Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Judit Ágnes Kádár: A Possible Application of Philosophy in the Study of Recent American Fiction

I hold the view that absurdity is a central category in recent philosophy as well as literature, especially drama and Black Humor Fiction. It appears in different interpretations, however, it always reflects the human need of some sort of help to cope with the chaos, uncertainly and absurdity today. The paradox, sometimes schizophrenic state of our consciousness derives from the choice we are impelled to face with: in Hauck's conclusion the escapes in the fields of philosophy, literature as well as in everyday practicalities are either suicide or unthinking resignation. He claims: "To be fully conscious is to have a sense of absurd. A sense of the absurd follows the recognition that the universe appears to be meaningless (3)." Most writers arrive at the same conclusion stating it directly in their novels or implying it indirectly. In Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman (1966) Sutter asks the same metaphysical question: "Which is the best course for a man: to live like a Swede, vote for the candidate of your choice, be a good fellow, healthy and generous, do a bit of science as if the world made sense, enjoy a beer and a good piece (not bad life!). Or: to live as a Christian among Christians in Alabama? Or to die like an honest man (236)?" Suicide as a rational choice is also mentioned earlier in the text: You are wrong too about the sinfulness of suicide in this age, at least the nurtured possibility of suicide, for the certain availability of death is the very condition of recovering oneself But death is as outlawed now as sin used to be. Only one's own suicide remains to one. My 'suicide' followed the breakdown of the sexual as a mode of reentry from the posture of transcendence. (230) According to Hauck, besides these so-called rational choices, there is one more, namely the Sysiphus-like creation of one's own meaning as the only possibility to make something out of nothing. Though it is ludicrous and full of paradoxes, as one can see it in Black Humor Fiction and the Rebellious and Intermedia Absurd Dramas, it is the only life-affirming force against moral nihilism more and more people live in. Abádi-Nagy considers the veins of humor to be "strategies man devises to cope with that consciousness ("Black Humor versus Satire" 32)." Reading the novels of Vonnegut, Barth, Pynchon, Heller and dramas like Jack Richardson's "Gallows Humour" (1962) or Edward 50