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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.

Wallace actually discusses both fiction and literature from the 1950s on, but focuses on a few main points or theories. He asserts that the one thing tying together TV and fiction circa 1990 was irony (i.e. – “A statement that, when taken in context, may actually mean the opposite of what is written literally; the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention, notably as a form of humor.” – Wiktionary). He develops this argument by discussing why people watch TV in general, how TV got so ironic, and what happened when fiction tried to reclaim the irony throne it had held since long before ironic TV got so pervasive.

Part of the reason I found the essay so interesting is because, as an adolescent, I was an eager consumer of television. My time spent growing up can be mapped as a steady path from Sesame Street to Nickelodeon to Saved by the Bell to…well…to all the sitcoms aimed at people over the age of 12. Then I got to high school and realized that most TV shows are retarded (for lack of a better word). And things only got worse after that: Survivor and American Idol led the way for “reality” TV, while dumbed-down dramas still dictate a large portion of adult viewership.

Now, looking back, I’m sort wondering how it had gotten so bad before I was even born. Enter Wallace, who unforgivably calls TV a “malignant addiction.”

“By 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment, ‘spectacles vehement and untutored and rude’ that aimed ‘to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste’” (p. 36).

“Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality” (p. 37).

As you can see, Wallace didn’t let himself resort to calling TV an evil device intended for brainwashing or mind control. I’d rather not be so forgiving, but he argues the point well. Still, he doesn’t let TV off the hook for being capable of such high levels of manipulation, spread across the areas of psychology, emotion, and behavior.

“The modes of presentation that work best for TV…are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more…well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it” (p. 39).

“The most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability” (p. 63).

“…Also, inversely, trains us to relate to real live personal up-close stuff the same way we relate to the distant and exotic, as if separated from us by physics and glass…” (p. 64).

After Wallace outlines the core of the problem, he introduces a subgenre called Image-Fiction. He claims that this style was closely tied to television, not only as a reflection of the various content on TV, but also in that it was an attempt to reclaim irony for the world of literature. The peak of this subgenre, according to Wallace, was the then-brand-new novel My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner. The work “incorporates elements of science fiction, cyberpunk, tabloid journalism, and advertising slogans; and as the book is also filled with TV and pop-culture references (e.g. to kung-fu films) and literary allusions it may be difficult to read without the wide-ranging knowledge of current affairs” (Wikipedia).

In other words, Leyner created a novel as random, flighty, and all-encompassing as TV itself. Unfortunately, though, Image-Fiction was (arguably) a fruitless effort.

“The reason why today’s Image-Fiction isn’t the rescue from a passive, addictive TV-psychology that it tries so hard to be is that most Image-Fiction writers render their material with the same tone of irony and self-consciousness that their ancestors, the literary insurgents of Beat and postmodernism, used so effectively to rebel against their own world and context. And the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch” (p. 52).

Wallace takes this as a dead-end for contemporary fiction, in that the lone device television (“E Unibus”) had become just as much a consumer and recycler of culture (“Pluram”) as it was an entertainment culture provider. These fiction writers couldn’t escape what Wallace called TV’s aura. But he also claims that rebellion in the face of institutionalized irony is pointless.

“…Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” (p. 67).

I especially liked a quote from another author: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage” (Hyde, p. 67). This reminded me of Pitchfork Media, and the essay I wrote about that organization – which brings up interesting questions about modern times, post-Y2K. Even if the Internet and other media have started to wean us as a culture from the grip of TV, do we still remain a society of ironic rebels with no clue how to construct a better future for ourselves? At the time, Wallace thought that having more control over content – the type, sequence, timing, etc. – would make no difference. Furthermore, he seems scared of the idea of anarchy, as if having any one device or organization determine his content input was a source of comfort. I’d like to think that the Web 2.0 explosion, with stars including YouTube, Last.fm, and Facebook, is a sign that people do appreciate having such control. But I’m looking at the subject 20 years later, so I have that advantage.

Wallace admits that his missing escape plan might be due to his lack of foresight or imagination. I have to agree with that notion, since I founded Supraterranean on the hopeful idea that we can further develop our creative ambitions through new forms of expression and interaction. This reminds me of The Matrix: once you stop trying to bend the spoon with your mind, you realize that only your mind can bend, not a metal object (…and after all, there is no spoon). We’re beginning, as a culture, to learn how to bend our minds, when once we had convinced ourselves (or had been convinced by TV) that it was impossible. What I’m trying to say is that, when we’re ready, TV will become obsolete. And that process is already under way.

But then again, I have been in a better-than-normal mood lately, so that could be swaying my conclusion.

In Gessner’s words: “Consider that our first great national literary flowering constituted, in part, a rebellion against what was thought of as academic, effete and indoors-y in English writing.” A lot of his worries mirror my own. I often find myself wondering, is it possible to fulfill my drive to write without banishing myself to the wilderness? Can someone balance career obligations with creative impulses? Are security and benefits worth sacrificing an artistic lifestyle that is both consistent and unbridled?

“Something is lost by living the divided life,” wrote Gessner. “Intensity perhaps. The ability to focus hard and long on big, ambitious projects. A great writer, after all, must travel daily to a mental subcontinent, must rip into the work, experiencing the exertion of it, the anxiety of it and, once in a blue moon, the glory of it.” The job provides a “safety net,” some social activity, and (in the professor case) summers off for writing. But the job also means less adventurous writing, and less time for reading and creating. The author seems inconclusive until the end of the article, when he suggests that he wouldn’t miss teaching as much as he misses the writing life.

Once I finished reading, I went on the web to research the author. In some ways he seems to be a nature writer — but that’s an oversimplification. For example, I read on Amazon that his book A Wild, Rank Place: One Year on Cape Cod starts with the nature focus, but also covers family drama, battles with cancer, and drug use.

That wide array of topics presented through a condensed lens seems like exactly the type of thing that I’d like to do in the future. For the first time, I feel as though I’ve possibly found a writing mentor who is still alive. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to enroll at UNC Wilmington where he teaches. I’ll just have to communicate with him another way. (UPDATE 12/9/08: I emailed David Gessner and he recommended his book Sick of Nature, since it contains discussions about these types of difficult decisions).

Below: A video of David Gessner giving a guest “lecture” on transformation in literature.

Link:
David Gessner’s Website