ABSTRACT
Absurdist literature’s emphasis on the futility of existence in an incomprehensible universe seems incommensurable with the postcolonial critique of the postcolony’s colonial legacy. In this chapter, I, however, demonstrate that it is precisely its awareness of a disjuncture between human systems of order and contingent reality that enables Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda to stage the local and provisional, rather than universal and timeless, nature of all knowledge systems, thereby exposing the absurdity and violence of the European assumption of certain knowledge in the colonial contact zone. As a counter to such hubris, this novel thematises a form of responsibility for others that is grounded in the uncertainty concomitant on a recognition of the artificiality of cultural forms of knowledge. I develop this argument on an ethical response to the futility of the semiotic project through a reading of John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary, a film in which an acceptance of the absurdity of existence leads to not only freedom but also responsibility for the other person.
