Yesterday I took my little sister to the mall to pick up a DVD and look for anything related to Alice in Wonderland. She’s really, really excited about the upcoming remake — and it makes me sad to think that this younger generation won’t be as critical of these so-called “films,” these CGI landfills. But I’ve complained enough about that, and I’m trying to be a good big brother. (Also, she has a stellar taste in movies overall.)

We went to FYE for the DVD and then to Hot Topic for the Alice products. I used to like Hot Topic in high school, but back in the ’90s it was quite a scarier place. Yeah, they still have the Slipknot t-shirts, but they also have Super Mario and Spongebob. And right now, the whole front section of the store is devoted to a Disney movie that hasn’t yet been released. Granted, it’s also a Tim Burton movie — but I doubt there will be anything too horrific about it.

Three days ago I received an email from a reader concerning a post I wrote in July 2008 (you may want to read that post before this one). He was confused about the logic I used when discussing the virginity of Henry David Thoreau, which in turn was related to skepticism over the sexual activity of Chris McCandless (protagonist of the book and film Into The Wild).

I asked the reader to post his email as a comment on the original article, but then I figured I would just put it in a brand new one. His note made me think that I hadn’t expressed myself very well, so I want to elaborate. Here’s his email:

I left off last time explaining how Zeitoun is the only “new release” book I’ve ever read. I zoomed through it in eight days, since I had checked it out from the local library (the book was sold out everywhere from Christmas until about a week ago — but I hadn’t had a library card since I was a kid, so that’s fun). My main reason for reading the book was to get a sense of what happened to New Orleans and the people who called the city home. Even though the book was written from the perspective of a single family, I thought it would still feel epic in scope (it didn’t).

I did enjoy learning about the Zeitoun family though. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian American man who settled in New Orleans after about a decade of living and working at sea. A friend introduced him to his wife Kathy, a Louisiana native who was raised Southern Baptist but had converted to Islam on her own. Kathy has a son from a previous marriage, and she and Zeitoun (as everyone calls Abdulrahman) have three daughters together. In my opinion, Eggers’s focus on this quintessential “American” family is the strongest aspect of the book. The result was that I learned more about Islam than I had ever known before.

You may have noticed from my discussions that I don’t read much modern literature. I think Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Choke might be the only works of narrative prose (i.e. – fiction or creative nonfiction) published within the last 25 years on my bookshelf at home. (Correction: I also have Nick Horby’s novel High Fidelity, Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction work Into The Wild, Tao Lin’s short story collection Bed, and one or two others.) There are a few reasons for this. First, I’ve been trying to catch up on many of the “classics” that I missed out on while skirting the reading requirements in high school English classes. More often than not, I managed to patch together a project without reading the entire book — and N64’s “Goldeneye” seemed much more important at the time.

The second reason is more complex, but it relates to my skepticism over the value of contemporary publishing. I’m sure there’s a long catalog of works that try to explain the reasons for the degraded efficacy of modern literature: people watch too much TV and movies, play too many video games, aren’t educated enough, or are tasteless, unrefined cretins. That’s without even mentioning the publishing industry’s concerns over lagging profits. Of course, the assumption there is that the publishers deserved whatever success they had enjoyed up until recent times.

I don’t usually announce (or even pick) a New Years Resolution, but this year I came up with one that suits me well. While most people choose to do something (and let’s be honest — it’s usually an attempt to work out more), I will be restricting myself from doing something. What’s the something? Writing really long posts on this blog. It’s not that I intend to write less; it’s that I want to redirect my efforts into different types of writing — namely essays and short stories. And since I’m working full time right now, I only have so much time and mental energy for this sort of thing.

I’ll probably being much as I did before, but only the shorter work will appear here. In other words, any time an article goes beyond 600 words, I’ll post it as an essay on Supraterranean or attempt to publish it elsewhere. That’ll make this more of a blog and less of a column (currently most posts run around 1,000-1,400 words!).

In early December 2009 I submitted my lengthy essay “Indecision Over Michigan” to the Cooperative Press, a branch of the group Michigan Writers that helps emerging writers publish a chapbook in the literary genre of their choice. It’s a program intended to educate new writers on the entire publication process. As it says on their website, “Selected authors share the publishing costs and marketing responsibilities with Michigan Writers in return for the prestige of being published by a press that prints only carefully selected manuscripts.”

I thought it sounded like a great idea, and I was totally willing to foot the $250 for the actual printing of the books. I even rushed to cut my essay down from almost 12,000 to just under 10,000 words, to stay within their submission guidelines. I printed and mailed the literary spawn, and I waited patiently. Then on Sunday night I got an email notification that my essay was rejected. They received 14 submissions and had picked three for publication.

The imminent release of Tim Burton’s (epic failure) remake of Alice in Wonderland has me thinking about that story. What’s that? I’ve already offended you? You think it’s going to be wicked awesome? Well, you should stop sniffing glue. Have you seen the new official trailer? It looks like a CGI monster snotted all over some film and they called it a movie.

Phew. Now that I got that out of my system, let me get to the point. I think the long-running appeal of absurdist stories like Alice in Wonderland (based, let’s not forget, on the book by Lewis Carroll) is related to a few themes that aren’t often acknowledged. The Wizard of Oz is a similar example. In each case, a young woman bored or frustrated with her surroundings dreams (or hallucinates) that she travels to a land where things are more exciting and unpredictable, but a land that’s also more dangerous and terrifying. (Also note: the 1986 cult classic Labyrinth, featuring David Bowie and an early performance from Jennifer Connelly).

I expect to be re-reading books more often in the years to come. So many that I’ve read seem distant and vague now, probably because I encountered them before I had gotten enough reading practice. If I haven’t explained it yet, I was a late-blooming reader. I never saw the point when I was younger… or maybe I was just too busy playing Nintendo. Either way, I didn’t retain much from books I read in school — even the ones I enjoyed — or the first few I read on my own volition.

Earlier this year I re-read and wrote about The Great Gatsby. Then this summer I cracked open my copy of Lord of the Flies. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I first read the book (it seems like it was ninth grade). And I didn’t remember every major plot development in the story. What I do know is that it was the first book to affect me profoundly. The Call of the Wild came close, but it didn’t reach the same level of real-life application.

One of the things I didn’t recall was how much I related to the character of Ralph. Of course, I may be relating to Ralph more as a 26-year-old than I did as a 15-year-old. I’ve been through so much more in the past decade than I had experienced in adolescence. Perhaps that’s why teachers yap and yap about symbolism in books like LOTF; it’s a short-cut way to explain the story in comfortable terms.

I think it’s funny how the textbook symbolism nonsense often gets carried on longer than other important elements of the story. Before this re-read, I glanced at user comments on Amazon.com. One person stated frankly, as if it were an undeniable fact, exactly what Ralph, Jack, Piggy, Roger and Simon “stood for.” The comment author was implying that these were cardboard cutouts inserted for only one specific purpose. I wasn’t convinced in high school, and I’m not convinced now. But then again, I never accepted the lazy ways of most English teachers. What’s the point of teaching symbolism if you don’t acknowledge each and every time that there isn’t just one explanation — that there is no right answer?

I also hated when teachers would suggest that every word in a book was there because the author wanted it there. They’d argue that every phrase and passage must have a specific purpose or the author would have omitted it. That’s bullshit. Or at least, if it’s true, then none of those books are literature or art; they’re textbooks.

But as I was saying, I don’t think the main characters can be adequately explained with a single interpretation — though they do have their obvious traits. Ralph is a benevolent, intelligent leader devoted to goodwill and progress, while Jack is a violent, disturbed leader fueled by insecurity and anger. Piggy is the brainy problem solver who provides fire with his glasses despite constant rejection from the other boys. Roger is a sadistic creature who waits until Jack leads a tribe to unleash his fury. Simon is the mystic, the schizomaniac, the visionary, and who prefers solitude to the creeping madness of the tribe.

I acknowledge that Simon is the most interesting character in the book, but he’s also the most complicated. He’s the only one who can see past reason and logic and fear and anxiety, and get a sense of the bigger picture of life. He’s also the only one willing to climb up the mountain and examine the so-called “beast,” instead of going to war over frail beliefs. Simon tries to save the boys from themselves by offering the truth, and for that the mob destroys him (sound like a Bill Hicks segment?).

Here one is tempted to refer to him as a “Christ figure” who seeks to awaken the crowd to the truth around them and who is then crucified for it. I’m not sure if that’s appropriate. Maybe this kind of 20th Century literature was pointing towards the necessity for a new kind of leader, a post-Christian spiritual guide. But any attempt to describe such a leader in common terms only alludes to trite stereotypes of the past (although that could just mean that my theory is far from complete).

Obviously the concepts of leadership and governance were at the front of Golding’s mind during the writing process. “Everybody wants to rule the world,” as Tears for Fears sang over ’80s synth pop. But there are endless ways that people go about exerting their influence on the world, and endless aims that they hope to achieve through that influence. Aside from Simon’s story, another mysterious element of the book is Ralph and Jack’s development into arch-enemies. It brings to mind all the “fevered egos” (to reference Bill Hicks again) that run our world today. Most of those egos are trying to make money, regardless of what other goals they may purport. Greed isn’t much of a factor on the island, so the two oppositional goals take shape as (1, Ralph’s) keeping the fire lit in order to be rescued and (2, Jack’s) having fun, hunting pigs, wearing tribal paint, and generally acting like savages.

Somehow this brings to mind the American Civil War. It seems that, in addition to the more discussed abolition of slavery, part of Lincoln’s high regard arose from his determination to hold the states together. He thereby guaranteed that those two very different cultures and often conflicting forces would have to live with one another. So are we ultimately better off because of that… or might the United States have been better split into two separate countries? (Try to answer that question without considering your fondness of Florida’s beaches.) The older I get, the less tolerant I am of the conservative American mindset. And yet, it will always be there, no matter how I feel about it — and (of course) regardless of geography.

It’s clear that Ralph didn’t benefit from having to tolerate Jack’s psychotic tendencies, but Ralph didn’t necessarily have the best plan for island life either. As I was saying before, I relate to Ralph in a very unique way. I had an experience like his while acting as president of Spartan Ski Club at Michigan State University. I wanted to lead the group to progress through logical reasoning, but always felt that some of theme resented me for it. My reasoning was simple: stay organized and do the hard work in advance so that events are more fun for everyone. Their reasoning was more like, “We do this for fun. This isn’t a job. I don’t care about your rules. I do what I want! Let’s get drunk!” We even had a talking stick at our meetings, like the conch! So club leaders were left with the choice of being alienated (an maybe punished) or abandoning the quest and joining the savages. Naturally there’s not much room for Simon’s enlightenment or spiritual awakening in a ski club, but you get the point.

I also related unexpectedly to the afterword by E.L. Epstein, in which he wrote: “Conrad was appalled by this ‘heart of darkness,” and existentialists find in the denial of this freedom the source of perversion of all human values. Indeed one could, if one were so minded, go through the entire canon of modern literature, philosophy, and psychology and find this great basic drive defined as underlying the most fundamental conclusions of modern thought” (p. 206).

Upon reading this I thought, “That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” And, appropriately, Lord of the Flies was one of the first creative works to propel me down this winding path. I still haven’t gotten to the level that Simon had reached, but I intend to keep the fire lit… or keep hunting… or keep gazing at a rotting pig head on a stick — or maybe all three.

We left Albert Camus as he was dispensing of all the leap-takers — the philosophers who, instead of bearing the weight of existence on their own, found some shortcut to assist them (I’m referring to the previous post, if you missed it). The most frequent of Camus’s targets here was Kierkegaard, who was reportedly a mysterious character until the last installments in his body of work. According to Camus, his final words reeked of a religious attitude. “Christianity is the scandal, and what Kierkegaard calls for quite plainly is…’the sacrifice of the intellect’” (p. 37).

Different authors took the existential line of thought in many directions, but as Camus pointed out, they did tend to justify the absurdity of life with some sort of claim to the eternal. Kierkegaard was probably the only philosopher connected to Existentialism who ever defaulted to a purely religious conclusion. But still, one can’t help but wonder how someone could pick apart all the layers, witness pure existence in its true form, and then justify it by concluding that there’s something that exists above and beyond our immediate life. You’ll recall that even Steppenwolf’s Hermine says all true actions live on in eternity.

This is what bothered Camus, and I think it’s why he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus. As I said in the last post, it’s a very subtle change in outlook between the Existentialists and Camus’s Absurdism — but it is a change nonetheless. The Existentialists (as I’ve come to know them) were remarkably skilled at describing the “nausea” brought on by life, but they were terrible at suggesting what to do about it. Those with suicidal tendencies before their existential investigation were often left with even greater death-bound impulses. In short, Existentialists sought a way to live in spite of the absurd, while Camus, on the other hand, chose to live for the absurd.

“Living is keeping the absurd alive. […] One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. […] It may be thought that suicide follows revolt – but wrongly. […] Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. […] That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. ” (pp. 54-55).

Those familiar with my rants may be thinking of Henry Miller. Back in March I wrote two posts (on Mar 11 and Mar 21) about Miller and George Orwell, after reading that Orwell had criticized Miller’s style of “protest.” To sum it up, Orwell’s style was to attack the governments that had swung too closely to totalitarianism. Miller’s style was more of a protest against all of existence — hence why I think it fits in with Camus’s suggestions.

I’ve only read three of his books, but it’s clear to me that Miller experienced more happiness in his life than most of my favorite writers. That’s just one of the reasons why he’s an enigma, why I can’t cross his name off and keep moving down the list…so to speak. Camus and Miller both understood that, though the absurd does seem to negate our natural tendencies in life, it in no way prevents us from adapting to its conditions. Human beings are the most adaptable creatures on this planet! And our imagination is more powerful than any other tool we possess!

Those who have come this far in the struggle are often compelled to write about it. I know not what drives a man to write — even looking at myself. I know I was bored, depressed, unsuccessful, lonely, etc…and I was deeply inspired by the personal fiction of Jack Kerouac. But at the time, it just seemed like something that would be a worthwhile activity even if nothing came of it. Even if I didn’t get paid for it or become famous because of it, writing seemed like a purposeful way to spend my time. Now three years have gone by and — after an arduous process of self-realization — I still feel essentially the same.

In the concluding section of Sisyphus, Camus suggests that a life of absurd creation is, without a doubt, a life worth living:

“He must give the void its colors. [...] A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. Likewise, a man’s sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. […] A succession of works can be but a series of approximations of the same thought. […] But if those failures all have the same resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he posesses” (pp. 114-115).

“The great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality” (p. 115).

“In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. […] To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s own fate. […] There is no frontier between being and appearing. […] The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings” (p. 117).

But you see that creation is of utmost importance. To continue to create is a man’s way of revolting against the demanding and often unrewarding nature of creative activity. In other words, hardly anyone will ever become famous for writing. Most who realize this after hoping for fame will stop writing. Those who continue do so in an absurd fashion, because it will appear to bystanders that the writer is wasting his time. The absurd creator disagrees:

“He knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life…in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. […] The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (pp. 122-123).

After two posts I still haven’t explained the myth itself. Sisyphus is a character sentenced by the gods to the underworld where he must roll a heavy rock up a mountain, whereupon it just rolls back down. This would drive most to despair (if not insanity), but Sisyphus is clever. His victory lies in his continued activity, which he performs without hoping that it will end. By simply pressing on, he revolts against the gods who devised this terrible state of existence. Camus said he prefers to think about the calm moment when Sisyphus reaches the top of the mountain — when he can take a deep breath, survey the land around him, and then stroll leisurely down the slope again.

But don’t be mistaken. Camus provides no manual, nor could there ever be one. Every man troubled by existence must imagine his own happiness. I haven’t quite accomplished it yet, but I feel a lot better about the process than I did before. And with that said, I may be moving on to the next phase in this process of inner discovery. As always, you’re welcome to come along for the ride.

“Even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.” Albert Camus clearly felt no need for an element of surprise in The Myth of Sisyphus, his long essay that won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. This statement appears in the first paragraph of the Preface, before the book even officially begins. I’m a curious individual, and lately I’ve been unusually interested in this subject, so my response was something like, “Okay. Convince me.”

I can tell you right away that this will be a two-part analysis of Sisyphus, because I feel that I must provide an overview of the topic of suicide in literature and philosophy — at least how I’ve perceived it. Then there are two aspects to Sisyphus itself: an eloquent statement of the dilemma, and the closest thing to a solution that Camus — or anyone else, for that matter — has ever devised.

Camus discloses that the book was written in 1940, which I find extremely interesting, if only in terms of what came before and after it. Just scanning my favorites, Henry Miller published his first works in the ’30s — but Kerouac’s first book wasn’t published until 1950. Even earlier, Hesse’s Steppenwolf saw publication in Germany in 1927. I point these out initially because it seems that Sisyphus is a landmark in 20th Century philosophical development — yet in some ways it represents a transition that was never completed (I’ll expand on this later). By transition I mean that Camus essentially broke with the Existentialists of the ’40s and ’50s, most prominently Jean-Paul Sartre.

Camus and Sartre both recognized the absurd nature of life, but while Sartre and others sought to transcend it, Camus thought that required a leap beyond human certitude. As Camus put it, “I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone” (p. 40). Seen in this light, Sisyphus becomes a sort of poetic mathematical exercise in which Camus affirms the absurd life instead of evading it. And according to the Wikipedia page on Absurdism, this book is practically the manual.

Camus argues his case succinctly, acknowledging how deeply he could go into this subject, but at all times subjecting himself to a rigid set of guidelines. The main point of the book appears early: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy” (p. 3).

He attempts many definitions of the absurd condition:

“Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering” (pp. 5-6).

“What is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?” (p. 20)

“That struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest). […] A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it” (p. 31).

This blog is riddled with discussions of Existentialism and Absurdism. Two posts that come to mind focus on Sartre’s Nausea and Hesse’s Steppenwolf. But while Sartre’s Roquentin never really considers suicide, Hesse’s Harry is obsessed with the concept. He finds a “Treatise of the Steppenwolf” that explains:

“Suicides present themselves as those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals, those souls that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and molding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the mother, back to God, back to the all. Many of these natures are wholly incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide, because they have a profound consciousness of the sin of doing so. For us they are suicides nonetheless; for they see death and not life as the releaser” (p. 48).

“All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. …It is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s own hand” (p. 49)

But that’s it???!!! That’s all he could offer us? A sense of despair that drags one through life? Isn’t that just making oneself a prisoner of inertia, unable to improve upon any aspect of existence and thus resigning onself to it? Of course I should give Hesse more credit than this. Steppenwolf is a novel, not an autobiography or a philosophical essay. If you know the ending (I won’t spoil it!), it’s believable that Hesse was mocking Harry’s mode of living, even after the awakening inspired by the treatise and his wise lady friend Hermine. But even when more concrete suggestions arise, they’re often vague and difficult to adapt to the context of the 21st Century.

Plus, this book was published over a decade before Sisyphus. But that’s not to say that the literary community made a convincing progression beyond Harry’s position in the subsequent decades. The most prominent example is Jack Kerouac. He wasn’t a philosopher, but he remains one of the most beloved literary figures in American history. In his books he claimed that he could never commit suicide because he was a Catholic and that would mean he’d go to hell. His alternative? He basically drank himself to death. Big Sur outlines part of this irreversible decline.

Obviously the world of literature is very familiar with alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide, but Kerouac was always his own protagonist and thereby immortalized his story. And when examining this twisted path, it’s impossible to maintain a separation between philosophy and psychology. But this existential despair is an important characteristic of modern humanity, and one that cannot be ignored. In Steppenwolf, Hermine tries to calm Harry by saying, “The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity” (p. 153).

Camus recognized this tendency in existential thought, and he made a point of ruling that out of his possible conclusions in Sisyphus. “I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide. […] They always lay claim to the eternal, and it is solely in this that they take the leap” (p. 42). The “leap” mentioned here is applied to any bridge beyond what a human can comprehend. That more commonly means religion, so it was strange for me to see such a term applied to Existentialism, which I had previously seen as an answer of sorts.

In reality Existentialism is a statement of the problem; it’s where Camus begins and quickly dashes off. He’s not convinced by the idea of eternity, whether in organized religion or just broader spirituality. He’s not content to stubbornly hope that the basic condition of life will eventually improve.

Camus began to wonder if the desire to escape is an even bigger problem than the nausea inspired by existence. In other words, what if there was a way not only to endure the situation, but even capitalize off of it? It’s a very slight twist of the mirror that could produce an extraordinarily different outcome. “The danger…lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest – that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge” (p. 50).

Next I’ll explore what one is to do on that dizzying crest, and why and how Camus felt it could be accomplished.