Now there’s a lot of ideas bundled together here which we should start to unpack;

Þ      meaning is being characterized as essentially aristocratic (and there’s no meaning because the old social hierarchies are collapsing);

Þ      it’s conceivable only in retrospect (because it’s no longer with us);

Þ      it’s mysterious (unlike the regimented, standardized industrial world);

Þ      and it’ll take some kind of “Second Coming” to reconstruct a world in which meaning can flourish again.

Sounds a bit like a Tory Party manifesto to me. And the result of this divine intervention will be that the writer can be once more inspired, because language and meaning will have been reconciled (and, presumably, the nobs’ll be back in charge). Let’s flirt with our Meaning Line again:

Meaning-----------------------Significance

Mysterious                                      Mechanistic

Aristocratic                                     Bourgeois

Rural                                           Urban

Paternalism                                     Economics

Nostalgic                                    Contemporary

Feudal                                      Democratic

You’ll notice something rather odd’s happened here. Until now in this book, Meaning, or the left hand side of our line, has been inclined towards the rational, the planned, the interpretable and the expressible. However, take away its perceived value, as Hofmannstahl, Yeats & Heidegger have, and the columns flip over. Suddenly, it’s the product of mysterious social and spiritual forces that can’t be quantified, and it’s Significance that provides a new home for rationality.

So this represents a 180-degree change of direction from what we’re used to. Going right back to Part 1 for a moment, Plato reckoned the irrational was harmful to literature; now here we have a collection of writers and philosophers who reckon the irrational is essential for language to function.

But surely language is all about definitions, I hear you say - and definitions aren’t vague and intangible, or they wouldn’t be defining anything. Surely if you want meaning back you’re going to have to aim for Hemingway’s ‘clean, well-lighted place’ and not, for example, travel to the depths of a murky forest where you can’t see your hand in front of your face.

But that was before Modernism came along.

Modernism wasn’t, as its name might suggest, modern at all - certainly not in outlook. It was only ‘modern’ in the aesthetic solutions it chose to address the problems it identified in the relationship between society and art. Essentially, it was NOSTALGIC, longing for a time (partly real and partly imagined) when language, art, and of course THE ARTIST were all appropriately valued and were invested with a certain cache by society. So here we have an intellectual oxymoron - an essentially conservative ideology, an offshoot of the lapsarian Puritanism we looked at earlier, developing revolutionary aesthetic solutions to fly in the face of what society (wrongly, to the Modernist) imagined was progress.

Modernism was reversing into the future using literary technique as a battering ram. And all because many of its leading lights were worried that the traditional forms of authority they craved were being undermined by a new world order that had been busy emerging since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. This is why TS Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene fled into the arms of the church; why WB Yeats hung out with Lady Augusta Gregory in her stately pile at Coole; and both Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis were pro-Fascist. All these were both physical and spiritual retreats from a grubby world to which, for a period in their lives at least, they took aesthetic exception. It was a world that had too much of the wrong kind of order, of regimented rather than ‘natural’ order, was too egalitarian, was too superficial. It was DISORDER MASQUERADING AS ORDER.  And that’s why the Meaning Line’s gone all weird on us.

While Prospero was never in any real danger of losing the plot, the Modernists were convinced they almost had and would be lucky to escape from modern times with their art intact. Because they felt society, and perhaps more specifically, an unsympathetic culture, had banished them to the margins of the onward-flowing tide of history. They were sitting at the back of the theatre, squinting at the stage and wondering what was going on. Prospero was lonely because his powers set him apart from the rest of humanity. But he had Milan to return to. The Modernists felt a similar alienation, but had nowhere to go. So the American contingent fled to Europe where they thought art was better appreciated because there was a longer and more established  tradition of creating it - only to find out that the spiritual malaise was just as strong there. The whole world had ‘fallen’. [1]

So, unlike Hemingway, who wanted to create something hard and bright and tangible, a high proportion of Modernist art is animated by the mysterious forces of Myth - the ‘natural’ human order of things we looked at in Part 1. Meaning, to the Modernists, was at its most powerful when was least capable of being defined. And in the game of hide and seek, the winner is the player who isn’t found. So the strongest things were the most elusive, and, paradoxically, the most evanescent. Meaning isn’t a physical thing, it’s a quality again. Anyone recognize religion in that definition, by the way?

There’s been so much written on Modernism, I don’t aim to pursue it much further. But it will be worthwhile bringing this section on Disorder as Order up to date.

Basically, things only got worse. Even the Modernist thesis of seeking meaning in myth was rejected as unrealistic or undesirable, particularly following the grim realities of World War Two. To many writers, the world was degenerating into absurdity. So, once again, they had the option of confronting this chaos of meaning, acknowledging it, or going and getting a proper job. After all, most people outside the realms of art hadn’t realized there was a crisis of language. They were still making themselves understood perfectly efficiently in their day-to-day dealings with one another.

The 1950’s in America and to a far lesser extent, Europe, was a time of unbridled optimism in many areas of society. And it’s true that after the gloom of the Modernists, writers did start to cheer up a bit and focus on the RIDICULOUSNESS of modern life rather than its UGLINESS.

       In the paragraph I quoted earlier, Martin Heidegger uses the term ‘absurd’ - a seemingly innocent adjective pressed into use (by critic and BBC Radio Drama chief Martin Esslin in 1962) to describe a movement in the theatre that gave a wider set of reactions to the “de-meaning” of the world than mere nostalgic pessimism.

Boasting a pedigree stretching back to Kierkegaard via Surrealism, Dada and Existentialism, it embraced both tragicomedy and out-and-out slapstick. [2]

And what most of the absurdist dramatists and poets are saying is that the world has no meaning not because meaning (or God, or the aristocracy, or whatever) doesn’t exist,  but because it can’t be put into any kind of order, and therefore given any significance - the ingredients that should make up reality can’t be assembled into reality. The pieces are all there lying around but won’t fit together - and that’s when we can actually find a reason to want to fit them together. And most absurdists, you feel, would like to be able to achieve that, but feel they can’t. So you react to this meaninglessness either by sinking into depression or laughing in the face of it. Which is either heroic or stupid, depending on whether you’re depressed or amused by things that don’t add up.

In what’s become the best-known absurdist drama, ‘Waiting For Godot’ by Samuel Beckett, this tragicomic vision is perfectly encapsulated by the actions of the two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, at the close of the play. The two men have just botched up a suicide attempt in which they try to hang themselves with a piece of rope which snaps. Unfortunately, the only piece of rope they could lay their hands on was previously holding up Estragon’s trousers. And so, with acute existential despair staring them in the face, it’s the cue for those trousers to fall down around the tramp’s ankles. Move over Laurel and Hardy.

Even the final line of the play “let’s go” sees the tramps not moving, since language no longer connects with the reality of their situation. There’s nowhere to go to, and nothing to go for. So they don’t go, even though they’ve expressed their intention to do so. And this scenario may move you to depression or to nervous laughter in the face of the void.

And the daddy of all absurdist novels is Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22’, set during the Second World War and published in 1961. The Catch itself is a seemingly logical premise that Heller describes thus;

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

 
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," [Yossarian] observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

The wonderful circularity that is Catch 22 seems perfectly logical but is simultaneously a betrayal of logic and therefore wholly specious.

In almost every scene in the novel, characters make plausible-sounding assertions fashioned from perfectly good vocabulary which obey the rules of grammar and syntax - but don’t mean anything. When Colonel Cargill tells his men, “You are American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement”, he’s absolutely right, but his meaning is so self-evident, it didn’t need stating in the first place. [3] Listen to a football manager waxing philosophical after a game, and you can hear this sort of thing on Sky Sports practically any day of the week. Yes, we know the game’s all about scoring goals. Perhaps you could have communicated that to your players.

Major Major is similarly challenged in the meaning department: when he tells his assistant Sergeant Towser, ”From now on, I don’t want anyone to come in to see me while I’m here,” Towser’s willingness to obey leads to the following exchange with Appleby;

“About how long will I have to wait before I can go in to see the major?”

“Just until he goes to lunch,” Sergeant Towser replied. “Then you can go right in.”

“But he won’t be there then. Will he?”

“No, sir. Major Major won’t be back in his office until after lunch.”

I could keep going with this all day - but one last memorable scene; Milo Minderbinder the entrepreneurial Quartermaster is paid by the Germans to use US pilots and planes to bomb American troops because the Luftwaffe can’t be bothered to do it. So Milo’s twisted brain tells him he’s successful in his job - procuring money and supplies to keep the US army functional - while actually murdering the soldiers he’s supplying. I believe these days the Germans would simply be described as ‘outsourcing’ their war effort, albeit employing a rather unorthodox service provider to do it  (although one uniquely placed to guarantee its success). In fact, the entire novel is scarily plausible in the way it depicts our ability to reason meaning out of whatever we do, most particularly in the theatres of war and commerce. And the even scarier thing is that Heller’s vision is becoming more relevant with age.

Footnotes:

1. See Malcolm Cowley’s excellent memoir of the 1920’s ‘Exile’s Return’ for the full story of the American expat aesthetes.

2. We’ll be looking at Dada and Surralism later in this section.