Robert Fenhagen’s Beautiful People is a very short (I would say concise) story that is not concerned at all with beautiful people. Nor is it an essay on beauty, and what beauty may mean to different (beautiful) people, as seen (and perceived) from different (possibly beautiful) angles.
It is rather a minimalist piece of absurd literature that is about beautiful people as much as Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (La cantatrice chauve) is about bald sopranos. Truth be told, both beautiful people and bald sopranos (and their equally juxtaposable positions) are only pretexts for the setting in of the absurd in a kind of literature that is absurd only inasmuch as its absurdness does not become an absurdity on its own merits. And the essential difference between the absurdness of a piece of absurd literature and the absurdity that it may fall prey to by all accounts is the optimal gauge of the absurd by which measure one is to know the proper length of a literary text that is edging on the absurd itself.
What is, then, the best length for any literary text to become literature of the absurd? Is there such a textual limit at which the absurd can penetrate literature and make its presence known in the form of the literature of the absurd?
The answer may seem nothing short of absurd itself. Yet, the answer is neither absurd nor possible. The answer is beyond the absurd of the situation that has made it plausible in the first place. In fact, the answer is utterly unknown to the asker except for a few historical hints that, on their own, cannot compose a fully articulate answer.
These hints are simple literary innuendos that should not be taken into consideration unless the asker is willing to do with them as if they were the stuff the...
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...the absurd, which states almost absurdly that the shorter, more concise a text is, the less likely absurd it can be, is no law at all. For how can it be so, and how can he abide by it, when his Beautiful People, who are quite absent from their title-supposed presence, are the living proof that the absurd of the literature of the absurd is gauge-proof and, most of all, immeasurable? After all, would gauging up the absurd not lead to the very absurdity to which the absurdness of any piece of absurd literature is striving not to fall prey? Obviously, Robert Fenhagen would not (could not) be in disagreement with his own writing. By its very nature, the absurd is as limitless as the hawk’s gaze gauging up the limitlessness of the process of enumeration of all the things standing between the two (equally absurd) ends of its food’s coming into being and in classic prey form.
The underlying paradox of irrationality, from which no theory can entirely escape, is this: if we explain it too well, we turn it into a concealed form of rationality; while if we assign incoherence too glibly, we merely compromise our ability to diagnose irrationality by withdrawing the background of rationality needed to justify any diagnosis at all. (1)
In conclusion, it is true that beauty pleased our eyes and consciousness. People have gone far trying to make themselves look lovely. Consequently most of them end up by getting killed or having some disease such as skin cancer. Instead of having only some people being happier than others, as Morrison introduced Twyla, I believe people should be all equal as Vonnegut advocates in her story, that way there will be no longer such as killings, rapped or even manipulating other because of their beauty. Can beauty help to rebuild our society?
Rochette-Crawley, S. (2004) James T. Farrell. The Literary Encyclopedia. April 2, 2004. Retrieved on May 13, 2009 from http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1487
Murphy, B. & Shirley J. The Literary Encyclopedia. [nl], August 31, 2004. Available at: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2326. Access on: 22 Aug 2010.
story points out that beauty has its cost as well, the power of being beautiful holds a great
...ot a single mention of curing or treating Gregor, his condition is thus rationalized as mundane in relationship to absurdity. Thus, the irrationality, and
In Camus there is a precise use of the word "absurd". "Absurd" comes from the Latin surdis and in surdis we have a dual definition: it means irrational, insensible (from that side of it we still use the word in mathematics; a 'surd' is an irrational number). But Camus concentrates on the other meaning which comes from the root. That is, "deaf, silent". There are many examples in literature of this particular kind of silence. I think of Romeo and Juliet when Juliet has been ordered by her parents to marry the County Paris, and in one of Shakespeare's best scenes in that play, he has Juliet's father talking...
Kafka illustrates life is absurd through the use of metaphors. “ One morning, Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.( Kafka,3)” In this quote gregor wakes up and realizes he’s a bug without any explanation or recollection of what he was turned into. Gregor’s transformation is never logically explained and is therefore absurd.
As stated by ‘The Duchess’, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford’s famous quote “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” As a result, beauty can describe as an inspiring view present in everything that can be seen. To begin, beauty can be viewed in a building as large and extravagant as the white house to the small hometown market or even in the sight of a single flower to a field filled with a million flowers. Also, beauty can be seen in the sunrise over the peaks of the mountains and also in the sunset glowing across a calm lake surrounded by the bright colors of the fall trees. Furthermore, people have physical beauty, which can be found in a person’s features, figure, or complexion. In the poem “Beauty & Dress” by Robert Herrick he explains the beauty he sees in his wife. Herrick states,
I believe I have now outlined with reference to the text the disintegration of Aschenbach, the inevitability of his death, assessed the major philosophical conflicts of rationalism and irrationalism and provided examples of narrative comment that underline the conflict. This conflict is inevitable once the initial scene setting is constructed and there is no return for Aschenbach back from this destiny.
Edward Albee’s drama who”s afraid of Virginia woolf? is not areal drama of absurd but still we can capture some elements of an absurd drama in it.The play is combination of a realistic as well as absurd drama. IT blends elements of taa...
In "A Woman's Beauty: Put-down or Power Source," Susan Sontag portrays how a woman's beauty has been degraded while being called beautiful and how that conceives their true identity as it seems to portray innocence and honesty while hiding the ugliness of the truth. Over the years, women have being classified as the gentler sex and regarded as the fairer gender. Sontag uses narrative structure to express the conventional attitude, which defines beauty as a concept applied today only to women and their outward appearance. She accomplishes this by using the technique of contrast to distinguish the beauty between men and women and establishing a variation in her essay, by using effective language.
...e ability to achieve anything in life. Hopefully, readers would learn from this novel that beauty is not the most important aspect in life. Society today emphasizes the beauty of one's outer facade. The external appearance of a person is the first thing that is noticed. People should look for a person's inner beauty and love the person for the beauty inside. Beauty, a powerful aspect of life, can draw attention but at the same time it can hide things that one does not want disclosed. Beauty can be used in a variety of ways to affect one's status in culture, politics, and society. Beauty most certainly should not be used to excuse punishment for bad deeds. Beauty is associated with goodness, but that it is not always the case. This story describes how the external attractiveness of a person can influence people's behavior and can corrupt their inner beauty.
... Absurd was the meaning Garcin came to realize about the room and Estelle and Inez.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds.” Making Arguments about Literature: A Compact Guide And Anthology. Ed. John Schilb and John Clifford. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins,.