In Absurdist literature "absurdity" is a technical term referring to the divorce of thought from reality, or, as it is variously expressed, the split of word and object, meaning and reality, conciousness and the world. It is, in short, the percieved distance between man as the source of meaning and intelligence and an independent and thouroughly distinct reality. The problem which these writers set themselves is to describe as faithfully as possible what that object is like when it has become stripped of humam meaning. And ... the description most frequently offered is that the object alternates between extreme heaviness and excessive lightness.
Not all absurdist writers emphasize both in such a balanced equation, some, like Sartre and Camus, stressing heaviness, others, such as Beckett, emphasizing lightness. Earlier accounts of absurdity tend toward the heavy side of the equation, later accounts, toward the light side. The heavy characterization also tends to be a statement of the problem of absurdity, while lightness is more often an attempt to formulate a solution.
...The literary problem of absurdity is basically a meta physical problem of being, that the lightness/heaviness distinction is the percieved correlate of the metaphysical distinction of being as essence and being as existence, being in the sense of what a thing is and being in the sense simply that the thing is; on the other hand, the "is" of predication, as in " A unicorn is a mythical beast" and, on the other hand, the "is" of existence, as in "There is no unicorn." As a preliminary definition, we may say that "existence" refers to the object as it is in itself, quite apart from any human interest in it, while "essence" is our interpretation of that object. The central concern of absurdist writersis the metaphysical distancing of the word and object, thought and reality, essence and existence.
-from: Metaphysics of Absurdity by: H. Gene Blocker Ohio University
" The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to."
" [The] divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the felling of absurdity."
- Albert Camus