Creative Values as Panacea to Existential Vacuum in Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance
Abstract
Viktor Emil Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School, ushered a new era in psychotherapy with his idea of logotherapy which is radically different in nature and form from Freudian Psychoanalysis and Adlerian Individual Psychology. The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, as Viktor E. Frankl’s logotherapy is commonly hailed, veers around the proposition that the primary motivational force of human existence is to find a meaning in life. Though the meaning of life constantly changes from time to time, it can be found according to logotherapy in three different but interrelated ways: (1) by inventing a work or doing a deed (creative values); (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone (experiential values); and (3) by the attitude one takes toward the unavoidable suffering (attitudinal values). Logotherapy aims to unlock the ‘will to meaning’ and assist the patient in seeing a meaning in his life under any miserable condition. This paper seeks to read Paul Auster’s celebrated novel, The Music of Chance (1990) in juxtaposition with the fundamental aspects of the first way of finding meaning in life that is through engagement in creative values to unravel the journey of the characters from solipsistic life to social life, from irresponsibility to responsibility, from boredom to happiness, from dark pessimism to bright optimism, and from existential vacuum to richness of survival.
Keywords-Creative values, Logotherapy, Meaning, Responsibility, Survival.
Viktor Emil Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School, ushered a new era in psychotherapy with his idea of logotherapy which is radically different in nature and form from Freudian Psychoanalysis and Adlerian Individual Psychology. The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, as Viktor E. Frankl’s logotherapy is commonly hailed, veers around the proposition that the primary motivational force of human existence is neither ‘will to pleasure’ as propounded by Psychoanalysis nor ‘will to power’ of Adlerian concept but a sheer ‘will to meaning’. Logotherapy encapsulates the Greek word ‘logos’ in the sense of meaning, thus making itself a meaning-centred therapy to cure neuroses. According to logotherapy, the primary motivational force in human beings is to find a meaning in life. Frankl has termed this striving to find meaning as ‘will to meaning’: “…I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term ‘striving for superiority’, is focused” (Man’s Search for Meaning 104). Frankl quite confidently believed Freudian ‘pleasure principle’ and Adlerian ‘power principle’ to be the guiding forces of the small child and adolescent respectively, whereas logotherapeutic ‘will to meaning’ to be the controlling principle of the mature adult. Criticizing Freudian ‘pleasure principle’, Frankl argues that the pleasure principle is self-defeating because the more one aims at pleasure, the more one misses it. The very pursuit of happiness is what frustrates it. According to him, pleasure is never the goal of human strivings but rather is an effect, more specifically, the side-effect of attaining a goal. When one attains a goal, s/he finds a reason to be happy and pleasure ensues automatically and spontaneously from this reason for happiness. In the same vein, Frankl chastises the Adlerian psychology which places immense focus on status drive. A person who displays and exhibits his status drive, a la Frankl, will be dismissed very soon as a status seeker. Like happiness, success and fame are by-products of fulfilling one’s goal. Frankl considers the ‘will to pleasure’ and ‘will to power’ as mere derivatives of man’s primary concern, that is, his ‘will to meaning’:
…pleasure, rather than being an end of man’s striving, is actually the effect of meaning fulfillment. And power, rather than being an end in itself, is actually the means to an end; if man is to live out his will to meaning, a certain amount of power—say, financial power—by and large will be an indispensable prerequisite. Only if one’s original concern with meaning fulfillment is frustrated is one either content with power or intent on pleasure. (The Will to Meaning 20)
Though the meaning of life constantly changes from time to time, it can be found according to Logotherapy in three different but interrelated ways: (1) by inventing a work or doing a deed (creative values); (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone (experiential values); and (3) by the attitude one takes toward the unavoidable suffering (attitudinal values). Logotherapy aims to unlock the will to meaning and assist the patient in seeing a meaning in his life under any miserable condition.
Though Logotherapy is a medical treatment for curing neuroses, its doctrines based not on any medicines but on showing avenues to discover meaning in life are adequate to interpret and deconstruct literary texts which are the sites of iridescent human behaviour and the battlegrounds for multifarious human emotions. To understand the trajectory of emotions of the literary characters— their conflicts and dynamics—the tenets of Logotherapy will be of immense help and will enable a discerning reader to shed light on some unexplored issues in the given text. This paper seeks to read Paul Auster’s celebrated novel, The Music of Chance (1990) in juxtaposition with the fundamental aspects of the first way of finding meaning in life that is through engagement in creative values to unravel the journey of the characters from solipsistic life to social life, from irresponsibility to responsibility, from boredom to happiness, from dark pessimism to bright optimism, and from existential vacuum to richness of survival.
An ardent believer of universal or eternal values, Frankl put much emphasis on creative values as a fundamental route to discover meaning in life. Creative values get fulfilled by dint of creativity, unique talents, and strengths of individuals. Specific occupation of an individual is quite irrelevant here. What matters most is how the individual “works, whether he in fact fills the place in which he has happened to have landed. The radius of his activity is not important; it is important alone whether he fills the circle of his tasks” (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul 43). It is not the type of work per se which counts, but the manner in which one performs it. In this sense an ordinary person with absolute competence in his field of work and adoration for his job is superior to an erroneous and whimsical statesman. Meaning can be found and fulfilled by fully utilizing one’s exclusive talents to engage in life. Realizing meaning by engaging in creative action is a way of giving to the world and contributing towards making something which did not exist before. Logotherapy advocates an active approach to dealings with challenges in life. Frankl opines that “In view of the task quality of life, it logically follows that life becomes all the more meaningful the more difficult it gets . . .” (The Doctor 54). The responsibility in being human is fulfilled by the engagement in tasks. To Frankl “nothing is more likely to help a person overcome or endure objective difficulties or subjective troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life” (The Doctor 54). Every individual has an occupation or mission in life to do something concrete, something that only he or she can and should do. And in this something, he or she cannot be replaced by anyone else, in the same way that his or her life cannot be replaced by another person’s. Therefore, the role of each human being is unique as the opportunity given for its fulfilment is unique to each person. This paper has sought to explore the situations where the characters in Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance deliberately and sometimes unknowingly exploit work as a panacea to their plethora of problems and hardships in life.
Jim Nashe, the central character of the novel The Music of Chance, is a person whose “ontological certainties are inextricably challenged” (Martin 54). Mark Brown has aptly summarized the content of the novel in the following manner: “This book presents the different phases in the life of Jim Nashe as he passes from family man, to wanderer, to gambler, and then to the prisoner of unseen power of control and oppression in a mysterious meadow” (102). As Nashe is found to be a prisoner of unseen force, Aliki Varvogli assesses that “The Music of Chance begins as a road novel, but ends as a Kafkaesque parable” (27). Nashe is found to inherit a huge property from his unseen dead father at the beginning of the story. His wife Therese has already left out of his life, and Juliette, his daughter, lives with his sister. In such a lonely condition Jim goes out to the road with his car and decides to squander away all the money he has received as gift. Being denuded of family, Jim is leading a purposeless life and to regain freedom in life he follows the road. Nashe is savoring the road life as he finds limitless freedom in that life:
It was a dizzying prospect—to imagine all that freedom, to understand how little it mattered what choice he made. He could go anywhere he wanted, he could do anything he felt like doing, not a single person in the world would care. As long as he did not turn back, he could just as well have been invisible. (6)
However, this freedom is sure to turn out to be bondage as he is not binding his freedom with responsibility. Robert Wilson, an eminent psychiatrist and commentator of Frankl’s works, has rightly pointed out: “Your life will be meaningful if you learn to take the responsibility where you have freedom of choice” (Marshall 64). Meaning cannot be found automatically by rejecting the external authority. It must have to be found through responsibility because “Freedom without responsibility does not result in meaning, but in chaos” (Marshall 64)). Being human means being confronted continually with situations, each of which is at once a chance and a challenge. One can give answers to the challenges of life by responding to them responsibly. Freedom may degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of “responsibleness.” Logotherapy finds in “responsibleness” the very essence of human existence: “Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness; therefore, it must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible” (Man’s Search 114). Logotherapy is a psychotherapeutic method which seeks to bring man, the neurotic in particular, to an awareness of his “responsibleness.” As in psychoanalysis man becomes conscious of his instinctual drives, in logotherapy he becomes aware of the spirituality or existentiality associated with him: “Here it is not the ego that becomes conscious of the id but rather the self that becomes conscious of the self” (Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning 31). According to logotherapy, authentic existence is only possible when the self is deciding for itself but not when an id is driving it. Freud saw only instinctual as the unconscious, shunning the presence of spiritualism in the unconscious. Pungently criticizing this sort of Freudian precept, Frankl avers:
It might be said that psychoanalysis has “id-ified,” and “de-self-ified,” human existence. Insofar as Freud degraded the self to a mere epiphenomenon, he betrayed the self and delivered it to the id; at the same time, he denigrated the unconscious, in that he saw in it only the instinctual and overlooked the spiritual. (Ultimate Meaning 33)
Frankl is very cautious of using the term ‘spiritual’ which hardly carries any religious connotation. It rather indicates the unique human quality which is different from any animal on this planet. Spiritual, in this context, refers to what is human in man. While Freud considers human beings as “the automaton of psychic apparatus” (Ultimate Meaning 30), Frankl emphasizes the “autonomy of spiritual existence” (30). Man is not a sublimated animal but a repressed angel. Frankl makes his stance evident by proclaiming that “being human is being conscious and being responsible, culminating in a synthesis of both—namely, in one’s consciousness of his responsibility” (63). The happiness which Nashe relishes is merely a camouflage to hide his existential vacuum which opens up in the middle of the novel. He is staying days and nights inside the car and drives it aimlessly. The car becomes “a sanctum of invulnerability, a refuge in which nothing could hurt him anymore” (11). During his months of travel on the road Jim witnesses a number of fatal accidents and once or twice comes very near to the end. Nonetheless, he is far from being disturbed and relishes the fact that he has “taken his life into his own hands” (12). This life of Jim is explicitly bringing out the meaninglessness of his existence. He is completely run short of any worthwhile activity in life. As a corollary to this meaninglessness, he indulges in various sexual dalliances varying from a series of flings to one-night stands. Gradually Jim runs short of money and though he is not desperate, he senses a panic to be a pauper within one or two months. At this critical juncture he meets the young boy Jack Pozzi who is found to be “a thin, bedraggled man lurching forward in spasms, buckling and wobbling as if he were about to fall on his face” (18). Pozzi, a professional poker player, has been manhandled during a poker game and is running for life. Nashe helps him overcome his physical injuries and seeks his partnership in poker game. Nashe offers him ten thousand dollars to play a poker game with a billionaire duo called Flower and Stone. Nashe takes this last desperate chance to revive his moribund financial condition. However, in that game Pozzi loses all the money. Even, they end up indebting ten thousand dollars. Flower insists they work for building a wall around their property. Pozzi vehemently discards the proposal but Nashe desires to go with it. Nashe is not ready to let the opportunity of engaging himself in a responsible work go by so easily: “Bit by bit, Nashe found himself giving in to the idea, gradually accepting the wall as the only solution to his predicament. . .. the wall would not be a punishment so much as a cure, a one-way journey back to earth” (100). They are supposed to work for ten hours a day for fifty days to meet the debt of ten thousand dollars. The work being extremely strenuous and monotonous Pozzi fumes in anger. However, Nashe keeps a calm composure because “he saw the wall as a chance to redeem himself in his own eyes” and welcomes “the hardships of the meadow as a way to atone for his recklessness and self-pity” (116). Though Pozzi is never happy with the type of the work, even he hops in joy when the first row of the wall gets completed. This happiness is due to the realization of his utility and the finding of a meaning in life. The narrator adroitly captures the pride of the duo in the success of their prolonged hard work:
In spite of everything, Nashe could not help feeling a sense of accomplishment. They had made a mark somehow, they had done something that would remain after they were gone, and no matter where they happened to be, a part of this wall would always belong to them. Even Pozzi looked happy about it, and when the last stone was finally cemented into place. . .uncharacteristically, the kid then hopped up onto the stones and started prancing down the length of the row, holding out his arms like a tightrope walker. (134)
They derive happiness from the realization of their utility as well as contribution to the world. This sense of work is analogous to Frankl’s idea of work:
Work usually represents the area in which the individual’s uniqueness stands in relation to society and thus acquires meaning and value. This meaning and value, however, is attached to the person’s work as a contribution to society, not to the actual occupation as such. Therefore, it cannot be said that this or that particular occupation offers a person the opportunity for fulfilment. In this sense no one occupation is the sole road to salvation. (The Doctor 118)
Logotherapy teaches people to see life as an assignment. The more one grasps the task of his life, the more meaningful life appears to him. The discussion of the text evidently portrays the journey of Nashe and Pozzi towards successful survival through their participation in creative values. Engagement in a particular work—be it playing poker or building a wall—enables them to defeat their depression and disappointments to lead a happy and active life. It is the work which brings back and fosters the urge of survival. The works they perform encourage them to survive fundamentally in two ways: by wiping out their inner vacuum and by instilling a sense of self-transcendence. Accomplishing a particular task necessitates a certain amount of responsibility and subsequently, imparts a sense of fulfilment. This sense of fulfilment is something which gives meaning to our existence and helps us have a fruitful survival.
Works Cited
Dr. Avijit Pramanik, Assistant Professor of English, WBES, Department of Basic Sciences & Humanities, Ramkrishna Mahato Govt. Engg. College, Purulia, West Bengal