To talk about dystopia in literature is to talk about the absurd. The twentieth century provided us with a vast number of such manifestations, both in fiction and non-fiction.

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     In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus refers to creation as “the absurd joy par excellence” because “[c]reating is living doubly” as “[t]he actor taught us […]: there is no frontier between being and appearing”. What Camus alludes here is to the absurd longing of man for the absolute, knowing it is impossible to apprehend it; it is what he calls “lucid indifference”. Man is fully aware of its finite condition and, instead of suicide, he opts to persist in this world and create. The goal is not to use the absurd of creation as a refuge for his uncertainty; it is not a consolation—the created work is absurd and it is absurdity. The differentiation between noun and adjective allows to better address the topic: creation is absurd, it lacks an inherent meaning and utility, it’s dispensable. But absurdity lies in the mere fact of the work being created, it’s a human condition. A man or a woman recognizes her impossibility of achieving the absolute, and yet, she remains and creates something as a reflection of the self to serve as a rebellion against what has defeated her in advance. She figures out ways to overcome or resist the state of things, even with no evident meaning. Like Sisyphus, who loathes death and is passionate for life and “toils so close to stones [that he] is already stone himself”, such is the creator—she is the embodiment of absurdity in communion with her work and her willingness to live.

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     Towards the end of the twentieth century, several authors around the globe address this deep sense of the absurd, from a narrative of a world in a state of entropy, due to an inexplicable and sudden plague, to complex depictions of marginal characters who change at a certain point in time and disrupt the “logic” of events to walk a new, unpredictable path. In every case we find and imbalance, both in the dystopic conditions depicted, and in the protagonists’ behavior, triggered by a revelation of sorts. The absurd appears as an epiphany and cannot be averted. The only alternative is suicide or adaptation, and the latter calls for a radical life change according to the demands presented by the absurdity. Camus said in this regard that “great revolutions are always metaphysical”. Half a century later, Michel Houellebecq writes: “In the history of humanity, metaphysical mutations – meaning the radical and global transformations of the worldview adopted by the majority – are rather rare. […] As soon as it is produced, the metaphysical mutation develops until it reaches its extreme consequences, without ever encountering resistance.”

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    Examples of these narratives are found in various geographies: Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles), Kobo Abe (The Woman in the Dunes), Vladimir Makanin (Escape Hatch), Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go), José Saramago (Blindness), and Paul Auster (In the Country of Last Things). These novels, like many others, were all written within a couple of decades from each other in different parts of the world. What they have in common is an existential sense of absurdity and push for life, even in the most abject conditions.

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     I’ll stop in the last two examples. Saramago presents us with a set of characters who lack names because, being blind, they lost an essential part of themselves. They are defined either by their last actions, right before being infected with the white blindness, or by their relations between each other. We have the doctor, the doctor’s wife, the girl with dark glasses, and so on. There is a social critique that lies in the way each character relates to the other, and how they collaborate for survival just as much as they fight for it. Their situation is dire, it is unknown whether there is a cure for the illness, they lack even the most basic needs, and a tyrannical government has locked them up, only for them to create another tyrannical organization in their reclusion. And yet, they strive to live with the hope of a way out. They absurdly remain waiting for something they have no assurance that will come. Each one of them embodies an archetype, and thus the novel invites us to think about our individual and social roles when we are in survival mode.

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     Auster’s In the Country of Last Things is also a social critique of humans in a time of crisis, as well as a deep exploration of what makes humans human. In this case, the protagonist sets out on a search voluntarily and with many warnings. Yet, she goes ahead and enters this apocalyptic space.

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     The novel introduces us to a sordid city, where nothing is being produced, but rather recycled until dissolving. It’s a place where everything becomes uncanny, including one’s own skin and smell. A place where everybody is only for himself, but at the same time, each has to figure out who to trust, as it is impossible to survive alone. The futility of every step on the street weighs heavy on Anna, the protagonist, as well as on the reader. It’s just about time for the last things to disintegrate and stop existing one at a time. But the fact that we are reading Anna’s diary, what “she wrote”, as our narrator tells us, we are given hope, even during the most adverse moments of the story. As we navigate the city with her, we feel the pain and see the absurdity, but we also know that al least her diary made it out of the place.

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     An intriguing element in Auster’s work is the social classes and their missions: there are the Smilers, the Crawlers, the End-of-the-Worlders, the Free Associationists, the Fecalists, the Resurrection Agents, the Vultures, the Runners. The latter is particularly interesting. Their rather absurd mission is for each member to run their death run: “By the time a member is ready to make his death run, he has simultaneously reached a point of ultimate strength and ultimate weakness. He can theoretically run forever, and at the same time his body has used up all its resources.”

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     However, the moment in the novel that reflects the most on what human condition is about is the scene of the library, when Anna enters a room where a group of Jewish scholars are gathered doing what they would do in any other circumstance: reading, discussing, questioning the text in order to find further meaning. As opposed to everything else in the city, the written word can never be a “last thing”.

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     In our current conditions, it is illuminating to go back and read these novels again in order to dig and try to discover who we are as individuals and as societies in times of uncertainty, and what our potentials are—positive or otherwise—when life suddenly changes and we no longer hold the steering wheel.