beth (1603) and Carson McCullers’s The heart
is a LoneLy hunter (1940). Tragedy, according to
Aristotle, is a journey by the audience into futil-
ity and then a rebirth from despair. Macbeth goes
insane when accosted with the pointlessness of
action:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. (5.5.19–23)These famous lines are glossed as the essence of
futility and how, being aware of the deceptive nature
of time, we will surely be wary of actions similar to
Macbeth’s. The underlying idea is that there still
remain ways to make our lives less than futile, if only
we can avoid imitating Macbeth. After all, accord-
ing to Aristotle, tragedies purge us even of despair.
When, by definition, the awareness of futility cannot
conceive of anything beyond the limitations of the
present moment, this leaves alone any soul whose
freedom is worth attaining.
Futility in literature is not an isolated concept.
Rather, it is located firmly within the repressive pro-
cess of Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle, or the id.
According to Freud, when our desires are thwarted,
we start sinking into despair, which creates within
us a sense of uselessness or futility. This is not to be
confused with the ideas of existential philosophers
such as Jean Paul Sartre (1905–80), who saw the
world as a stage where every action is meaningless.
Existentialism posits that while our actions may be
meaningless, they are influenced by inner spiritual
struggles. Much later, after the great surge of exis-
tentialist writings, we find the French philosopher
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) establishing futility as
the end result of his forays into literature and texts.
Derrida argued that it is futile to search for ultimate
meanings in texts, including patterns in historical
thought.
Futility, then, has a long ideological history, from
the laments of the preacher in Ecclesiastes, “Vanity
of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all
is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour
which he taketh under the sun?” (1:2–3); listless-
ness to St. Augustine of Hippo’s concept of acedia
which had such a hold on the British romantics; to
the agnosticism that we find in Friedrich Nietzsche,
Émile Durkheim (Suicide, 1897), Freud, Sartre, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein; and then through Michel
Foucault, Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and their dis-
ciples to such present-day classics as the best-selling
writers Stephen King (The Stand, 1978) and Cormac
McCarthy (Blood Meridian, 1985; The Road, 2006).
We find deep despair in the heroic codes of old: The
Babylonian Gilgamesh, the Scandinavian beowuLF
(Anonymous), Widsith, The Wanderer, and The Ruin
seamlessly spill over to the famous “Dance of Death”
poems in the Middle Ages. In Europe we find the
uselessness of trying to find meaning in life in the
works of Franz Kafka (1883–1924; especially The
Trial, 1925) and Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936).
American literature, too, obsesses about the useless-
ness of life and its struggles. Famous examples are
Herman Melville’s Moby-dick (1851) and, to
an extent, J. D. Salinger’s The catcher in the
rye (1951). Salinger’s teenage protagonist, Holden
Caulfield, even finds it futile to consider people as
individuals. He just calls everyone he meets “pho-
nies,” much in the same way as Antoin Roquentin,
the main character of Sartre’s Nausea (1938), con-
tinually feels nauseous in his utter disgust at the
futility of breathing to live on.
Futility also figures as a theme in non-Western
literature. Whereas the Christian concept of history
is forward-looking with clear divides, the Eastern
sense of history is circular. In the Hindu, Bud-
dhist, and Jain traditions, events are considered as
repeating themselves endlessly. As such, God is
not thought of as a separate entity as in Christian-
ity and Islam. Hinduism sees the world itself as
an emanation of the godhead, or Brahma. Thus,
all sorrow is momentary and born of ignorance of
our final ends and our true natures. We indeed are
“amritasya putra” (Shvetashvatara Upanishad, 2.5) or
“sons of the Immortal.” While Buddhism is silent
about the presence of God, Jainism denies it. But
in both these systems of thought, what occurs now
will repeat itself in some manner later, giving eternal
scope for personal and social improvements. Thus,
there is present a conscious negation of futility in
Eastern ancient literatures, including those writtenfutility 39