The Myth of Sisyphus (Albert Camus, 1942)

Camus, Albert.  The Myth of Sisyphus.
1942.  Trans. Justin O'Brien, 1955. 
Penguin Great Ideas 39.  London: Penguin, 2005.

The second of the lovely Penguin Great Ideas series I've picked up. These pocket-The cover art is by David Pearson and seems to me to be a kind of sized volumes are gorgeously presented. This one's cover is by David Pearson and is a suitably minimalist Malevich/Ad Reinhardt reduction of Sisyphus rock nested in white void threatening to crush the text below. I like.

The first of the Penguin Great Ideas I read was Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Penguin Great Ideas 56), which included not only the titular essay but also essays on Proust and Kafka. The latter is particularly interesting here because in The Myth of Sisyphus Camus holds Kafka up as a representative creator of absurd fiction.

In Benjamin's essay, "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death", recounts an early jotting where Kafka writes, 'I have experience... and I am not joking when I say it is a kind of sea-sickness on dry land" (78). A sickness brought on by an encounter with the "fluctuating nature of experience" where "every experience has 'give'; every experience blends with its opposite" surely recalls the attitude of existential philosophy, principally Antoine Roquentin's experience in Sartre's Nausea (La Nausée, 1938).

Like Sartre, Camus' existentialism follows from Heidegger when he states that anxiety is fundamental and that this anxiety (Angst for Heidegger and Kierkegaard) is generated when we situate ourselves in relation to time. Like parasites, "we live on the future",  Heidegger's futural 'thrown' projection of ourselves. Living for tomorrow changes its tone when Camus' man "takes his place in time", fully realising our temporal, that is temporary, location. At this point he

"admits the he stands on a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges he has to travel to its end. He belongs to time and, by the horror that seizes him, he recognises his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him out to reject it. The revolt of the flesh is the absurd" (12).

Again, recalling Roquentin's nauseating experience of the perplexing evanescent-yet-persistent world of objects, Camus talks of the realm "a step lower" from the mundane human condition, where

"strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is 'dense', sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us," that "at the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them" (12-13).

Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent (1989). 

But Camus' approach is breaks with existentialism as formulated, after Heidegger, by Sartre. Where Sartre would stress the vitality of the 'heroic act', that 'to be is to do', Camus' properly termed absurdism rejects that it is essential for humans to create meaning for themselves in a meaningless cosmos without saying that such constructions are impossible. Rather, the pursuit of meaning may have meaning in itself and the solution to our desire for meaning lies not in burying one's head in a solipsistic and autopoetic universe of constructed meaning but the embrace of one's constant becoming (even as one ceases to be). 'Existence precedes essence' is the maxim and, without necessity or essence, the meaning of existence may consist in a simultaneous acceptance and revolt against the Absurd.

Camus turns to Kafka in an Appendix titled "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka", and his opening gambit is to suggest that apprehension of Kafka's works is a Sisyphean task: "The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read" (120). For Camus, Kafka's characters are "inspired automata" that "provide us with a precise image of what we should be if we were deprived of our distractions and utterly consigned to the humiliations of the divine" (127). The divine, after Kierkegaard, is the absurd. That is, as illustrated by Kierkegaard's retelling of the tale of Abraham and Isaac, experience of the divine necessitates a 'leap of faith' into the religious sphere that is tantamount to a surrender to the irrational. Kafka's characters exist in a world where secular and bourgeois mythology has displaced much of the religious, so that Metamorphosis' Gregor Samsa lives by the clockwork of his day-job and familial obligations even after his transformation, worrying that he might be late and what his boss might think about his new form.

At the same time, in figuring the human condition so vividly, Kafka's characters are supremely 'lucid', they represent Kafka's embrace of the God, that is the absurd, that consumes him: "Kafka refuses his god moral nobility, evidence, virtue, coherence, but only the better to fall into his arms." However, Camus refuses Kafka the full credit of an aburd embrace. "The absurd is recognised, accepted, nd man is resigned to it, but from then on we know that it has ceased to be the absurd." This is because Kafka adopts the existential attitude that "is steeped in a vast hope" that the lucid apprehension of an absurd existence, that is a temporally bound existence devoid of inherent meaning, can somehow be transcended.

Kafka's brilliance, then, lies in falling somewhat short of the absurd, for suffering hope and nostalgia. Nevertheless, in Kafka "we are carried to the confines of human thought" for "if nostalgia is the mark of the human, perhaps no one has given such flesh and volume to these phantoms of regret" (133). Camus concludes with reference to Kafka's The Burrow, in which an 'absurdly' rational mole-like creature expends a life mapping and constructing his burrow in defence of an encroaching enemy only identified by a mysterious fluctuating and omnidirectional sound. Camus finds "at the conclusion of the vehement proceedings Kafka institutes against the universe" that "his unbelievable verdict is this hideous and upsetting world in which the very moles dare to hope" (134). The hope expressed at the conclusion of The Burrow is that the encroaching beast has paused, or that it has even failed to register the existence of the mole. This hope is absurd, while falls short of the absurd in its tacit denial of the facticity of death, which figured as the beast is indeed utterly indifferent to the presence of the mole. The contradictory last line of The Burrow states "but all remained unchanged", even as the mole's existence continues to be devoted to an unending cartographic record of its own construction even as the beast, a present absence, flickers in the unmapped space beyond lived existence.