SOURCE: "The Circuitous Path: Albert Einstein and the Epistemology of Fiction," in Einstein and the Humanities, edited by Dennis P. Ryan, Greenwood Press, 1987, pp. 125-34.

[In the following essay, Hauptman and Hauptman argue that Einstein's theories were fundamental to the development of absurdist fiction.]

When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

Albert Einstein

The zeitgeist and the general inferences drawn from Einstein's work come to bear most seminally on a group of philosophically oriented novelists conveniently termed absurdists, authors who believe that man is, in Heidegger's phrase, "thrown" into a world devoid of absolutes, order, and meaningfulness. The world that these novelists depict is one in which external meaning is elusive, metaphysical underpinnings are questioned, and knowledge is ephemeral. If this is the antipode of the harmonious world that Einstein demanded spiritually, it is nonetheless a valid hypostatization that follows logically from his physical theorizing. It is small consolation that the man who helped to destroy the harmony of the universe, failed to accept the consequences of his own work and spent the rest of his life attempting to prove that the universe is indeed harmonious and comprehensible. Thus to ascribe man's anguished cry entirely to a philosophical etiology, while conveniently ignoring concomitant advances in physics is rather naive. Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett were certainly influenced by nineteenth-century philosophy but their fiction consistently reflects the world that Einstein and Heisenberg depict. A. A. Robb commenting on only one aspect, Einstein's theory of simultaneity, states that "This seemed to destroy all sense of the reality of the external world and to leave the physical universe no better than a dream, or rather a nightmare." Exactly. For Einstein's heirs nothing remains stable and the inevitable result is absurdity.

The first of the absurdists is Kafka, who, in 1910, became aware of relativity through direct contact with Einstein at the salon of Berta Fanta in Prague: "… he got familiar, shortly before writing his main works, with the most important matters of inquiry of the new age (for example, quantum theory and relativity theory.)" Moreover, both Sartre and Camus acknowledge their debt to Kafka. These are admittedly tenuous connections, but they certainly demand recognition. Furthermore, this [essay] does not contend that these writers were directly influenced by Einstein's work, that there is an explicit line traceable from his scientific papers to their fictional worlds. It is rather claimed that during a period that witnessed the transformation of the most basic physical concepts, it is the general zeitgeist that exercised the primary influence on the absurdists. One of the few critics to note this is S. Beynon John, who, in discussing the intellectual climate of Camus's early years, observes that,

New scientific theories, too, seemed to challenge still further men's assumptions about the nature of experience. Among these we must count the delayed implications of Freud, and discoveries about the nature of the physical universe, especially those of Einstein. Two general conclusions were often drawn from the play of these factors. Firstly, they appeared to break up traditional values and beliefs about the nature of man and his place in the universe. Next, in the degree to which they menaced individuality or made it the prey of unconscious impulses (as with Freud), these forces seemed to impair the density of individual existence and to provoke the idea that man was adrift in an absurd universe.

It is this general Einsteinian influence that is so important for fiction.

Because Einstein's scientific methodology is based on a surprisingly well-developed epistemology and more significantly because in an indeterminate and meaningless universe epistemological questions assume unprecedented importance, it is legitimate to examine the attempts of fictional characters to acquire knowledge. But it is not the purpose of this chapter to discuss Einstein's epistemology nor to compare his perspective with ways of knowing in fictive worlds. These are autonomous realms.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

These opening lines of [T. S.] Eliot's "Burnt Norton" mirror the confusion of time in modern fiction: from Proust, Joyce, and Mann through Robbe-Grillet and Cortazar, time is manipulated into asymmetrical, simultaneous, and reversible patterns. Events are not disclosed in sequential narrative, one incident succeeding another, but rather "everything is everywhere at all times." Rudolf Arnheim perceptively remarks that

The shattering of the narrative sequence challenges the reader or viewer to reconstruct the objective order of the events. In trying to do so, he tends to assign the scattered pieces to their place in a structurally separate system offered by Time and Space. However, if the reader or viewer would limit his effort to this reconstruction of objective reality, he would miss the entire other half of the work's structure. Although discontinuous and therefore disorderly with regard to objective reality, the presentation must also be understood and accepted as a valid sequence of its own, a flow of disparate fragments, complexly and absurdly related to one another.

Strangely enough, the novels of Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and Beckett frequently do unfold in a sequential fashion; that is, a distinct temporal progression can occur. On the other hand, time, for these writers, tends to be inconsequential, amorphous, alienating. As Kafka notes in his diary, "The clocks are not in unison, the inner one runs crazily o n … the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the two worlds split apart … ?" This disparity reinforces the chaos of a world in which the most significant things are unknowable and even the insignificant often defy comprehension. Attempts to discover are met with silence. Indeed, Camus insists that "The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world." If one cannot know, then one cannot predict and if one cannot predict, it is difficult to know: this is a vicious circle and thus it is no surprise that the fictional worlds created here are haphazard, disharmonious, and unpredictable.

Both Kafka's Trial and Camus's Stranger are predicated on unpredictable events and unfold through the unknowable. This is, in fact, Kafka's normal perception of the world and there are potent auguries of the weltanschauung of The Trial and The Castle in Kafka's shorter fiction. In "The Judgment" George commits suicide because his father sentences him to death, but the sentence is incommensurate with his crime, which is not really knowable, particularly since it may be different for father, son, and reader. "In the Penal Colony" is a detailed account of a grotesque device used for torturing prisoners, but the offender who is about to be tormented does not know his sentence; in fact, he does not even know that he has been sentenced. Joseph K., in The Trial, is arrested, harassed, and ultimately executed (murdered by official thugs) without ever discovering his crime; as K. laments, "it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance." The Trial is K's valiant attempt to understand his position in a bizarre world, to learn what he has done, and, more important, to discover how to deal effectively with the judicial system. To this end he will try anything, but everything fails; he learns nothing of utility, and because of this he dies: knowledge is life; ignorance is death.

Kafka retells the story in The Castle. The orientation is different, but the goal is the same: to learn and to understand, both of which are allegorized by K's attempt to reach the castle. Of course, he never does; too many obstacles are put in his path. He fails to recognize his assistants, who have supposedly followed him to the new town. This is no surprise since they appear to be local men, not his original assistants at all. K. accepts this and acts as if they were the originals despite the evidence: "'But if you are my old assistants you must know something about it [surveying],' said K. They made no reply. 'Well, come in …' ". The only reliable source of information is the meaningless "humming and singing" of the telephone; "Everything else is deceptive." … Franz Kuna epitomizes Kafka's unique position:

The Trial and The Castle are monuments to Kafka's dedication to his self-imposed task of dismantling the key assumptions underlying the idea of a harmonious order. What Einstein very much at the same time, did in physics Kafka did in the field of ethics and aesthetics.

Camus constructs The Stranger along similar lines: Meursault knows why he is condemned, but he does not know why he kills the Arab. And the judges, jury, and prosecutor, who think they know why Meursault is guilty, confuse the crime with his social ineptitudes. The Stranger, in a sense, is Camus's paean to uncertainty: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure." From these opening words to the final execration, The Stranger insists that it is virtually impossible to know. Even the commonplace is qualified: phrases like "I suppose," "So far as I knew," "I couldn't say," "I wasn't sure," "I can't remember," "It seemed," "I didn't know," and "I still don't know" appear in unabashed profusion. And even when Meursault appears to know, he actually does not, for example, when he acts as a witness for Raymond, he is merely repeating something that Raymond told him; but he does not check Raymond's story: it may be true, it probably is, but Meursault has no way of knowing. When he kills the Arab, he is dealing with a "blurred dark form" and his eyes are filled with brine and tears so that he cannot see. He shoots and then shoots four more times. He does not know why he does so. At his defense, the best he can do is to mention the sun. Meursault concludes by opening his heart "to the benign indifference of the universe." For a man who neither knows nor cares to know, this is perhaps the only solution.

The extremes of epistemological questioning are evident in Sartre's Nausea and Beckett's The Unnamable. Sartre is more concerned with the metaphysical perspective. The nausea that Roquentin feels whenever he perceives too lucidly is Sartre's metaphor for the congruency of knowledge and absurdity: the implied meaninglessness of The Stranger becomes explicit in Roquentin's articulated responses to his environment. Without self-knowledge and unsure of his purpose, Roquentin abandons his historical study of Rollebon, about whom little is known with certainty. Nausea is of particular interest in this context, because it is here that Sartre presents one of the few characters in absurdist fiction who actually has apodictic knowledge of the universe. But the self-taught man, who has acquired all of his knowledge by reading the books on the local library's shelves in alphabetical order (he is only halfway through), is a parody, a man for whom knowledge is of little significance:

He has digested anti-intellectualism, manicheism, mysticism, pessimism, anarchy and egotism: they are nothing more than stages, unfinished thoughts which find their justification only in him.

Although Roquentin sees a solution to his dilemma in fictional creation (he will become a story teller) the final effect of Nausea is mitigated by Roquentin's belief that, "Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance."

In Molloy and Malone Dies Beckett depicts a quest whose epistemological significance is invariably overshadowed by metaphysical queries. But by The Unnamable (the final novel in the trilogy), the inexorable movement has been reversed and the metaphysical aspects give way to a 123 page litany of man's inability to know himself, his past, his desires, his physical surroundings, or his world. There are few pages upon which the narrator fails to mention his lack of knowledge and whatever he does claim to know is immediately contradicted. Metaphysical conjecturing breaks down in this epistemological quagmire. At the height of his despair Roquentin cries,

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I … because … Ugh! I flee.

A stronger congruence of fictional worlds would be difficult to imagine. This passage provides a gloss to the Unnamable's plight. Roquentin reaches this stage and then moves on to recovery. The Unnamable begins and ends in similar mental gyrations. Since physically he consists (apparently) of a torso embedded in a container, there is little he can do other than think. But his goal is to "go silent," although he begins by affirming that "I shall never be silent. Never." To which he adds, some pages later, "So it is I who speak, all alone, since I can't do otherwise. No, I am speechless." He knows nothing and the reader knows even less, because it is impossible to distinguish between the truth and his mistakes, invented memories, tergiversations, and lies. No cartographer could map the narrator's progress; there is none. Early in the monologue he depicts himself at rest or in motion, the distinction is unimportant, while toward the end he laments that he is still unsure of what he is, where he is, whether vocal or silent, indeed whether he even exists. George Wellwarth sums up Beckett's position: "all knowledge is an illusion and all things are pointless—insofar as the human mind is concerned." This is the obvious conclusion and it is therefore easy to forget after all those devastating words, that The Unnamable ends on a positive note: "it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

The four novelists discussed here depict worlds in which meaninglessness is the dominant value and the validity and significance of knowledge is highly questionable. It is the contention of this essay that this perspective can, in part, be ascribed to developments in modern science, particularly to Einstein's theorizing. That these developments logically lead to the cul-de-sac outlined above has at least been noted by the humanists. Few scientists, however, have ventured such opinions. An exception is P. W. Bridgman, the Nobel-Prize winning physicist, who in 1950 stated that,

We are now approaching a bound beyond which we are forever estopped from pushing our inquiries, not by the construction of the world, but by the construction of ourselves. The world fades out and eludes us because it becomes meaningless. We cannot even express this in the way we would like. We cannot say that there exists a world beyond any knowledge possible to us because of the nature of knowledge. The very concept of existence becomes meaningless. It is literally true that the only way of reacting to this is to shut up. We are confronted with something truly ineffable. We have reached the limit of the vision of the great pioneers of science, the vision, namely[,] that we live in a sympathetic world, in that it is comprehensible by our minds.

If Einstein's influence on the absurdists is, at times, oblique, there is another area of fiction where it is far more salient. Many contemporary novelists have been captivated by various aspects of modern science and they make use of scientific method and metaphor often in strange and even grotesque ways. Perhaps the favorite metaphor to be usurped from its rightful place in the physicist's arsenal is entropy. As Tony Tanner points out, the concept is virtually ubiquitous and Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and John Updike, inter alios, actually use the term in their fictions. Because entropy entails not merely the running down of the universe, but disorder and chaos as well, it is necessary to mention a specific manifestation. Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 revolves around the entropy of communication. Oedipa Maas attempts to solve the mystery of an alternate mail system, but she never learns whether the source of her knowledge is reality, hallucination, fantasy, or an extravagant perpetration; the novel concludes in ambiguity and the ultimate effect, though not as powerful, is similar to that achieved by Kafka and his heirs: one only discovers that one cannot know with certainty.

The four novels of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet provide an excellent example of the novelist using an Einsteinian metaphor as a structuring principle. As Durrell puts it in his note to Balthazar,

Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition.

Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern.

The three first parts, however, are to be deployed spatially (hence the use of 'sibling' not 'sequel') and are not linked in a serial form. They interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel.

The result of this can be seen in the final novel, Clea. As in Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, events are surprised from different angles, which shows once again that knowledge is subjective and ephemeral. The philosophical position is articulated at various points in terms of "the mutability of all truth" or at its most extreme "poetic or transcendental knowledge somehow cancels out purely relative knowledge." More important, however, are the many examples of inexactitude: Capodistria's death, which turns out to be a hoax; Darley's vision of Justice, which is "an illusionist's creation"; the incredible transformation of Scobie into the Saint, El Yacoub; or the misconceptions concerning Pursewarden, who is perceived from the perspectives of Darley, the diary, his sister, his wife, and Keats. The only knowledge possible here is rather peculiar: "Sexual love is knowledge, both in etymology and in cold fact… When a culture goes bad in its sex all knowledge is impeded." While Einstein believes that there are no limits to knowledge, Durrell, using an Einsteinian structure, concludes that, with the exception of sexual knowledge, epistemological problems are unresolvable; as he observes in another context, "Under the terms of the new idea a precise knowledge of the outer world becomes an impossibility."

Stanislaw Lem's protagonists, like Kafka's, are usually searching for the solution to some enigma. The Investigation provides a splendid example of characters who attempt to discover order and harmony in apparent chaos. The disappearances of some corpses result in a number of tangential explanations, the most preposterous of which are couched in purely statistical terms. The result of one analysis, "the product of the distance and the time between consecutive incidents, multiplied by the temperature differential" is a constant and leads nowhere. A second statistical farrago insists that the answer to the mystery lies in the fact that the corpses disappeared in the area of England that has the lowest cancer death rate. The novel concludes with yet another hypothesis concerning truck drivers, fog, and fantasies. When confronted with this explanation, Gregory asks, "is all this true?" to which the Chief Inspector replies, "No but it might be. Or, strictly speaking, it can become the truth." These men are groping for knowledge in a world in which bodies cannot be identified with certainty; time factors are ambiguous; rumors are rampant; actions are incomprehensible; and a guilty party may not exist. Nonetheless they continue to insist on specious explanations for an unsolvable case. As Gregory declares in a moment of despair, "we human beings are the resultant of Brownian motion … Our knowledge is underlined by statistics—nothing exists except blind chance, the eternal arrangement of fortuitous patterns." It is perhaps superfluous to add that The Investigation concludes in ambiguity; there is no solution.

Concerning the reliance of statistical methods of prediction, Philipp Frank remarks, "If science could not advance beyond this stage, 'God would,' as Einstein said, 'play dice indeed.'" Robert Coover has predicated his fascinating novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. of J. Henry Waugh, Prop., on this supposition. J. Henry Waugh (whose initials plus the final h form the letters of the Biblical name for God, JHWH) controls a baseball game of his own creation, by rolling dice. Waugh's involvement in this board game is so intense that he fails to distinguish between it and reality; thus he alienates friends, loses his job, and imperils his own being. The game progresses according to the throw of the dice and until Damon Rutherford, Waugh's favorite player, is killed by a pitch, Waugh does not interfere. There is nothing that he can do to bring Rutherford back, but he does meddle in future games; he juggles schedules; he controls the Knickerbockers' losses; and he tampers with two rolls of the dice, which results in the death of Damon's killer. In Arlen Hansen's apt words, "God does play dice with the universe, but the dice are loaded." The novel concludes in a ritual reenactment of Damon's death. This mythification is Coover's subtle indication that one knows only in confusion: the player who becomes Rutherford in the reenactment is not really the earlier hero, but in the eyes of the crowd he is, and as such he must be sacrificed, literally. The ambiguity of the final pages allow for a tantalizing peroration: the reader learns nothing further of this ball player's fate, nor of Waugh's for that matter.

The preceding discussion attempts to show that Einstein's influence on novelists is both substantial and diverse. He is indirectly responsible for the world that the absurdists depict, the philosophical implications of which have had a decisive impact on the contemporary mood. Secondly, he directly influenced writers like Durrell and Coover whose fiction depends both structurally and contextually on Einsteinian metaphor. Finally, there are novelists like Vladimir Nabokov and Aldous Huxley, who merely mention Einstein or his theories in passing. Further, this essay contends that many of these novels lead to the same conclusion: in an Einsteinian universe knowledge is ephemeral, elusive, and at times unobtainable.