"Few authors of the twentieth century were as sensitive to the relationship between human existence and the apparent randomness of life as Franz Kafka and Albert Camus. Both writers not only imagined characters responding to absurd worlds, but they also unveiled the role of human action in creating absurd worlds. This essay expounds on Camus's idea of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus and how, understood within its context and alongside Kafka's , it characterizes the nature of absurdity as being both universal and historically rooted."
"For Camus the existence of the absurd is reliant on a dyadic relationship with the world at one end: "the primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us [...] that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd" (Camus, 1942/1955, p. 14). At its opposite pole stands humanity, for "this world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart" (Camus, 1942/1955, p. 21)."
"Both of these works are put into conversation with Orson Welles's adaptation of (1962), highlighting qualities that the film adds to the text. Employing techniques unique to the cinema versus the novel, the film conveys the experience of absurdity within human society."
The absurd originates in a dyadic relation: a primitive, hostile world opposing humanity's deep longing for clarity. Absurdity appears as the gulf between the world's refusal to be reasonable and human demands for meaning. Twentieth-century historical traumas — wars, genocide, and totalitarian systems — amplify the experience of absurdity and produce cruel, illogical bureaucratic mechanisms. Literary narratives reveal how human action participates in creating absurd systems. Cinematic adaptation uses visual and cinematic techniques unavailable to the novel to viscerally convey how absurdity is experienced within human society.
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