THE PSEUDOCOUPLE

What a wonderful time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd! The most popular representatives of this genre are Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. (The most popular unofficial representative is The Stanley Parable.) Beckett's plays have a reputation for being boring and pretentious among people who had to read them for school, but I promise they're actually deeply playful in, you know, the face of the absurd. They're explorations of a very particular philosophy in a very particular historical context, but I also think they're fully "gettable" by vibe alone.

So. You know what else is an absurdist play to me? Any status-quo franchise that goes on for more than ten years. Some of those guys are waiting for Godot! Some of them are Sisyphus, happy.

That's not a new take, and it's also not one the source material would embrace. It's kind of reading it for form instead of content. After all, a huge Lupin theme is that their lives ARE made into meaningful stories by their will, which is distinctly non-absurdist (existentialist, maybe). So I understand that some people may find that take cynical. I find it extremely exciting.

And anyway: Beckett conceptualises a particular character constellation, the pseudocouple, in his absurdist plays. A kind of love-hate relationship that arises out of the impossibility of defining yourself without an other, the impossibility of full self-possession that drives you to attempt other-possession! Very Hegel of him. And when I found out that this dynamic was a properly theorised literary concept, I was ecstatic. Because it's just kind of generally my favourite thing ever.

And yeah alright it's also a great Lupin/Zenigata framework, if you were looking for one. Should be noted that both of them can inhabit both roles! And some version of this could probably be applied to most of Lupin's relationships, I just don't see any of the others with that ominous edge of oncoming doom.

Here's some excerpts from "From Narcissistic Isolation to Sadistic Pseudocouples" by Elsa Baroghel:

Crucially, upon realising that a self-sufficient relationship with
one’s self is impossible, the narcissist is driven to seek – or invent – an
‘other’ in order to restore sufficient distance between subject and object
to enable possession of some aspect of that self in the other. “I would
that what I love were absent from me” cries Ovid’s Narcissus in
Beckett’s translation (1999c, entry 1115, 158).

Master and servant depend on each other; the narcissistic subject
seeks a lovable image of himself in the other’s dependency upon him,
but soon becomes dependent in turn on the other’s dependency, giving
rise to an endless regression. Hence the circular stasis in which the
pseudocouple is caught and which governs the resulting ethics of “nec
tecum nec sine te” (neither with you nor without you). In his essay
“The Anethics of Desire,” Shane Weller analyses these atypical entities
as “neither single nor double, characterized by endless reversibility, the
subject oscillating between love-objects and the object itself oscillating
ceaselessly between being a love-object and a hate-object”. Hamm
and Clov are indispensable to one another, even if the foundation of
their relationship is essentially utilitarian.

The ‘other’ is therefore deployed as a palliative device in order to
distract the subject from his own existential sufferings without curing
their cause; in a nutshell, the ‘other’ is given the function of painkiller.

When there are no more painkillers and the instrumental nature of
the relationship has eaten away the possibility of reciprocal love,
cruelty arises as the only expedient capable of momentarily soothing
the torments of consciousness. Here, the Schopenhauerian subtext
suggests more serious power dynamics in these paired relationships, in
response to the strivings of the will to life: “[the subject] will seek to
mitigate his own suffering by the sight of the suffering of others, which
at the same time he recognizes as an expression of his power. The
suffering of others now become for him an end in itself and a spectacle
in which he delights” (Schopenhauer, 226). Sadism becomes the
ultimate mode of existence of the pseudocouple; for their part,
Hamm and Clov incarnate a “torturer/victim relationship in which violence is
the principal form of contact and communication with the other”
(Weller 2006, 15).
 
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Ooh, we’re talking about absurdism and Lupin? I was reading Albert Camus’s The Rebel at about the same time I was getting back into Lupin, so the two hold hands in my heart! (I don’t think Camus and Lupin’s philosophies actually overlap that much, but they are both French(?) have both fought Nazis, I guess.) I agree with lobac that Lupin’s themes probably lean more existentialist than absurdist, although I think there’s an argument to be made that the impulse to narrativize life is an example of the absurd!

(Personal tangent, can be skipped)
Personally, I find absurdism to be a pretty empowering antidote to the kind of nihilism that begins with “nothing in life matters” and ends with murder or authoritarianism, which I do find to be really cynical. It’s like, “No, you can’t just cope with a chaotic universe by killing or constructing your own rigid order! You have to embrace the contradiction! Every day, you are going to wake up and live with the absurdity of it all!”

I totally see the existentialist, meta-textual readings of the franchise, especially since Lupin doesn’t have a narrative “end”. I haven’t read The Myth of Sisyphus yet, but to paraphrase Kate Bush, the characters really are running up that road, running up that hill, with no problems.

I also haven’t read Beckett or The Phenomenology of Spirit, either, but I see what you mean about Lupin and Zenigata having those vibes! Especially in those episodes where Zenigata actually catches Lupin and has an entire crisis about who he’ll be when he doesn’t have Lupin around anymore. The Baroghel excerpts are interesting, and I definitely want to look into that article!

Now I kind of want a Lupin episode where Jigen and Goemon are waiting for Lupin to come back from a heist, and it actually does play out like Waiting for Godot. :loop_laugh:
 
Hell yeah. Lupin's whole thing is definitely an attempt at coping with the absurd. And, of course, he has the recommended freedom and richness of experience down - but then, the question is whether Lupin is actually that free, if he has his narratives to play out and his sense of self to sustain, if he's doing everything to avoid facing the absurd...

And I agree :) I think full acceptance of the absurd is just kind of considered more unpalatable than "make your own meaning". I'm not married to either philosophy, anyway, but it makes for really unique, passionate fiction, with incredible, fundamental stakes in something like the act of sitting around and bickering.
 

Agudoodles

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Now I kind of want a Lupin episode where Jigen and Goemon are waiting for Lupin to come back from a heist, and it actually does play out like Waiting for Godot. :loop_laugh:
That reminded me about a fic I've once read! I just had to go and search for it again:


I must say I've read Waiting for Godot a lot time ago, but from what I remember the fic is a nice parody :)
 
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