The Floating Opera: loving the world’s absurdities

I read The Floating Opera when I was 18 years old, and thought it was a well-done but tame “realist” novel, a warm-up to the author’s later “post-modernist meta-fictions.” Re-reading it decades later, I think Floating is a model of what a novel can be – a delightful entry into a unique world, with a new way of seeing everyday life, imbued with a vision of love and delight at the world around in all its absurdities and pleasures.

Underneath the appearance of a rambling monologue, there is a tight structure and powerful narrative driving to the very end. No, I don’t find the end very convincing, even in its darker revised 1967 version, but it falters in a very revealing way.

Throughout the novel and especially during the climax inside the showboat Floating Opera, the author clearly sees significance everywhere in the ordinary details of life. His perception of significance cracks the false facade of nihilism, because someone who sees significance is also seeing into the invisible reality beyond the surface, and the author’s voice radiates with an awareness of the transcendental in the ephemeral.

Hence, the story of The Floating Opera throws the superficial nihilism of the narrator against the rocks of the narrator’s awareness itself and produces a triumphant shipwreck of a false ideology.