Tag: Absurdism

The Non Existent Knight

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Of Empty Armor and Absurd Quests

The first time I read The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino, I imagined I had stumbled onto a lost Monty Python script—one written in secret, translated from the Italian, and perhaps smuggled through time in a hollowed-out codpiece. There it all was: the self-serious knight with no self, the ludicrous battles fought for reasons long forgotten, the crumbling machinery of Church and State, and a narrator who may be inventing the entire tale while cloistered in a convent. If Don Quixote and Waiting for Godot had a baby in a suit of armor, and then handed that baby over to the Pythons for finishing school, this would be the result.

Calvino’s Agilulf is a knight in shining armor—literally only that. He’s a suit of armor animated by sheer will and adherence to knightly protocol, a bureaucrat in a battlefield, a man so perfect he ceases to exist. The knights who surround him are petty, confused, and perpetually distracted. The Church is there to muddle things. Women disguise themselves as men. And all quests lead not to glory, but to farce.

Sound familiar?

Though there is a 1969 film version of The Nonexistent Knight—a strange hybrid of animation and live-action directed by Pino Zac—it’s worth remembering that Calvino’s novel came first, published in 1962. The film adaptation captures some of the book’s surreal, satirical energy, but it’s the novel itself that feels eerily ahead of its time.

Reading The Nonexistent Knight now, you can’t help but notice how much it seems to anticipate the tone and structure of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). The empty armor, the collapsing logic of knightly codes, the bureaucratization of the quest, the existential jokes delivered in deadpan—Calvino’s book often feels like a conceptual blueprint the Pythons could have stumbled upon, giggled at, and filed away until the coconuts were ready.

it practically is—albeit accidentally, accidentally Italian, and about 70% more philosophical, a dreamlike prequel where the Holy Grail hasn’t been lost yet, the knights are even more neurotic, and God is replaced by bureaucratic absurdity. In other words, imagine this madcap meditation on identity, purpose, and purity… performed by the Monty Python gang.

You’ve got:

A chivalric order reduced to absurd rituals, where no one remembers why they’re fighting but everyone insists on the forms—check.A protagonist defined more by concept than by character (Agilulf as pure will, Arthur as divine appointment)—check.

Knights whose quests collapse into petty squabbles, misunderstandings, or bureaucratic mishaps—check.A narrator who may be making it all up, filtering the story through a lens of religious guilt and romantic confusion—sounds an awful lot like the Holy Grail’s opening intertitles crossed with Terry Gilliam’s God character.

And the kicker: an obsession with the emptiness inside armor—literal in Agilulf’s case, symbolic in the Pythons’.Even the tone overlaps—equal parts high-concept satire, medieval parody, and lowbrow farce.

You could almost imagine The Nonexistent Knight sitting on the same shelf as 1066 and All That or The Goon Show scripts—slotted between Dante and Dada, passed around late-night at Oxford or Cambridge parties.

You’ve got:

A chivalric order reduced to absurd rituals, where no one remembers why they’re fighting but everyone insists on the forms—check.

A protagonist defined more by concept than by character (Agilulf as pure will, Arthur as divine appointment)—check.

Knights whose quests collapse into petty squabbles, misunderstandings, or bureaucratic mishaps—check.

A narrator who may be making it all up, filtering the story through a lens of religious guilt and romantic confusion—sounds an awful lot like the Holy Grail’s opening intertitles crossed with Terry Gilliam’s God character.

And the kicker: an obsession with the emptiness inside armor—literal in Agilulf’s case, symbolic in the Pythons’. Even the tone overlaps—equal parts high-concept satire, medieval parody, and lowbrow farce albeit accidentally, accidentally Italian, and about 70% more philosophical.

If the Pythons didn’t read Calvino, then we’re dealing with one of those eerie creative convergences where the postwar absurdist current broke the surface at the same time in Italy and Britain, each wearing a slightly different helmet.

But imagine, if you will, a dreamlike prequel where the Holy Grail hasn’t been lost yet, the knights are even more neurotic, and God is replaced by bureaucratic absurdity. In other words, imagine this madcap meditation on identity, purpose, and purity… performed by the Monty Python gang.

John Cleese as Agilulf the Nonexistent Knight

Cleese is perfect as Agilulf, the knight so perfect he doesn’t actually exist. With his trademark rigid posture, clipped delivery, and commitment to rules (even when the rules make no sense), Cleese turns Agilulf into a send-up of fascistic order—a man of armor and principle, who literally evaporates if you question him too hard. One can picture him ranting in a tent, correcting everyone’s Latin declensions while polishing armor that may or may not be empty.

Michael Palin as Rambaldo, the Naïve Young Knight

Palin brings his signature wide-eyed innocence to Rambaldo, a character who could wander straight into a shrubbery skit without batting an eyelash. Rambaldo’s quest for glory and love mirrors Palin’s turn as Sir Galahad, always enthusiastic and painfully confused by everything around him. Whether charging into battle or flirting awkwardly with Bradamante, he maintains that classic “Palin-in-peril” charm.

Eric Idle as Torrismund the Monk (Who Might Also Be a Peasant and a Revolutionary)

Let’s slot Idle into this role, shall we? Torrismund, with his secret lineage and shifting loyalties, is ripe for Idle’s gift at playing self-important everymen who talk too much and know too little. Cue a subplot involving mistaken identities, sermons interrupted by peasants complaining about the feudal system, and a song about the joy of not knowing who your father is.

Terry Jones as Bradamante, Warrior Nun and Lovesick Mess

Jones, never one to shy away from playing women, would be perfect as Bradamante, especially in the tragicomic scenes where she pines for Agilulf—yes, the guy who doesn’t exist. His performance would add a delightful awkwardness to Bradamante’s struggle between chaste virtue and frustrated libido, somewhere between Life of Brian’s mother and a lovestruck Valkyrie with a battle axe.

Terry Gilliam as the World Itself (And Probably the Narrator Nun Too)

Gilliam, the animating madman, wouldn’t act so much as warp the entire visual aesthetic of The Nonexistent Knight. Expect forests that look like melting chessboards, siege engines with eyeballs, and paper cutouts of saints wagging fingers. As Sister Theodora, the unreliable narrator who may be inventing the whole story, Gilliam would peer from behind an illuminated manuscript, giggling at inconsistencies and sipping mead from a fish.

David Chapman (a surprise guest star as the Horse)

Let’s get weird and have Chapman play Agilulf’s horse—a beast of burden that, much like its rider, has no actual personality but is imbued with strange dignity. Chapman, master of playing the ultimate straight man in a world gone mad, might even steal the show with a deadpan whinny or a stoic refusal to move in protest of metaphysical contradiction.

The Nonexistent Knight, in Monty Python’s hands, would be less a film than a fever dream of false identities, empty armors, collapsing authority, and slapstick heresy. It’s Holy Grail before there was a grail to lose—where the main joke is that the knightly ideal isn’t dead, but never lived to begin with. A crusade against meaning, carried out by fools, lovers, clerics, and the ghost of reason.

All that’s missing is a shrubbery. And maybe a foot that comes down from the sky and squashes Agilulf into a puff of existential despair.

I mean, the parallels are so specific, it starts to feel less like coincidence and more like a secret adaptation done under the cover of coconut halves.

Honestly, it’s the kind of literary mystery that deserves its own sketch:

Michael Palin: “Look, I told you, Agilulf doesn’t exist!”

John Cleese (in full armor): “Then who’s polishing my pauldrons, you silly man?!”

Terry Jones (as Bradamante): “Does this mean I’ve been flirting with a concept all along?!”

Makes you wonder if Holy Grail was the Pythons’ own answer to Calvino: “What if we took that metaphysical knight… and made him look even more ridiculous?”

HYPERREALITY

In attempting to place The Nonexistent Knight within the world of Monty Python, we inadvertently construct an accidental hyperreality—a blending of Calvino’s medieval archetypes with the absurdity of Python’s comedic sensibilities. By layering these distinct worlds, we’re left with a knight who, while rooted in the medieval tradition, is refracted through the absurdity of modern sensibilities. The Pythons’ characters often embody archetypes of authority, absurd heroism, and misguided purpose—traits that mirror the empty nobility at the heart of Agilulf’s existential crisis. When these elements are layered on top of Calvino’s original medieval constructs, the knightly archetype becomes a hollow, comedic parody of itself. Instead of representing valor and honor, these characters begin to stand for the performance of those ideals, trapped in an endless loop of their own absurdity.

The beauty of this process lies in the accidental nature of it. What begins as an attempt to merge two worlds—the medieval and the absurd—results in a multi-dimensional satire where traditional symbols of knighthood are completely distorted. The knights in Calvino’s narrative are already part of a decaying system, performing a ritualistic role without any true meaning behind it. The Pythons take this idea further, layering on top their own archetypes of bumbling authority figures, smug tricksters, and everyman fools. These characters, often self-important and out of touch with reality, further detach the archetypes of knighthood from any semblance of their original meaning. What we are left with is a hyperreal version of knighthood, one that no longer serves its original purpose but instead reflects the absurd, fractured nature of modern life.

This blending of archetypes—both medieval and Python-esque—creates a simulacrum of knighthood, a copy of a copy, detached from the original context. The more we attempt to analyze these characters, the more they slip away from any grounded reality. They become symbols of symbols, performers of roles that are increasingly irrelevant to the world around them. In a Baudrillardian sense, this is the essence of hyperreality: the collapse of the “real” into an endless chain of representations that no longer refer to any original source. What’s left is a culture where meaning is perpetually shifting, fragmented, and disjointed—a space where archetypes, once fixed and meaningful, have become absurd performances detached from their historical or cultural origins.

The Analogy-Industrial Complex

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Good evening, my fellow citizens.

Three decades ago, the creators of content were few and proud, toiling under the noble constraints of gatekeepers, editors, and that most ancient of traditions—actually needing to prove one’s worth. But today, my friends, we find ourselves at the mercy of a new and insidious force: the Analogy-Industrial Complex, a sprawling, self-perpetuating ecosystem where one man’s half-baked comparison is another man’s paid subscription.

In the councils of the thought-leadership elite, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Analogy-Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of intellectual mediocrity exists and will persist.

Every day, thousands—nay, millions—of individuals, once ordinary citizens, wake up to discover they have “a take.” With reckless abandon, they forge dubious historical parallels, likening the fall of Rome to their Uber driver’s bad attitude or claiming that the decline of jazz radio proves the death of the Western mind.

We face a grave moment, my friends, where Substack has enabled a proliferation of minds so free they need not be burdened by research, coherence, or the faintest notion of historical accuracy. Who needs expertise when you have a paywall? Who needs a publisher when you have a thousand fervent believers sending you $5 a month to confirm what they already think?

But the gravest threat, my fellow Americans, is not just the unchecked spread of these dubious think pieces but their alarming entanglement with the economy itself. We are building a world where GDP may no longer be measured in raw materials or even in clicks, but in the production of ever-more strained metaphors.

No longer do we produce steel, wheat, or even reality television. Instead, our greatest industry is the newsletter, where any man with a keyboard and an inflated sense of self can convince himself he is standing on the shoulders of Tocqueville, when in fact, he is merely riding shotgun with Malcolm Gladwell.

The Analogy-Industrial Complex is, after all, much like a kudzu vine—expanding unchecked, suffocating all other intellectual flora, and thriving best where nothing of real substance is left to grow. Or, if you prefer a more modern lens, it’s like an Amazon warehouse filled with takes instead of packages, each one delivered overnight with the speed of someone who read half a Wikipedia article and now considers themselves an authority.

But let’s not stop there. The Analogy-Industrial Complex is the algorithmic ouroboros, forever consuming its own tail in a feedback loop of diminishing insight. It’s a magician who keeps pulling the same rabbit out of the hat, insisting each time that it’s a brand-new trick. It’s an opium den for the overeducated but underemployed, a place where one can chase the next intellectual high by reframing the same five historical events to explain why vibes are now a legitimate economic indicator.

And, of course, like any self-sustaining ecosystem, it has its own natural predators. Just as the buffalo once had wolves, and the sea has sharks, so too does the Analogy-Industrial Complex have its critics—those rare voices who insist on boring, old-fashioned concepts like “evidence” or “historical accuracy.” But, much like a declining species in a mismanaged wildlife preserve, these critics are increasingly outnumbered by the ever-proliferating pseudo-intellectual influencers who can, with great confidence, explain why Ted Lasso is actually a perfect metaphor for 17th-century mercantilism.

And this is the danger, my fellow citizens. The machine no longer produces anything real; it simply feeds on itself. It is an infinite jest, a Wikipedia citation loop, a seminar where every speaker is quoting a speaker who is quoting a speaker who is quoting a speaker who misread the original source. It is the intellectual equivalent of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy—where, at some point, no one is quite sure what the original image was, but everyone agrees it was probably profound.

So what can we do? Is there an escape? Or are we, too, merely characters in an overextended analogy, doomed to wander this Substackian purgatory forever, searching for an original thought like medieval alchemists seeking gold?

I leave that question to you. But if you happen to come up with an answer, don’t forget to put it behind a paywall.

The Analogy-Industrial Complex isn’t just a self-replicating machine; it’s a hall of mirrors inside a snake eating its own tail inside a fractal where every iteration is a LinkedIn post about the fall of the Republic. It’s a funhouse where every door leads to another, slightly worse version of the same argument, until finally, you exit back where you started—but now there’s a paywall and a call to action.

To understand it, we must analogize the very act of analogy-making. It’s like a restaurant that serves only the menu, a cookbook that only describes other cookbooks, a recipe where the ingredients are other recipes. It is an industry built on the manufacture of metaphorical scaffolding, except no one remembers what the building was supposed to be. We are not constructing insights; we are endlessly refining the tools with which we might, someday, perhaps, in theory, construct them.

But the truth, my fellow citizens, is even worse. The Analogy-Industrial Complex is not just a self-licking ice cream cone; it is a self-licking ice cream cone that has written 3,000 words explaining why self-licking ice cream cones are a perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism. It is the intellectual equivalent of an Escher staircase where every step is a TED Talk about how Escher staircases symbolize the paradox of modernity. It is the content economy’s perpetual motion machine, powered only by confidence, midwit energy, and the inability to let an idea die in peace.

And so we must ask: is there an escape? Or are we merely trapped inside an analogy for the trap of analogies, endlessly layering meaning upon meaning until all meaning collapses under the weight of its own self-referential cleverness? Are we just passengers on a Möbius strip of overthought, desperately searching for an exit that turns out to be another newsletter?

Perhaps we are. Perhaps, in the end, all we can do is embrace it. Perhaps, my fellow citizens, we must become the thing we fear most: the people who, after all this, still hit “Publish.”