Albert Camus said, and I'm paraphrasing, the only important philosophical question is the question of suicide. Should we go on living?
I can't answer that for you. But here at the dawn of a new year, I pose a similar question. The great philosophical question of Goosebumps. Should we go on reading Goosebumps?
And at their core, they are the same question. Should one live or kill themself, should one read Goosebumps or... kill themself? For if life has no meaning, then surely the act of reading Goosebumps has no meaning, and if reading Goosebumps is meaningless, then it can only mean that Goosebumps books themselves are meaningless.
And yet the act of reading anything is the endeavour to find meaning. With each page, we search for a meaning that may or may not be there, just as we live each day frantically scrounging for a meaning in life that we may never find.
And this is what philosophers call the Absurd. The search for meaning in the absence of meaning - or, at the very least, the absence of the assurance of meaning, depending on whether you're more of a Camus or a Kierkegaard about it.
But is life and Goosebumps meaningless? Is our failure to find meaning the same as there being no meaning, or is that just a fault in our perceptions? Perhaps, in the absence of tangible meaning, we need to undertake a new exercise.
Let's not look for meaning, but instead, let's look for signs of the absence of meaning. Does life or Goosebumps present us with an absence of proof of meaning, or a proof of absence of meaning? Well, that's a big ask on the topic of life for one small blog, so let's instead focus on Goosebumps.
After all, as we've established, what is true of Goosebumps vis a vis meaning can be said to be true of life. The question of suicide is the question of Goosebumps.
So then, let's look at this week's Goosebumps, starting with the cover art and ask: does this confirm the Absurd?
Huh...
Yeah... I guess that kind of settles that.
Looks pretty definitive to me.
So here we are, at the start of January, the fresh faced year of our Lord 2022 asking the one truly, staring at the Absurd, forced to reason with the break-down of the illusion of meaning and purpose. And now that we have satisfied that all important philosophical question of Goosebumps, as Camus demands we must, we come naturally to the following great question of philosophy:
The fuck did I just read?
'Goosebumps #17: Why I'm Afraid of Bees' is perhaps one of the great works of Absurdist fiction. It is equal parts Kafka and Camus, presented as a horror by way of Cronenberg. A lesser critic might call it derivative, but such an approach would only misunderstand not only the intent of the novel but the context in which it exists - ie. a world devoid of meaning. To be derivative suggests that 'Why I'm Afraid of Bees' is taking from something that it does not own, but as the book demonstrates time and time again, nobody owns anything. Your life, your body, your feelings, none of them are you or belong to you.
Gary 'Lutz The Klutz' Lutz - the name no doubt a reference to the famous 'Amityville Horror' series, further cementing this as a work that bears its lineage like its heart on its sleeve - leads a miserable life. We see his day-to-day world as one of suffering. He is bullied, mocked, and isolated by his family and peers, and even animals routinely attack him. Gary does nothing to bring it on himself. There is no karma or cosmic order demanding his suffering. It is simply the life he lives. And since he can find no comfort anywhere in his existence, he only wishes to escape it. Gary wants out of life.
Gary, like many Absurdist protagonists, is faced with torment without reason and has recognised that there is nothing to be gained by enduring it. He has recognised the absence of meaning in his life.
Escape comes for Gary in the form of a 'Person-to-Person Vacation' service that allows him to swap bodies for a week with another person. Gary signs up for the service, and the service finds him a match who wants to swap bodies with him. But during the transfer process, one of Gary's neighbour's bees climbs into the mind-transfer machinery and Gary finds himself stuck as a bee.
Gary has many shenanigans as a bee, all driven by the need to return to his original body and the life he left behind. Along the way he interacts with his sister's pet cat, a variety of insects, his family, his neighbour, the bee hive he now belongs to, and Dirk, the child who has taken Gary's body. Almost all of these encounters are hostile and Gary is nearly killed a dozen times. Eventually Gary is able to communicate with Ms Karmen, the woman who works for the vacation service, but she explains that Dirk is refusing to give up Gary's body and so she cannot help him. She then accidentally locks Gary in her office where he may well starve to death.
Eventually Gary confronts Dirk and tries to force him to hand over his body by tricking the hive into swarming Dirk-Gary. Caught up in his rage and hatred, Gary commits the one bee act he had sworn never to do: he stings Dirk. This spells Gary's end. A bee cannot sting a person and live.
Dying slowly, Gary flies out into is back yard to die under the maple tree, in his favourite spot to rest as a human. But when Gary awakens, he is human again. Why? How?
Such pedestrian questions about continuity and reason rightfully go unanswered. One might engage with the dying-under-the-tree moment as a metaphor for Gary reconnecting with his humanity by finding the one thing that, in human life, made him happy.
But let me remind you:
This book has no meaning.
There is no metaphor. And while the final moments see Gary rejoicing to be back with his family, showering them with affection, even befriending Dirk (who is back in his own body) before sticking his face in a flower to suck up some pollen, you will no doubt feel the temptation to see this as a parable about appreciating your life, do not give into that temptation.
There is no reason for Gary's change. The things that made his life torment as a human continued to make his life torment as a bee. Gary's arc defies narrative tradition. It defies reason.
Because there is no reason.
There is no meaning.
And do we ever learn why Gary is afraid of bees? No. The book begins with Gary afraid of bees. He is afraid of bees during the book - and the most genuinely frightening moment in the book is when Gary is forced into the hive and is crowded antenna-to-antenna with bees - and at the end of the book, he no longer fears bees, but feels kinship with them. As a bee, he failed to live as one of them, now comfortably emulates one as a human. He promises to visit them at the hive.
Gary isn't afraid of bees.
The book's title is a lie.
No matter what angle you try to view this novel, it defies understanding and rationalising. It has no purpose. There is no meaning beneath the words.
'Goosebumps #17: Why I'm Afraid of Bees' is the Absurd made manifest.
And so what do we do with that? How do we live in a world where Goosebumps - and thus life - has no meaning?
Well Albert Camus had an idea, and Gary Lutz lives up to Camus' ideal of an Absurd Hero. Without any impetus, without any reason, Gary at the end of the story is happy. He has embraced this wild random life of suffering and body horror and against all rationality, decided to be happy, decided to do what makes him happy. And in Gary's case, that's sticking his nose in flowers and slurping up pollen. Does it make sense?
No. But why would it? Why should it? Sense and reason are what demanded that we search for meaning in the first place, and the universe can only deny us that. So live senselessly. Rebel against your reason, rebel against the meaninglessness of your life, and live without purpose. Anything you might choose to define your life is ultimately, equally worthless, which only means they're all equally worthwhile. There are no right answers, so answer anyway you like. That is Camus' and R.L Stine's answer to that great important question of suicide.
The rational answer is death. The irrational answer is happiness.
Embrace the Absurd. Embrace meaninglessness. Embrace happiness.
Alternatively, it might just not be a very good book...
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