He is Allen the absurd

In his most recent writing, Woody Allen8217;s universe is as bizarre as ever.

I keep wondering if there is an afterlife, and if there is will they be able to break a twenty?8221; Woody Allen memorably wrote in Without Feathers. In the same collection, he lamented, 8220;Today I saw a red-and-yellow sunset and thought, How insignificant I am! Of course, I thought that yesterday, too, and it rained.8221;

More than any other American writer, Allen put existential dread on the map. He has two books out now, The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose, a compilation of his three previous books, and a new collection, Mere Anarchy.8221;

If the film Annie Hall is to be taken as autobiography, Allen was a philosophically traumatised child, who stopped doing his homework when he realised the universe was expanding. If not, we know his intellectual sensibility was formed in the 1950s, when the French existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus argued that life has no God-given purpose, and that only man8217;s choices and struggles give it meaning.

When Allen started out doing stand-up comedy in Greenwich Village clubs, young people sat in cafes reading books like Sartre8217;s Being and Nothingness, and debated man8217;s fate late into the night. Allen found himself turning to the same questions. 8220;What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?8221; he wondered. 8220;In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.8221;

Always lurking in his prose is what he regards as the great cosmic joke. A man in Getting Even asks his uncle: 8220;Could it not be simply that we are alone and aimless, doomed to wander in an indifferent universe, with no hope of salvation, nor any prospect except misery, death, and the empty reality of eternal nothing?8221; The uncle replies, 8220;You wonder why you8217;re not invited to more parties.8221;

Allen has recreated himself as an artist many times. His film-making has evolved from gag-filled movies like Sleeper, to the more refined sensibilities of Interiors. And his public image has suffered because of his private life.

But his comic prose has remained remarkably consistent. The humor is certainly as absurd as ever. In Thus Ate Zarathustra, he insists that the 8220;great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup?8221;

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Allen offers a bemused brand of skepticism. 8220;Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine,8221; he declares, 8220;shall fall by pestilence so why bother shaving?8221;
Existentialism long ago went out of fashion. But Allen remains, in his way, one of its most prominent exponents.
ADAM COHENNYT