Futility in 20th Century Novels

Looking at the course as a whole, one of the major themes that has cropped up in almost all of the books we've read has been the futility of life, or the meaninglessness of the main characters' actions. This is something that's always been a common theme in literature, even back to things like Oedipus Rex or the original myth of Sisyphus. However, it seems like it's an idea that's gotten more prevalent within the last century or so, and almost all of the books we've read touch on it to some extent.

The most obvious place to start is with The Stranger, which is basically an entire book about the futility of most of the things people worry about on a day to day basis. While reading essays for my research paper I came across a lot of information about Camus that really illustrated his opinions on everyday life. One of the more interesting ideas of his that doesn't shine through all that much in the novel is that "the quantity of life is more important than the quality of life." At first this seems contradictory with the scene in which Meursault says that "it doesn't matter much whether you die at thirty or seventy," but you can see how it fits with other parts of the novel. When Meursault talks about how it doesn't matter the way he lived his life, and that it would have been no different had he lived his life one way or the other, he is essentially saying that the way you live your life doesn't matter; life is good no matter what. As he tells the chaplain, every living person is "privileged," because they are given a short time in which they are still alive, even if they are all "condemned" to death. Looking at things that way can help explain a lot of why Meursault acts the way he does; if there's no point to any action and just being alive is more important than anything you do while you are, then it makes a lot of sense to just sit in bed smoking cigarettes and eating chocolate, since you can just do whatever feels good in the moment.

This idea of futility, that it doesn't matter what you do so you might as well just do what you want, isn't one that's shared by most of the other authors we've looked at so far. The closest one is probably Nicholson Baker's philosophy in The Mezzanine, but that novel's tone and scope are both very very different than The Stranger's. Baker does seem to believe that the enjoying yourself is more important than acting in the way people might expect, and Howie's quest seems specifically selected to be the most futile imaginable (when the shoelaces inevitable break again in a couple years, he'll buy new ones from the same job and the escalator he takes upstairs from CVS will still be running the exact same way as it always has been). Both novels also revel in the small, personal moments where the main characters take some minor pleasure in something they don't outright recognize is insignificant, but which the audience easily can, such as Meursault's salt advertisement or any of Howie's footnotes.

A parallel character trait can be found in Gregor Samsa, who keeps the picture of a woman in a fur boa on his wall, but in that case it means something quite different. Kafka definitely believed in the futility of human endeavor, but he's different from Baker and Camus in that he doesn't see anything in the struggle to enjoy. He just turns Samsa into a bug to make his life go from insignificant in one way to insignificant in another, and you get the feeling that no one else is better off. Kafka also believes it doesn't really matter what you do, but he means for that truth to manifest itself as a grinding depression, whereas Camus wants it to be an assurance that you can act how you want to act, at least without bothering others.

The last novel I want to look at is possibly the most interesting in this case: Song of Solomon (although Mrs. Dalloway and Wide Sargasso Sea could also both be good). In Song of Solomon, people take personal events very seriously -- even events that happened 30 years before the novel opens. In fact, when Milkman calls everyone around him "crazy," that's really what he means: people take things that don't matter (in his opinion) way, way too seriously. Guitar even calls him out on not caring about racial issues and he barely responds. Instead, Milkman cares about doing what makes him feel good, even if that means stepping on his family and friends for years to get his way, as Lena informs him. However, this ends up backfiring for him: he decides that what will feel good is to leave home and his father's shadow, which requires money, which requires him finding the gold. However, his quest to find the gold ends up aging him from his old, adolescent self, and changing him more and more into Macon Dead II, as he does his father's bidding, operates from the same place as his father (greed), and more importantly, assumes his father's history, which he never had any interest in before coming there. Therefore, when Milkman goes to unreasonable lengths to accomplish something (break away from his dad), he ends up accomplishing the opposite (he becomes his dad). This theme, of people getting too passionate about things and causing the opposite to occur, happens over and over again in Song of Solomon. We see it with Ruth's love powder, with Milkman's attempt to get rid of Hagar and with her attempts to kill him, with Macon's telling his son to stay away from Pilate, and so on. This is a different kind of futility than the kind we see in the other novels from this class, in that people do have the power to change things -- however, they don't have the power to control exactly how things are going to change.

Milkman as a passive narrator

Today in class we were talking about how Milkman seems like more of a receptacle for other people's stories than an agent in his own story, which is somewhat unusual for the main character of a novel. From the very start of his life, Milkman was conceived more as an idea of something that Ruth thought might help her be happy: "Her son had never been a person to her, a separate real person. He had always been a passion"  (131), meant to provide a bond between Ruth and her husband. He is Ruth's "one aggressive act brought to royal completion" (133). Even after his birth, Milkman continues to be more important because of what he represents than who he is. This is even reflected in his nickname, which represents someone who comes from a vaguely depraved and potentially incestuous household -- a possibility which has a lot of importance later in the book.

Milkman himself seems to slowly realize this over the course of the book. Early on, when he's 12, he wants to hear stories, especially about Pilate. He begs his father to tell him why he considers her a "snake," and is upset when his father reminisces about his childhood and just says that Milkman has to trust him that she's a snake, without providing any concrete details. By the time he's 22, and presumably used to people telling him stories about their lives, since that's about all that ever happens to him, his opinions have changed. When his father explains, in explicit detail, why he hits Ruth, Milkman doesn't want to hear about it. He even says on page 78 that "[i]f he wanted me to lay off... why didn't he just say that?... But no. He comes to me with some way-out tale about how come and why." By this time in his life, Milkman prefers to hear the simple answer and doesn't want to get the reasons for why he is expected to behave a certain way.

Later on, at 31, Milkman has developed as a character in only one respect: now he doesn't just dislike hearing about other people's life stories, he actively resents it. He realizes that people treat him as a "garbage pail for the actions and hatreds of other people." That's basically what he is right from his birth: someone who represents something to everyone, but who doesn't actually have much of a personality himself. Everyone wants to lecture him about their lives or their ideas because he fits so well into all of it without even trying. Even to his best friend Guitar he's the perfect example of the what's wrong with middle class black people. The only people who seem to care about him as a person are Pilate (who may still have other reasons to care about him considering the amount of attention she pays to his life) and Hagar, who is for whatever reason completely in love with him. You could even argue that Hagar just values him as the idea of an attractive, respectable, and available future husband at an age where (as we see with Corinthians) that's getting harder and harder for her to find.

By the end of Part I, it seems like Milkman is starting to take things a little more into his own hands. He makes a half-hearted argument against Guitar's involvement with the Seven Days, and he starts to question why his father and Pilate care so much about him. He even has a minor moment of introspection as he waits for Hagar to try to murder him in Guitar's apartment. When he leaves the house after Lena yells at him about the negative impact he has on everyone in his family, it seems like he might finally be making a decision to change his life, although it's hard to see from here exactly where he's going to go.