How Did I Get Here?

Abstract

How Did I Get Here? Speer Morgan How did I get here?" is a recurring question in one of my favorite songs, "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads. It is an anthem to the uncertainty of human existence that suggests the existential feel of much of this issue. While several post–World War II philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus are called "existentialists," they were less a school than a group of related thinkers stretching back to the nineteenth century. Their ideas are akin but quite individual. They came from an understandable beginning, as late eighteenth-century industrialization created an urban working class. Marx was predictive of existential thought due to the threats to individual freedom that he argued would happen in developed capitalist economies, regardless of the label used by political leaders for their economic systems. It is hardly surprising that after the second devastating great war of the twentieth century, philosophers would write about alienation, absurdity, and the tendency of humans to follow the crowd. If we are not born into a benevolent and inherently meaningful reality, we can create authentic selfhood only through conscious choice and action. Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus describes this as one of the most basic paradoxes of existentialism: While Sisyphus must forever roll and then reroll the boulder up the hill, condemned by the gods to powerless rebellion, he understands his condition; he is fully aware and, in some small way, therefore victorious. Existential thought in general is not a simplistic denial of all combined human effort. We are conscious and free and must live with [End Page 5] personal choice, and with that comes responsibility. We also must participate in collective or joint action to do anything important. Such larger recognitions go back to the early thinkers regarded as existential—Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche—and continue through to the late ones such as Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Because some sources of mass communication pour out misinformation (a fact acknowledged as early as Nietzsche's time, when newspapers were often notoriously "bought" by political and commercial powers), we must combat it through our own awareness and knowledge. We fight these same battles today. By using Greek myth to exemplify the central paradox in existentialism, Camus shows that its emphasis on choice and present action does not deny previous culture. Literature comes from our struggle to understand reality and deal with human issues such as virtue, malice, death, separation, rites of passage, and epiphany. It is at once mythic and existential. Literary realists such as Charles Dickens sometimes used mythic or fairy-tale-like characters and environments—monstrous bad guys, innocents, impossible odds—with protagonists who are alone in an unfriendly world that includes little human community or status. Whatever they achieve they do themselves, through choice and deed. It is no accident that Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, three of the important twentieth-century Black American novelists, also shared both existential and mythic approaches to issues of race and the human condition. They lived with the general destructiveness of the twentieth century and the rise of racial discrimination and white supremacy. Like the Invisible Man at the end of Ellison's novel, their protagonists are left trying to turn on as many lights as possible, even if their choices be Sisyphean. The fiction in this issue reveals how the impact and legacy of the past can sometimes create a new and disorienting present. Devin Murphy's story of boyhood friendship, "Reclamation," is a tale of two boys living near the shore of Lake Erie whose friendship is built on the fact that both are partial outcasts who have problems at home. A death and shared secret sever their friendship. Years later, the protagonist tries to revisit the place where they grew up and reconnect with his childhood friend. What happens leads him to reconsider the past and adopt a new openness to the present. [End Page 6] Kristen Iskandrian's "Picnic, Ocean, Hatred" is a story of two days, twenty years apart. For two decades, since the accidental drowning of her preteen daughter, Iskandrian's protagonist, Katie, has...