The Stranger thus charts a pathway toward self-conscious affirmation, providing the metaphysical ground from which the positions first struggled with in Two Sides of the Coin and Nuptials and then reflectively articulated in The Myth of Sisyphus could emerge.10 It has cleared away the theoretical terrain, while existentially instantiating the necessary personal perspective. “‘The Stranger is the zero point,” comments Camus (TRN, 1924). But it is to The Myth that I must now turn to begin to harvest the fruits of this perspective.
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TheMyth of Sisyphus
The important thing … is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments (MS, 38).
MEURSAULT AND THE MYTH
“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future, and no gospel keeps its meaning for him” (MS, 31—2, E, 121, 1436).1 Meursault, who had been “devoid of hope” since long before we met him, finally became conscious of that fact in his encounter with the chaplain. He realizes that the chaplain has nothing to offer him, except the illusion of another world that would turn his attention away from the few precious moments that still remain for him. The “good news” is a lie. Confronting his own death, he struggles for a response that can sustain him. But he cannot —or, at least, those of us who are still just emerging from a no-longer-believable system of ultimate Truths, and that includes Camus, cannot—so easily dispense with the often inarticulate need for absolutes. The All or Nothing has profound attraction.
He is offered a solution in which all the past contradictions have become merely polemical games. But that is not the way he experienced them. Their truth must be preserved. . . .
My reasoning [Meursault might have said] wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evidence is the absurd. It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe, and the contradiction that binds them together. . . .
He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn’t fully understand, that it is not
obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of pride, but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in store, but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to him an idle consideration. An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels- his irreparable innocence. . . . Hence, what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. . ..
Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. … To abolish conscious revolt is to elude the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experience. . . . Revolt … is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. . . . [It] is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation which ought to accompany it.. .. It may be thought that suicide follows revolt—but wrongly. . . . [The absurd] escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. . . . The contrary of suicide, in fact, is the man condemned to death.
That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it. The sight of human pride is unequaled. … I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry on alone.
Consciousness and revolt… are the contrary of renunciation. … It is essential to die unreconciled and not of one’s own free will. Suicide is a repudiation. The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself … for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance (MS, 49-50, 54-5).
It is at precisely this point that we left Meursault—or, rather, we turn, with him, to reflect upon the meaning of our common situation and the earthly possibilities that are the legate of our absurd fate. Such is the significance of The Myth of Sisyphus.
PERSONAL ROOTS
The Break from Religion
If it is a consciousness such as Meursault’s that gives rise to the meditation on the possibility of living “without transcendent appeal” that is The Myth, it is not at all surprising that Camus should locate the triggering event in a confrontation between a man condemned to death and a Catholic chaplain holding out the promise of immortal life. For The Myth is pervaded by traces of an agonized break with Christianity and may actually make complete sense only to one who has shared similar roots. Absent a consciousness once steeped in the eternal, the struggle to face life on its own terms—”without the aid of eternal values, which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe” (MS, Preface)—without falling into the abyss of nihilism, hardly makes sense. The Myth is thus a testament to a personal struggle that echoes the trauma of a civilization.
While Camus has gone to significant lengths to objectify the content and deemphasize the importance of personal religious struggles, early manuscripts leave clear traces of their imprint.2 Rather than speaking impersonally
of what is demanded by the absurd, Camus had written, “What I demand of myself is to live solely with what I know. . . . I want to find out if it is possible to live without appeal” (E, 1440).3
The personal effort of will is underscored by assertions such as claiming to “hold certain facts from which I do not want to separate myself,” in which passage the want is ultimately replaced by the more impersonal cannot (E, 1439; MS, 51).
This effort at depersonalization needs to be seen in the light of a culture breaking away from Christianity—and, for the Frenchman Camus, that meant primarily from Catholicism. It should therefore not be surprising that Camus refers to the absurd as a “trinity.” “What other trinity can I recognize,” he had asked, before changing trinite to verite, “without giving rise to a hope which I don’t have and which, within the limits of my condition, signifies nothing” (MS, 51; E, 1439). He goes on to observe, in a passage also dropped from the final version, “The road which leads to these facts . . . requires a great deal of effort, a very great tension, and a concerted act of will to keep one’s eyes focused on that which, for so long, had blinded me” (E, 1439—40). Is it any wonder then that he can speak of this “transfigured” consciousness as offering to man “the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference on which his greatness feeds” (MS, 52; E, 137) or that he can later counterpose both the actor (cf. MS, 82ff) and the conqueror (cf. MS, 89) to the Church? Or that he can observe that the wisdom that Sisyphus teaches “drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings”? (MS, 122).
The Existential Connection
If, however, the origins of this essay in a sensibility in rebellion against Christian absolutism are beyond question, that existential negation, with which Camus is all too often uncritically associated, hardly provided the answer for him. Quite the contrary! He finds in existentialism the same unquenchable thirst for the Absolute and an impassioned inability to come to terms with nonbelief. This connection between Christian and existentialist belief is nicely suggested by the manner in which Camus exchanges one for the other in his study of Franz Kafka.
Where, for example, the published version identifies The Castle with the “leap of faith” that is the “secret” of “the existentialist revolution” (MS, 131), an earlier manuscript had spoken instead of the secret of “Christian religion” (E, 1454). And his introduction to the belated publication of the essay on Kafka had clearly stated its aim as “defining an absurd way of thinking, that is, one delivered of metaphysical hope, by way of a criticism of several themes of existential philosophy” (E, 1415).
Initial signs of this distancing from existentialism may be gleaned from a consideration of Camus’s 1938 critique of Sartre—at a time, it should be noted, when the initial ideas for both The Stranger and The Myth were taking shape. Camus notes Sartre’s “taste for impotence . . . which leads him to choose characters who have arrived at the limits of their selves, stumbling over an absurdity they cannot overcome.” They do so, he suggests, “through an excess of liberty,” which emerges out of a fundamental rootlessness.