Literature of the absurd has enjoyed a special prominence in world letters during the past several years. Due in large part to the popularity and critical acclaim of the French Theater of the Absurd, absurdist expression has found its way into the novel and short story as well as into the theater. While there seem to be no concrete or well-defined limits to such literature, nevertheless there are certain characteristics which do make it distinguishable from other modern literary approaches.

In a recent essay on Albert Camus (1913–1960) and the Mexican Juan José Arreola (1918), George R. McMurray convincingly shows that Arreola's “Switchman” expresses the concepts of the absurd as outlined in Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus.¹ The purpose of this study is to develop the idea further by illustrating the specific literary techniques that Arreola employs throughout his Confabulario (1952)² to create a uniquely absurdist expression.

Briefly stated, the notion of the absurd arises from the conflict between man's desire for reason and order, on the one hand, and the apparent chaos and irrationality of the world which surrounds him, on the other. The absurd hero recognizes that the only way to survive his condition is to live life absurdly, that is to rebel against being seduced into complacency by daily routine and a monotonous existence. Camus' Sisyphus continues to push the rock up the hill, but mocks the gods who condemned him to his fate by doing so cheerfully.

While Arreola's short narratives are a broad and poetic treatment of the human condition in general, we immediately recognize the specifically absurdist point of view from which many of his stories are written.³ His Confabulario, for example, appears to be a literary fulfilment of Camus' formula for an effective expression of the absurd: rather than defining the absurd, “solely [absurd] appearances can be enumerated and the climate make itself felt.”⁴ Thus we find ourselves assaulted by a barrage of stories which indeed make us feel the absurd on an intuitive rather than rational basis.

A thematic analysis of Arreola's fiction reveals certain consistent preoccupations: loveless and lonely man-woman relationships, excessive scientific research and erudition at the expense of poetic sensitivity, irrationally restrictive codes of social behavior, and material and commercial progress with little or no concern for basic human values. In response to our chaotic existence, Arreola proposes that we adopt an absurdist posture, that is that we rebel against the norm and live life more poetically. Although this is not an answer to the problem of absurdity, it does allow us to survive it a bit more cheerfully.

However, these are the same themes that one can find in Camus, Sartre, and many other existentialist writers. What sets Arreola apart from such writers, and what makes absurdist literature what it is, is the combination of techniques and themes that portrays absurd contradictions in an inductive way so that we as readers can come to apprehend directly our own condition. Martin Esslin has stated that the theater of the absurd, and by extension all absurdist literature, “has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being, that is in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the philosopher and the poet. …”⁵

Absurdist literature is often characterized by its cruelly harsh and often grotesque distortions of reality. As we examine Arreola's style, however, we soon discover a somewhat different tone, a more subtle and seemingly benign approach to the problem of absurdity. As Esslin affirms, a similar tendency also manifest itself in the French Theater of the Absurd: “another important, and parallel, trend … is equally preoccupied with the absurdity and uncertainty of the human condition: the ‘poetic avant-garde’ theatre …” which relies heavily on “… consciously poetic speech; it aspires to plays that are in effect poems, images composed of a rich web of verbal associations.”⁶ He further indicates that it is often difficult to draw a dividing line between them since “the two approaches overlap a good deal.”⁷ In Arreola we find much the same problem, complicated by the fact that at times Arreola combines both the poetic approach and a more typically absurdist approach where grotesque and radically devalued language predominate. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Arreola has succeeded in creating a style which adequately and often very effectively communicates the notion of absurdity.

Arreola's basic artistic philosophy, as seen in “El Discípulo,” provides the explanation for some of the techniques that we find in Confabulario. In this story a young artist is told by his master that he ruins his art with too much detail. By way of example, the teacher then sketches the outline of a beautiful figure, “el rostro de un ángel, tal vez el de una hermosa mujer,” declaring that “ésta es la belleza.”⁸ He proceeds to fill in the details of the work, but upon finishing what the student considers to be a masterpiece, he tears it in two and throws it into the fire, declaring, “Hemos acabado con la belleza” (p. 92). The message is clear: true art is more effective and beautiful when it suggests; excessive detail can only ruin one's attempt at artistic expression.

It is this power of suggestion that helps Arreola to effectively portray absurd situations. Because our lives are too full of meaningless detail, it often takes someone who can lay before us the outline of these situations before we can recognize the absurdity of the things we say and do. Arreola utilizes three specific techniques in his attempts to suggest absurdity.

The feature that is most immediately obvious in Confabulario is the shortness of the fictional pieces. Since Arreola's stories average one to two pages, some critics have called them minicuentos or “short-short stories.” The effect of this length of fiction is that out of necessity traditional development of a topic or situation must be limited. Thus we see in Confabulario a wide array of situations which singly and collectively suggest themes of absurdity, or as Camus would put it, Arreola presents an enumeration of absurd instances. The author's effectiveness lies in his ability to condense the essence of these situations into poetic images; the heat of our imagination allows them to return to a full-scale life-like size.

This is particularly true in the characterization of Arreola's heroes. None is ever fully developed; most are merely types, even stereotypes. Nevertheless, the main characters in Arreola's short stories become alive as we project them to the plane of reality. The simplicity of their characterizations effectively reminds us that we also often fall into stereotypes, bound by daily routine and trivia. Examples of easily recognized modern-day characters abound: the man on the bus in “Una reputación” who must stand until the end of the route in order to live up to the gentlemanly reputation bestowed on him by the other passengers; the North American graduate student in “De balística” who can't see the beauty of the Spanish countryside because of his overconcern with getting enough material on ancient catapults to write his doctoral dissertation; the young lady at the “Cocktail Party” whose proclamations to everyone that she's having a marvelous time become suspiciously insincere; and the man in “In Memoriam” who writes a sensational volume on sexual relations which belies the realities of his own marriage.

More importantly, however, the relegation of characters to purely stereotyped roles helps to emphasize the significance of the situations in which they participate. In “El asesino,” for example, the potential for character development is great, since the ancient ruler is agonizingly faced with death at the hands of an assassin. Instead, however, Arreola chooses to emphasize the absurdity of the circumstances of imminent regicide: placed in power by a group of drunken soldiers, he now faces being overthrown; in order to become instead a heroic “martyr” he must allow an inept assassin to kill him with a common kitchen knife. Thus, the absurdity of the situation transcends the importance of the individual.

Arreola also avoids traditional plot structures. Hardly ever do we find the narrative developed from exposition to climax to dénouement. This is partly due to the brevity of the stories, but more importantly, because problems of absurdity cannot be resolved so easily. Instead, Arreola will focus on one given absurd situation, or will present a series of absurdities. In either case, although things do happen, we are hard pressed to find a traditional plot. “Una reputación” is an example of the series of absurdities made to appear like a plot, while “En verdad os digo,” “El diamante,” and “Flash” are examples of the single plotless situation. The important thing, in both approaches, is that the absurdity of the situations is allowed to take precedence over the importance of the story line. The reader also feels a greater impact since the tension between the characters and the absurdities which they face usually remains unresolved.

These three techniques of suggestion—shortness of the stories themselves, and de-emphasis of both characterization and plot—help Arreola's stories to approximate the poetic suggestion that one also finds in the Theater of the Absurd. One interesting difference, however, is that these stories may be taken singly, as expressions of absurdity in and of themselves, or collectively, as expressions of a larger and more complex absurd world. And while in the theater the spectator must take the situations as they come, here the reader may order the sequence of absurd situations as he wishes. The fact that Arreola himself rearranges the stories with each successive edition of Confabulario might serve to emphasize the arbitrariness of the sequence of absurdities as they occur in reality.

Another major aspect of Arreola's technique, which also is related to the idea of suggestion, is the use of parody to present a caricaturized and exaggerated imitation of reality in order to underline the essential absurdity of life. The very subjects of this parody testify to the universality of Arreola's stories, since he draws material for them from all periods of history and all types of literature. In this regard, he reminds us of Borges; one critic states that:

Como Borges … Arreola se pasea por los territorios de las culturas y las épocas, como un recuerdo de Gog. Esto le da los caracteres de variedad, de diversidad cosmopolita y también rareza. Es decir: su obra tiene estas caracteristicas, pero su intensidad, su trascendencia y su belleza no dependen de ellas.⁹

One of the principal tools of parody, and one which Arreola has fully mastered, is that of language. Again, he reminds us of Borges in the way he is able to absorb and assimilate a wide variety of styles. When he criticizes excessive commercialism in “Baby H. P.,” for example, he parodies the style and tone of a high-powered radio commercial:

Señora ama de casa: convierta usted en fuerza motriz la vitalidad de sus niños. Ya tenemos a la venta el maravilloso Baby H. P., un aparato que está llamado a revolucionar la economia hogareña. … El pataleo de un niño de pecho durante las veinticuatro horas del dia se transforma, gracias al Baby H. P., en unos útiles segundos de tromba licuadora, o en quince minutos de música radiofónica. … El Baby H. P. está disponible en las buenas tiendas en distintos tamaños, modelos y precios. Es un aparato moderno, durable y digno de confianza. … (pp. 144-145)

In “En verdad os digo,” Arreola parodies the style of a research prospectus. In this case, a certain professor-scientist seeks to make a camel literally pass through the eye of a needle, in order to assure rich people a place in heaven. He seeks funds to support his research, noting that even if he fails, the rich will be poor from having contributed and thus will qualify to inherit the kingdom of heaven. Arreola begins with a simple statement, very similar to what one might find in a real prospectus, but then he gradually exaggerates the request until the reader is brought to a realization of the absurdity of the proposal. By extension we can also see that in spite of superficial scientific terminology, many projects are essentially just as absurd.

Arreola also takes us back in time to other periods of history and literature to show us that, although not always recognized as such, the problem of absurd contradictions is an eternal and universal one. Often, in the style of Schwob's Vies imaginaires, he presents a pseudo-history of an obscure figure or situation from the past which while perhaps partially historical, is more probably fictional. In “Sinesio de Rodas,” for example, Arreola presents the philosophy of an obscure heretic from early Christianity who claims that those things which appear to be accidents of life are in reality controlled by the angels who live among us. The style parodies that of the historical treatise in which the reference is allegedly found:

La herejia de Sinesio careció de renombre y se perdió en el horizonte cristiano sin estela aparente. Ni siquiera obtuvo el honor de ser condenada oficialmente en concilio, a pesar de que Eutiques, abad de Constantinopla, presentó a los sinodales una extensa refutación, que nadie leyó, titulada Contra Sinesio.

Su frágil memoria ha naufragado en un mar de páginas: la Patrologia griega de Paul Migne (p. 104).

In “Los alimentos terrestres,” Arreola humorously presents a poet's petitions for food and money. Imitating exactly the Spanish Golden Age style, Arreola then surprises us by indicating that the lines are from the Epistolario of Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, the Spanish poet of great renown.

Arreola also carries the techniques of parody to the extreme by using fantasy or fantastic situations as caricaturistic representations of reality. The fundamental purpose of such an approach is to bring the reader to an awareness of the absurdity of his own reality. While many absurdists begin with reality and proceed toward a fantastic, often nightmarish distortion of that reality, Arreola frequently begins with a fantastic point of departure. This involves a two-step process. As Rosario Castellanos explains it, the author must first create a fantastic situation which parallels reality, but which is also autonomous:

La fantasia se desentiende del problema de la existencia o no existencia del mundo y se aplica a la creación de otro mundo que puede ser paralelo, contrario, etc., es decir que puede guardar todas las relaciones posibles con el mundo de afuera, pero que es autónomo, lo que significa que se da a si mismo sus propias leyes, las cuales resultan perfectamente operantes.¹⁰

The next step is taken by the reader, who, confronted by an absurdly fantastic situation, recognizes the parody and realizes that his own reality is no less absurd nor fantastic. Richard Hauck, in A Cheerful Nihilism, states:

But another point of view—the awareness of total absurdity—sees everything as absurd. This all encompassing view is paradoxical: it sees that there is no norm, that everything deviates from a man's inner sense of rightness or his suspicion that there should be ultimate meaning. The man who has a sense of the absurdity of everything can shift his viewpoint at any time to see the impossible as probable and the normal as abnormal.¹¹

One example of the reversal of norms to provide a fantastic situation is in “El soñado.” The protagonist in the story is the unborn, in fact not yet conceived, child of a young married couple. The reasons for his non-existence—the husband's wish not to have children—are refuted by the reality of the wife's desire for the child, as well as the fact that the phantasmic creation actually narrates the story. Likewise, the reality of death appears transformed in “Autrui,” where the diary of events from Monday through Sunday begins with the man's being followed by a mysterious being, and ends with the same man's complaining about the jail-like confinement he feels while he decomposes in his casket.

We find, then, that fantasy has a natural propensity to make us more cognizant of our own absurd condition, since that which we consider as real, reveals itself, by comparison, to be as equally irrational or incredible as those sequences which are deliberately portrayed as fantastic. In addition to completely fantastic situations, Arreola often mixes reality and fantasy in an attempt to further disorient our sense of logic and reason. Here he follows a typically absurdist, even Kafkian approach, by commencing with reality and proceeding to a fantastically grotesque distortion of that reality. Thomas Tomanek makes the comparison:

The face of Arreola's universe appears distorted to the point of madness. Yet the madness lies not in the distortion, but in the universe itself; the distortion is needed in order to make visible the madness which so often appears and passes for normal.

Is not this the same distortion Kafka uses for the sake of truth?¹²

In “Pueblerina,” for example, a man awakens with a set of horns, but, much like Kafka's Gregor Samsa, he decides to try living a normal life. The distortion increases as Arreola skillfully substitutes bullfighting terminology for the actual description of the man's cuckolded condition. The protagonist finally dies of a probable heart attack in the town plaza: “La congestión se hundió luego en su espina dorsal, como una estocada hasta la cruz. Y don Fulgencio rodó patas arriba sin puntilla” (p. 99).

One of the more important aspects of Arreola's fiction is the use of the comic element. We have already discussed his use of parody, caricature, and fantastic distortions, all of which help to create the incongruities essential to comedy. The purpose and net result of such techniques is a provocation to smiles and laughter. This is certainly the case in “En verdad os digo,” “El guardagujas,” “Los alimentos terrestres,” or “De balística,” to name just a few humorous stories. But at the same time, Arreola has also recognized the power that humor has to make us recognize the serious side of reality. In “Flash,” for example, in order to make us aware of the dangers of nuclear experimentation, he reports the case of a mad scientist who places his atomic absorber at the exit of a tunnel and causes the five o’clock commuter train to disappear. The government excuses the accident by saying the device was only in the experimental stages of development. The situation is so exaggerated and incongruous with our accepted norms of reality that we have to laugh, or at least smile. But by laughing, we are then able to eliminate our subjective attachment to the realities presented in the story and to view more objectively and more solemnly the seriousness of the reality upon which the exaggeration is based. Thus it is that while Arreola's humor often appears at first to be gently benign, one soon recognizes the deception. Laughter merely serves to liberate us from a carefree, blindfolded view of the world and to make us painfully cognizant of the tragicomic nature of our existence. Other good examples of this process can be found in “El guardagujas,” “En verdad os digo,” and “Una reputación,” among many others.

Another important purpose for humor in Confabulario relates to Arreola's own attitude toward the problem of absurdity. With a touch of stoicism, he recognizes that absurd contradictions are necessarily a part of life, and that the best way to deal with them is to laugh at them; the only solution is really a non-solution. Ojeda states:

El ideal del principio era tan alto que fue insostenible en la realidad. Cómo resolver este conflicto? La solución fue dada desde el principio: reir y sonreir. La desilusión del bien se resuelve en buen humor.¹³

This attitude is akin to that of Montaigne who preferred laughter because “wailing and commiseration imply some valuation of the object bewailed; what we mock at we consider worthless.”¹⁴ Similarly, Camus claims that Sisyphus mocks his fate by performing his absurd task cheerfully.

For Arreola, then, humor is similar to a two-edged sword: one side provides frustrating recognition of absurd contradictions while the other can help relieve those frustrations. Meanwhile, both sides work to cut down our preconceived sense of our absurd condition. Again, however, we should stress that Arreola's approach generally differs from that of many other absurdist writers. Rarely do we find the same kind of intense black humor of grotesque exaggerations that precipitate paroxysmal laughter. In this regard, his humor is more gentle, although perhaps no more benign than that found in other absurdist works.

In summary, we find that Arreola has mastered the combination of absurd themes and techniques which creates in the reader an intuitive sense of the absurd. Many of these techniques are similar to those found in the theater of the absurd: poetically condensed situations of absurdity, a de-emphasis of plot and character development, the use of parody for purposes of caricature, the presentation of highly distorted and even fantastic views of reality, and an ever present humor which helps liberate the reader from subjective attachment to the absurdities which surround him. However, the similarity between Arreola and other absurdist writers does not detract from his importance or his creative genius. Taking into account that the majority of his stories were written in the late nineteen forties and early fifties, we realize that not only is he one of the first Spanish American authors to explore man's absurd condition in a universal rather than regional context, but he also precedes many of the so-called dramatists of the absurd, most of whom did not achieve international prominence until the late nineteen fifties.

Notes

1. “Albert Camus' Concept of the Absurd and Juan José Arreola's ‘The Switchman,’” Latin American Literary Review, 6, No. 11 (Fall-Winter 1977), 30-35.

2. The first Confabulario appeared in 1952, but there have been several subsequent editions, including Confabulario total in 1962. The first edition in the Colección Popular series (1966) also includes a useful prologue by Arreola.

3. Without having to look beyond the effects and aftermath of the Mexican Revolution one might easily trace the realities of Arreola's life that would contribute to an absurdist Weltanschauung. Significantly, however, Arreola breaks from the traditionally regionalistic view of Mexico to interpret his and his countrymen's experience in a universal context.

4. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 9.

5. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 6.

6. Ibid., p. 7.

7. Ibid.

8. Juan José Arreola, Confabulario (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966), p. 92. Subsequent quotations from this text will be noted with the page number in parentheses.

9. Jorge Arturo Ojeda, “La lucha con el ángel,” in Antologia de Juan José Arreola, ed. Jorge Arturo Ojeda (Mexico: Ediciones Oasis, 1969), pp. 15-16.

10. Quoted in Ojeda, p. 71.

11. Richard B. Hauck, A Cheerful Nihilism: Confidence and “The Absurd” in American Humorous Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), p. 4.

12. Thomas J. Tomanek, “The Estranged Man: Kafka's Influence on Arreola,” Revue des Langues Vivantes (Brussels), 37, p. 307.

13. Ojeda, p. 71.

14. Michel de Montaigne, “On Democritus and Heraclitus” in Essays, tr. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958), p. 133.