Absurdity and Meaning-Making

Both Carroll and Escher, as we’ve touched on, play with perception—Carroll with language and logic, and Escher with space and geometry. But what makes absurdity in their work so intriguing is how it undermines our usual sense of coherence and opens up new perspectives on reality. Absurdity doesn’t just confuse—it invites us to question the rules we take for granted.

Absurdity as a Challenge to Meaning: The Alice books, for instance, are structured around paradoxes and nonsensical events that twist logic to the point where things can be true and false at the same time. It's as if the text is pushing the reader to recognise that meaning itself isn’t always as rigid as we think. Take the Cheshire Cat’s famous line, “We're all mad here.” It’s a statement that plays with the boundary between logic and nonsense, yet it feels strangely profound. The more absurd things get, the more you realise how we create meaning by following particular rules of interpretation, which, as it turns out, are not as universal or stable as we imagine.

In Escher’s work, the same kind of destabilisation occurs. His paradoxical staircases or impossible structures don’t just make us question how space works—they reveal the limits of our assumptions about dimensionality, balance, and perspective. In a way, his art offers a visual language of absurdity—things are both real and unreal at once, forcing us to reconsider how we build our experience of the world.

Absurdity as a Gateway to Other Forms of Meaning: What’s especially fascinating is that in both Carroll and Escher’s work, absurdity leads to a different kind of meaning—one that isn’t constrained by ordinary logic or perception. It’s almost like absurdity is the language of deeper, more hidden truths. Just as quantum mechanics deals with the paradoxical nature of reality, absurdity in art and literature exposes something beneath the surface of our typical understanding.

The same could be said for myth, in fact. In Campbell’s terms, myths don’t always offer straightforward truths—they communicate through symbols, metaphors, and paradoxes. They, too, rely on absurdity in their own way, speaking to deeper, more archetypal truths that transcend normal experience.

Absurdity and Meaning Potential: If we look at absurdity through the lens of meaning potential, it’s like we’re playing in a field where the usual rules of coherence don’t apply. It’s a space where the raw affordances for meaning are left unstructured—just like raw potential waiting to be actualised. Carroll’s logic games or Escher’s impossible geometry reveal how structures of meaning are not set in stone; they are fluid, flexible, and malleable.

When we engage with absurdity, we’re actively constructing meaning in the midst of chaos. The fact that we can find meaning even in the most nonsensical scenarios is part of what makes absurdity so powerful. It shakes us out of habitual meaning-making and forces us to build new interpretations, new relationships between elements, often in playful and unexpected ways.

So, What Does This All Mean for Our Own Inquiry? We’ve been talking about the absurd as a tool for intellectual exploration, and it’s clear that by applying it, we’re not just creating chaos—we’re engaging in a deeper process of meaning-making. Just like with myth and metaphor, absurdity opens up new dimensions for understanding. It’s a way to challenge assumptions, break down old boundaries, and invite creative connections between ideas that may seem completely unrelated at first.

Absurdity, like myth, doesn’t always offer clear answers—it invites us to rethink the question itself. And maybe, just like the Cheshire Cat's grin, the answer we’re after isn't so much about reaching a final conclusion but about playing with the process of inquiry itself.