COL49 _Courier's Tragedy_

[calbert at hslboxmaster.com]

Thomas Eckhardt:
> A few thoughts: M.H. Abrams in his "Glossary of Literary Terms" names
> Jarry's Pere Ubu and Kafka as predecessors of the Literature of the
> Absurd and continues:
> 
> "The current movement (...) emerged in France after the horors of
> World War II, as a rebellion against essential beliefs and values both
> of traditional culture and traditional literature. This earlier
> tradition had included the assumption that human beings are fairly
> rational creatures who live in an at least partially-intelligible
> universe, that they are part of an ordered social structure, and that
> they may be capable of heroism and dignity even in defeat. After the
> 1940's, however, there was a widespread tendency, especially in the
> "existential philosophy" of men of letters such as Jean-Paul Sartre
> and Albert Camus, to view a human being as an isolated existent who is
> cast into an alien universe, to conceive the the universe as
> possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning, and to represent
> human life, as it moves from the nothingness whence it came toward the
> nothingness where it must end."
> 
I can't help seeing some kind of parallel with this:

"In between those events, of course, was the Civil War, which like 
all traumatic wars, made the beliefs and assumptions of the pre-
war period seem, to younger people especially, naive, complacent 
and obsolete. Those beliefs and assumptions had not pregvented 
the country from going to war, and they seemed to have done 
nothing to prepare it for the terrible violence the war released. 
Young Cambridge (Mass.,cfa)  intellectuals who lived through the 
war scarcely needed the incitement of Darwin's book to question 
the verities of their parent's generation. They were in the market for 
a mentor who was not associated with the pre-war intellectual 
establishment, and whose views seemed systematic, hardheaded, 
and up to date. Chauncey Wright was their man........

...Philosophers like to deduce dire practical consequences from 
the theories of their opponents, bu in daily life people's 
philosophical beliefs don't have very much to do  with the way they 
actually behave:

"Men conclude in matters affecting their own welfare so much 
better than they can justify rationally, - they are led  by their 
instincts of reverence so surely to the safest known authority, that 
theory becomes in such matters an insignificant affair....To stake 
any serious human concern on the truth of this or that philosophical
theory seems to me, therefore, in the highest degree arrogant and 
absurd, as coming from a confused begging of some philosophical 
question, - from taking for granted that something is important 
practically which is in theory problematical; from taking for granted, 
for example, that our duties would be different, or be more or less 
binding on us according as our faith in a future life should be well or 
ill founded.'

Wright wrote these words in 1867, two years after one of his
brothers died from wounds suffered at the battle of Cold Harbor in 
VIrginia."

THe Socrates of Cambridge, Louis Menand, NYRB 4/26/01

in this instance the response to the "horror" was "pragmatism".....


love,
cfa