A Glossary of Literary Terms

Drawn once again to the Irishman for the solace he so often provides, but resisting in the hope that I might make sense of what's happening all by myself, I pick up my new-to-me-but- previously-owned A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and turn to page one, noting that the very first entry is, Absurd, Literature of the. Joyce, Kafka, Sartre and Camus, then Ionesco are all invoked, and finally near the end of the entry the Irishman himself is brought forward and the words from one of his texts quoted: "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful."

Not good when nothing happens, is he saying? Not good, a depopulated landscape which nobody enters or exits? Is this not the imagination speaking to itself, the place of which the Irishman himself wrote, "when you listen to yourself it's not literature you hear?"

I flip through the pages of the glossary, past the L's and the T's, to the books' final entry, Wit, Humor, and the Comic.

I asked an expert once, a man who'd studied the Irishman's writing and performed his works on stage, if he thought the writer was a comic or a tragedian. He said it was a good question with no definitive answer, noting that the Irishman had subtitled his most famous play, A Tragicomedy.