What is reality? And who are we, the people populating it? Both fiction and philosophy are engaged in unraveling this questions, and their answers uncover the absurd nature of our existence, writes Joanna Kavenna. 

Albert Camus wrote: 'A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.’ As soon as you create a character you ask philosophical questions about the nature of the self; as soon as you create a world you ask philosophical questions about the nature of reality.

In an absurdist novel, as in an absurdist philosophical argument, the universe is fundamentally meaningless and any attempt to find a sane and coherent interpretation of events is doomed by the insane and incoherent nature of reality.

In a sense, all fiction is quite absurd, because it is concerned with the inner lives of unreal people. Then again, reality can seem quite absurd as well, because we are told there are rules and indelible facts and then - as we’ve recently seen - everything abruptly changes.

Indeed these sudden, at times painful shifts of reality, are the fundamental concern of the absurdist novel. But philosophy, too, is preoccupied with the question of reality - how we might distinguish reality from unreality, and who ‘we’ are anyway when ‘we’ seek to do this.

As soon as you create a character you ask philosophical questions about the nature of the self; as soon as you create a world you ask philosophical questions about the nature of reality.

Philosopher and fiction writer Georges Bataille, writes: ‘We are discontinuous beings who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure.’ Fiction writer and philosopher, Jorge Luis Borges wonders how we even know if the universe is in a realist or fantastical genre? To Borges, reality has an oneiric quality. Yet this dreamlike reality is all we have; there is no possibility of escape into somewhere more tangible and reasonable. So this is quite absurd and furthermore the feeling that the world is absurd is itself absurd as well!

Reality feels quite unreal, and yet there is nowhere more real than reality, there is no other realm where everything makes perfect sense. People die and vanish forever. This is insane, yet we are told we must accept it as quite normal. Philosophy and absurdist fiction both seek to capture what cannot be captured, to answer questions that cannot be answered such as:

What is this reality that I’m in, that feels so unreal, though it is the only reality I have, and what are the rules of this game?

Also:
Who am ‘I’ anyway, living in this reality/playing this game - at least for a while?

Further philosophical consideration only yields more questions. Who are these people around me? Are they authentic? What do they want? How does this reality feel to them? Are they compelled/afflicted by these same weird questions or are they thinking about something else entirely? We might continue, but the first two questions are immeasurable enough.

They are profound philosophical questions, and also of great practical importance. After all, if we are to play a game, then it is nice to know the rules. Maybe they are nonsensical, like Mornington Crescent or the Caucus Race in Alice in Wonderland, but it would surely help, at least, to be aware of this. If we act without any idea of the overarching meaning of our actions then we might end up acting on behalf of something we don’t agree with at all.