. Douglas Adams, with this absurdity and strangeness, crafted a story that was so freeing, not bound by the laws of our reality, our storytelling, that it could perform the most wonderful feats possible through the human imagination.
Within such freedom, absurdist fiction finds itself facing existential questions. Writing in this genre often highlights the meaninglessness of actions and situations and the characters’ reflection on this lack of meaning. In the Hitchhiker’s Guide, this theme is glaringly obvious when our main cast of characters find the long-sought Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything to be something quite bizarre and apparently meaningless. To some, this answer is cause for despair — they hunt endlessly for the question that might help them make some sense of it. To others, the answer represents exactly that — nothing, they move on with their lives, with the universe making no more and no less sense than before.
These absurdist stories fundamentally break the rules. If the earth is usually destroyed at the end of the story in a dramatic finale, Douglas Adams will demolish it in the very beginning for the inglorious purpose of building a flyover. If the main character of a story should be brave and strong and capable, Sir Terry Pratchet will make him unwilling and cowardly, and quite happy to always run away. If languages and words were made to read simply and comprehended easily, Lewis Caroll would write in seemingly nonsensical, strange and mysterious words.
Yet despite their strangeness, these works of absurdity do not fly away from understanding — on the contrary, they are remarkably recognizable, and even relatable. The characters are frequently thrown into bizarre circumstances, specifically designed to make no sense, where they must adapt to the strangeness. These are situations to which we can all, at some point in our lives, relate to. Even the strangeness is relatable in its sense of liberation. After all, who doesn’t want to occasionally break away from the tight rules of rationality and sense?
I want to extol my love for this beautiful, wonderful Guide that left me feeling like anything is possible. Suddenly, we weren’t bound by the grimy little planet full of small people obsessed with the “little green pieces of paper.” Now, with Adams’ words there was a world where mattresses ‘flolloped’ in a swamp, a world where ballpoint pens lived their unique lives, and a world where a pitch-black spaceship routinely crashed into the sun for entertainment. With Terry Pratchet’s words, there is a world that is flat like a disc, a world where a sentient, homicidal box runs around on a hundred legs, and a world where an anthropomorphic Death loves small kittens.
These absurdist fictions represent the ability to accept nonsense, and revel in impossibilities. They help us dream in realms beyond rationality, and expand what we think of as ‘reality.’ They give us the freedom and the courage to break boundaries, and empower our whims and ideas. They give weight to even our most bizarre and random thoughts, and show us that they do not have to make sense to be important.