Marvelous versus the Absurd

Daniel Barbiero
February 2023

The Absurd World

In his famous review of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of the absurdity of the world as “an original datum” consisting in, among other things, “the unintelligibility of the real.” That “original datum” arises from the often perverse resistance of the real as it defies our aims, shows itself to be unpredictable when least expected or desired, and refuses to cooperate with us at critical moments in our lives. It is seemingly on account of a systematic irrationality built into the world that circumstances align to make our plans go awry; thus it’s apparently by a perverse logic beyond our own that a crucial piece of equipment or bit of information inexplicably malfunctions, misleads, or is simply missing; and by an adverse twist of chance that we fail to be in the right place at the right time. These failures and frustrations may be taken as an index of the limits of the world’s knowability and its capacity to disclose itself to us, due as much to our cognitive or imaginative limitations as it is to the stubborn indifference with which the real confronts us. The real, as the uncontrollable resistant, exposes the limits of what we can effect or achieve in any given situation; it reveals the incompleteness and uncertainties of what we can know. To confront the resistance of the real in the breakdown or disappointments of a situation is to confront the role of the unforeseen—and unforeseeable—as a potential eruption disturbing the course of any undertaking and rendering it absurd.

The absurd above all is an intuition about the nature of the world specifically when considered in its relationship to human being. It is a relationship that manifests itself most noticeably through the structures of meaning associated with purposive action and particularly in the quintessential human drive to find meaning in oneself and one’s surroundings. Consequently, the intuition of the world’s absurdity isn’t necessarily the intuition of an absence of meaning in the world but of a meaning that cannot be grasped. The absurd world may in fact be meaningful, but it is a meaning that is alien or concealed—it either doesn’t conform to our own ways of making sense of things or is at least potentially intelligible but nevertheless too occult to be known. The absurd world is either irrational or opaque, but not necessarily empty.

When did the world become absurd? An answer that immediately comes to mind is that was in the late 19th century, with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the nihilism he saw in an increasingly secular, modern Europe. The idea of the world’s absurdity became a commonplace in the mid-twentieth-century when two world wars and other forms of state-sponsored mass murder, epitomized in the development and use of the atomic bomb, seemed to expose the arbitrariness and senselessness at the heart of human existence—an arbitrariness that threatened imminent annihilation, given the means to achieve it.

But the problem of the absurd—or rather the recognition that the existence of human being within the larger universe might be a problem, and that this problem might show up as a gap between the human need to impose an intelligible order on the world and the world itself, is an intuition that has haunted Western thought from its beginnings in the classical past. The Greek tragic poets, for example, often portrayed a universe notable for the mismatch between human intention and rationality on the one hand, and the unfathomable logic of the extra-human world on the other. Their portrayal of the gods’ unpredictability and capricious interventions in human affairs is a model of the absurdity that erupts through the discontinuity dividing human designs from an uncooperative and seemingly adversarial environment. Their intuition of the absurd could also take the form of a strenuously avoided fate nevertheless befalling the hero, as in the Oedipus cycle, or the dilemma that arises when natural (or divine) law and human law come into ruinous conflict. The Sophistic enlightenment of the fifth century articulated the problem of the absurd in a more directly philosophical form. Antiphon’s treatise Truth conceived of the natural universe (physis) as the product of a chain of causation absent intentional design or telos—a universe that, as Mauro Bonazzi argues, was neutral and lacking in any sense on which humans could base their choices and actions. Antiphon’s universe was an indifferent, mechanistic universe that neither conformed to nor offered guidance for human projects and purposes, and took no account of human needs and desires—it was a mute, gratuitous environment of pure contingency offering no answers or hints of an ultimate purpose, instead remaining unresponsive to moral concerns and values. Paradoxically, Protagoras’ famous “man is the measure of all things,” rather than reducing the world to a relativized adjunct to human projects, may be seen as laying the groundwork for the absurd to the extent that it raises the possibility of things not measuring up—of the human and extra-human world as incommensurable. Gorgias’ skeptical treatise On Non-Being argued not only that many things do not measure, but that they cannot measure up—that even if language could say something about the world, the world itself would defy the logic of language and hence would remain unknowable. Gorgias may be seen as reacting to Parmenides’ attempt to make sense of the world through a logos that, based more on the necessity of its internal logic than on observable facts, explained the multiplicity and perishability of what we see around us as only the misleading surface of a unitary and eternal underlying Being. Parmenides’ is an early expression of the metaphysical urge to ground the instability of things in a stable, transcendent principle; it is through the gap that necessarily opens up between his metaphysical vision—his logos—and the world it describes inadvertently allows the absurd to arise.

The absurd isn’t the invention of modern thought, then, and while it arguably is the inevitable inheritance of Western metaphysics, that may not be the end of it. Rather than consigning the absurd to a historical era or culture, it might be better to think of it as a structural part of human existence. The absurd begins with the human capacity to impose order on physis through logos—through language and discourse, which conceptualize the extra-linguistic world in partial and seemingly arbitrary ways. The conceptual order and ontological divisions that language facilitates don’t necessarily carve the world up at its natural joints but rather categorize and structure it in ways that correspond to our own needs and desires—and possibly to basic categories native to the human mind–rather than to the way it is as such. The order that logos imposes on the world isn’t necessarily intrinsic to the world but instead is a pragmatic construct to the extent that it is a tool or instrumentality by which we make our way through the world in relation to our projects and other directed activities. The world that is disclosed through logos is our world, the world as we attempt to make it intelligible and human. Logos reflects the logic of the human, not of the world itself. The absurd is the intuition that the world—physis—evades human logos, or the order we attempt to impose on it. The intuition of the absurd is the sense that there is an irreducible gap between between it and us and that something of it will always escape—and confound—us.

The Marvelous World

Counterposed against the absurd world is the world of the marvelous. Like the absurd, the marvelous has a long history that may well go back as far as the first time a human felt something like awe or astonishment in the face of anomalous or unsettling events, or imagined the world as animate and pervaded by invisible forces. In modern times the most forceful advocates of the marvelous—in a sense, its rediscoverers—were the Surrealists. What is remarkable about their their notion of the marvelous, particularly as articulated by André Breton over the course of many works of poetry and prose, is how it takes the basic intuition of the absurd and transposes it into a different key—from minor to major—and inverts it.

Although Breton wrote frequently about the marvelous, he never did so in a systematic way. Similarly, the Surrealist Pierre Mabille’s book-length study of the marvelous was written in a style largely made up of impressions and suggestions. Other Surrealists, such as Louis Aragon, addressed the marvelous in a poetic manner. What we can distill from these various accounts in multiple discursive and rhetorical modes is the basic idea that for the Surrealists, the marvelous is the everyday world transformed into the site of portentous meaning. The marvelous, in other words, is the revelation of the surreality latent in what we ordinarily take to be reality. Not a superseding or transcendent reality but a reality immanent in reality, a marvelous world-within-the-world. As André Breton was careful to point out in “Surrealism and Painting,” the surreality at the heart of reality had to be understood as “neither superior nor exterior to” the reality we move within in our ordinary mode of being in the world; rather, it was to be taken as immanent within it and something to be divined.

Breton often characterized the ordinary mode of being as something narrowly bound by a practical, instrumental rationality that blinds us to the surprising meanings things and circumstances may hold for us, and to the secret affinities these things may have for us and for each other. The world could thus reveal itself as marvelous only when, as Breton put it in “Marvelous versus Mystery,” “the reins of common sense are dropped” and relationships prohibited by plain reason become admissible and hence apparent. Or, as Louis Aragon claimed in Paris Peasant, “the marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.” This is the marvelous as event, as a happening that, by virtue of its peculiar logic, both instigates and emerges from a break in reality and reveals an extraordinary meaning within the ordinary world. The marvelous thus understood is cause, correlate, and effect of the rupture of our ordinary mode of being in the world.

The Marvelous as Rupture within the Real

The idea that the marvelous consists in the “eruption of contradiction within the real” recalls Pierre Reverdy’s proto-definition of the surrealist image as the joining of two distant realities, if we think of the relationship between those realities as consisting in a contradiction. That ordinarily distant realities should come together and illuminate each other runs against—contradicts—the logic of the everyday and substitutes for it the logic of the marvelous: of the imagination, the dream, and the unconscious. The order that the marvelous reveals is contrary to what we think of as the usual order of things; that the mutually alien should make a certain kind of sense when seen through each other goes against the logic of ordinary sense, but is made possible by the alogical logic of the marvelous. This alogical logic ruptures the relationships that define the real as we usually know it; as Ferdinand Alquié expressed it in his study of the philosophy of surrealism, it “comes ceaselessly to break the framework of the given, to surpass it, to evoke the inaccessible to which the real must, nevertheless, be compared.”

The rupture out of which the marvelous emerges represents something like an abyss opening up in the logic of everyday experience—an abyss in which one can, through an alogical leap of intuition, grasp an unexpected meaning speaking to a deeply personal concern or dilemma, a meaning through which that concern can be addressed or that dilemma resolved. The rupture with the real, in other words, is the kernel out of which the marvelous develops; it is the condition for the possibility of the marvelous’ self-disclosure.*

*[What we might call the abyssal or alogical logic of the marvelous raises the question of whether or not the marvelous is ultimately something beyond or resistant to complete subsumption in the generalizations or definitional structures attendant to representation. It certainly would seem to be what Robert Baker, in his fascinating study of the tradition of “the extravagant” in post-Romantic writing, has described as one of “those forces of otherness that disrupt conventional modes of representation.” But this is a matter to be explored at another time.]

The Marvelous as Atopos

That the contradiction at the heart of the marvelous’ appearance is abyssal means that it brings on a kind of displacement of oneself within one’s world. The marvelous is, in other words, “atopos.” This isn’t a term Breton or the other Surrealists used, but it does fit the content of the experience of the marvelous as they described it. In its literal meaning, the adjective “atopos” refers to being out of place. By a metaphorical extension from the domain of the physical to the domain of the psychological, it means strange, unusual, or out of the ordinary. The marvelous is atopos. It signals an interruption of one’s relationship to the place one normally occupies in the world. Although “place” is used here in a figurative sense, certain physical places may be conducive to the experience of the out-of-placeness that corresponds to the marvelous. Certainly this was the case for the early Surrealists, who pursued the marvelous in some of Paris’ seedier environs—as Paris Peasant attests. This is because the strangeness of the marvelous, its being atopos, is a strangeness provoked by the encounter with the unexpected, the ordinary seen under a different, which is to say extraordinary, aspect, which strange or affectively charged places may facilitate. The experience of this peculiar variety of estrangement is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the marvelous to reveal itself. It is simply the rupture through which the marvelous may show itself.

The sense of atopos as a particular kind of strangeness germane to the displacing experience of the marvelous is described by Plato in the Parmenides, when the dialogue’s title character discusses the logical possibilities associated with an entity undergoing change. Parmenides describes a moment in the entity’s metamorphosis that is atopos—strange, but in a particular way. It is an interstitial moment in which the entity is out of place in relation to itself, displaced from the place it formerly occupied but not yet in a new place through which it can define itself in terms of what it is and what it is not, because it is neither what it is, in the mode of having been it, nor what it is not, in the mode of being some other determinate thing than what it initially was. This strange moment is an opening, an interruption in the entity’s mode of being and hence represents a moment of pure possibility.

The marvelous as conceived of by Surrealism is atopos—strange and estranging, and giving rise to a feeling of being out of place. Its logic consists in an estrangement from the logic of the everyday. To that extent, it feels very much like the absurd. And yet there is a crucial difference between them having to do with the meaning of that estrangement.

Objective Chance and the Intelligibility of the World

When we see the world as absurd, chance and accidental events are liable to impress us as being irrational and meaningless, and proof of the world’s unintelligibility in general. By contrast, to see the alogicality of the world as marvelous rather than absurd is to assume that it constitutes a structure of meaning that may be relevant to us, even if it at first is hidden from us. We can uncover it or apprehend it as it reveals itself through what Breton called “objective chance”—a seeming coincidence in which “natural necessity,” or what objectively must be, meets “human necessity,” or the needs and desires that drive us. Breton held that this meeting occurs when our unconscious (somehow) directs us to a situation—an encounter with a person or object, for example—that serendipitously pulls together seemingly unconnected or contradictory elements whose conjunction, when properly interpreted, discloses a heretofore hidden significance or meaning that provides the key to obtaining what it is that we need or desire. Breton liked to describe the process in terms of problems and solutions: the solution to an unresolved problem might manifest itself in an unlikely place or encounter at that moment when suddenly everything “makes sense.” As such, objective chance manifests itself as one of the guises the marvelous is liable to take.

The meaning revealed by objective chance isn’t meaning in an absolute sense but rather meaning as significance, which is to say, meaning in relation to something of concern to oneself. Additionally, it is in a literal sense something occult—hidden or concealed, but nevertheless there. On this point the world as Surrealism takes it and the absurd both converge and diverge. In the absurd world hidden meaning remains hidden and out of reach of human knowability. In the Surrealist world hidden meaning may reveal itself and make itself knowable. This difference between the two worlds manifests itself particularly in the phenomenon of chance. Whereas in the absurd world chance is a symptom of the unknowability of the real, for Surrealism chance, as objective chance, on the contrary is revelatory of the knowability of the real—of its significance rather than its indifference. It is in the world’s ultimate knowability that natural necessity and human necessity—that physis and logos—are liable to be reconciled. The world as marvelous, as revealed through objective chance, is a world full of meaning conveyed by signs—signs that are not, to be sure, self-interpreting, but that must be deciphered and taken to heart. It is a world in which one can read one’s fate in the otherwise apparently random coincidence and can thereby break the identification of chance with the unintelligibility of the real.

The Marvelous as Ontological

As the case of objective chance suggestions, the marvelous as atopos is not just the marvelous as strangeness, but is the marvelous as my strangeness. This sense of strangeness is a sense of being out of place in one’s own place, of experiencing a self-displacement when one’s experience of the everyday breaks down. The kind of strangeness involved is concrete and properly existential precisely to the extent that it is specifically mine, and a sense that only I can experience because it is a sense that consists in my own being displaced from myself, on the basis of a confrontation with an object, person, or situation that holds an unexpected significance for a concern that is mine alone. (Think here of Aragon’s assertion in Paris Peasant that the “fantastic, the beyond, dream, survival, paradise, hell, poetry, [are] so many words signifying the concrete.” This obviously is a rhetorical flourish, but it does carry an existential truth when these things are understood to be experienced by the concrete individual.) This confrontation, in its strangeness, is more than an interruption in reality; it is an interruption of my mode of being. Which makes it, in effect, an ontological interruption which forces me to change the practical or unthematized interpretive stance of my everyday being-in-the-world and to take up a new one in its place. I am in effect disabused of the everyday logic with which I encounter the world and am laid open to the possibility of confronting the marvelous in its place. I am compelled, in other words, to take a different, extraordinary interpretive stance toward the world. This extraordinary stance is one of openness or availability, a quasi-passive receptiveness to the otherwise easily overlooked signs through which the marvelous makes itself known. Quoting a passage from his work Communicating Vessels, Breton described this state to interviewer André Parinaud as

the constant exchange in thought that must exist between the exterior and interior worlds, an exchange that requires the continuous interpenetration of the activity of waking and sleeping.

As hinted just above, the interpretive stance of availability Breton describes here is a fundamentally ontological stance, although this is not a term he used. But it does count as ontological by virtue of the assumption that the marvelous reveals its meaning when the contradiction through which it is apprehended is interpreted in an existential manner specific to the person to whom it is revealed–ontologically, rather than logically. (In any event, a logical interpretation would seem to be impossible given the alogical nature of the appearance of the marvelous.) An ontological interpretation is an interpretation that grasps and makes sense of the object or situation to be interpreted within the framework of the interpreter’s mode of being—that is, of his or her way of projecting him- or herself into the world on the existential basis of his or her projects and concerns, desires and affects, personal history and so forth, and hence of understanding the world in its significance relative to that existential basis. When we grasp the world ontologically we grasp it as the site of a network of meanings bearing specifically on what matters to us, and interpret its meanings accordingly. It is only in light of such an interpretation that one can make oneself available to the eruption of the marvelous and the portentous significance it holds.

“A Stunning Revenge on All Things”

The stance of availability that the marvelous, in its strangeness and need to be divined, requires is one that, in words Breton used in describing the goal of Surrealism in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, enables “imagination to take a stunning revenge on all things.” To see the meaning in things and events that ordinarily seem meaningless or contradictory is to have the ultimate revenge on them, through the imagination. As an instrument of interpretation imagination negates at the same time that it affirms: it negates what is or what apparently is in favor of what might be—or what actually is, if only it could be seen. If we recall the observation that the idea of the marvelous as a contradiction within the real is consistent with the Surrealist notion of the image, we can think of the marvelous as a kind of image reflected back to the imagination, like an echo bouncing off of the hard surface of the exterior world.

The interpretive stance that reveals the marvelous uncovers a particular kind of imaginative meaning, the meaning proper to a world whose apparent absurdity harbors a meaning despite its apparent meaninglessness. If the absurd world is the world as atopos—the world as a place in which one is, by definition, displaced—then the world as atopos is, to the interpretive stance that imagination allows us to wield, the world as latently meaningful. To read the absurd world this way is, to use Breton’s terms, to read human necessity in natural necessity, and vice versa. It is to find physis and logos inextricably intertwined. To the properly imaginative logic, then, the absurd is only the first stage through which meaning makes itself available to us. To grasp the world imaginatively is to deny its apparent meaninglessness and to find significance where significance otherwise would be appear to be absent. And what is that if not meeting the absurd on its own terms and defeating it?

References:
Ferdinand Alquié, The Philosophy of Surrealism, tr. Bernard Waldrop (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1965). Quote on p. 124.
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994). Quotes on p. 204 and p. 205, respectively.
Robert Baker, The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy (Notre Dame IN: U of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Quote on p. 33.
Maurizio Bonazzi, I Sofisti (Rome: Carocci Editore, 2010).
André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, tr. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993). Quote on p. 134.
___________, “Marvelous versus Mystery,” in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier & Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1995). Quote on p. 4.
___________, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver & Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1972). Quote on p. 174.
___________, “Surrealism and Painting,” in Surrealism and Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row Icon Editions, 1972). Quote on p. 46.
Plato, Parmenides, in Plato IV: Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias (Loeb Classical Library No. 167) tr. H.N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1926).

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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).

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