was reading this and found our hero listed among the "ten great works of existentialist literature" !!!
(sorry it copied as blocktext.)
Run with the Hunted, by Charles Bukowski
If one of the misanthropic characters from an existential novel got up and walked around in real life, he’d probably look a lot like Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was one of America’s greatest and most controversial poets and novelists. Alienated, alcoholic, lonely, poor, and even homeless for long stretches of his life, he wrote semi-autobiographically about the world he lived in, a world of flophouses and bars, racetracks and menial jobs, prisons, hospitals, and graveyards. Oh, and libraries. Being homeless and/or unemployed much of his life, he spent vast quantities of time in them, reading voraciously without guidance or structure, bias or preconception. A literary man without pedigree, Bukowski didn’t write about an existential perspective; he lived it. He once said of Camus that he wrote about death like a man who had just had a fine steak dinner. In his late middle age, he became famous and successful, but for much of his life, there were few steak dinners for Charles Bukowski. Run with the Hunted is a posthumous collection of his short stories, poems, and excerpts from his novels, arranged “chronologically” — not in the order he wrote them, but in the order of the period of his life from which they’re taken. The result is a fictionalized biography, a literary portrait of the man as he re-created himself in his work. It’s an act of self-creation, and in that there is, of course, some artifice. But what strikes the reader is the degree to which his writing is raw, unvarnished, and uncolored by romanticism or apology. In true existential fashion, he stubbornly refuses to look away from the world as it is. What emerges is a kind of existential saint, one who adheres to no moral code but who consistently acts in what Sartre calls “good faith,” seeing the world and acting within it in a way that’s totally honest and doesn’t abdicate responsibility. The world he presents isn’t one you’d normally call pretty, but it’s often beautiful despite Bukowski’s refusal to doll it up. His characters and situations all have an immediacy and an intense humanity. Many of his poems read almost like personal letters, and you get the rare experience of feeling a direct, unadorned connection to the writer and, ironically, to all humanity and our shared human condition. Bukowski certainly has his nihilistic tendencies, which would place him in direct opposition to the existentialists. Much of his work is deeply cynical, even resigned. But poems like “Nirvana” and “The World’s Greatest Loser” help illuminate, in a way no philosophy (and perhaps no novel) could, the beauty and wonder that you can see in this imperfect world when you accept it as it is without falsifying it or romanticizing it, and without hiding its scars or justifying its ugliness in terms of some more perfect world of which it is a part. Bukowski arranged for his tombstone to read simply, “Don’t try.” Acceptance or surrender? Maybe a bit of both.
(sorry it copied as blocktext.)
Run with the Hunted, by Charles Bukowski
If one of the misanthropic characters from an existential novel got up and walked around in real life, he’d probably look a lot like Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was one of America’s greatest and most controversial poets and novelists. Alienated, alcoholic, lonely, poor, and even homeless for long stretches of his life, he wrote semi-autobiographically about the world he lived in, a world of flophouses and bars, racetracks and menial jobs, prisons, hospitals, and graveyards. Oh, and libraries. Being homeless and/or unemployed much of his life, he spent vast quantities of time in them, reading voraciously without guidance or structure, bias or preconception. A literary man without pedigree, Bukowski didn’t write about an existential perspective; he lived it. He once said of Camus that he wrote about death like a man who had just had a fine steak dinner. In his late middle age, he became famous and successful, but for much of his life, there were few steak dinners for Charles Bukowski. Run with the Hunted is a posthumous collection of his short stories, poems, and excerpts from his novels, arranged “chronologically” — not in the order he wrote them, but in the order of the period of his life from which they’re taken. The result is a fictionalized biography, a literary portrait of the man as he re-created himself in his work. It’s an act of self-creation, and in that there is, of course, some artifice. But what strikes the reader is the degree to which his writing is raw, unvarnished, and uncolored by romanticism or apology. In true existential fashion, he stubbornly refuses to look away from the world as it is. What emerges is a kind of existential saint, one who adheres to no moral code but who consistently acts in what Sartre calls “good faith,” seeing the world and acting within it in a way that’s totally honest and doesn’t abdicate responsibility. The world he presents isn’t one you’d normally call pretty, but it’s often beautiful despite Bukowski’s refusal to doll it up. His characters and situations all have an immediacy and an intense humanity. Many of his poems read almost like personal letters, and you get the rare experience of feeling a direct, unadorned connection to the writer and, ironically, to all humanity and our shared human condition. Bukowski certainly has his nihilistic tendencies, which would place him in direct opposition to the existentialists. Much of his work is deeply cynical, even resigned. But poems like “Nirvana” and “The World’s Greatest Loser” help illuminate, in a way no philosophy (and perhaps no novel) could, the beauty and wonder that you can see in this imperfect world when you accept it as it is without falsifying it or romanticizing it, and without hiding its scars or justifying its ugliness in terms of some more perfect world of which it is a part. Bukowski arranged for his tombstone to read simply, “Don’t try.” Acceptance or surrender? Maybe a bit of both.
