The Myth of Sisyphus

In Part 3, “Absurd Creation,” Camus explores creativity and its relationship to absurdity. As an author and playwright, he focuses on writing, but his ideas apply to all the arts.

He suggests that the best storytelling brings out the absurd in human life, but it does so by example, with stories of everyday people who struggle with meaninglessness and try to live worthwhile lives in the face of absurdity. What the best writers don’t do, Camus says, is directly express their concepts by moralizing, as if they were writing opinion pieces instead of fiction.

Camus writes, “Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity” (116). By this, he means that creativity thrives on multiple, often-contradictory ideas that reveal the uncertainties and ambiguities of life. A work that points directly at a theory—“In conclusion, it’s inevitable that…”—merely pontificates, insisting that it’s right and pushing people’s noses into its ideas. It’s much better if, for example, a character struggles and suffers over a dilemma, and perhaps fails to resolve it; the reader’s heart will quicken in response to that character’s suffering. That is how the lesson of the work, if there is one, best reveals itself: The audience discovers the point.

Part of absurdism’s purpose is to restore to humans a sense of dignity in the face of an uncaring universe. Nearly all of us succumb to the need for safety by submitting to social or religious creeds. When people follow rules laid down from on high, they abase themselves before the authority of the rule maker; Camus asserts that “it is essential to humiliate oneself in order to believe” (109). The test of a great author, according to Camus, is whether that writer can sustain a story that depicts the absurd and not cave in to the temptation to fix the absurdity with a cure for it in eternity.

In this respect, Camus finds most authors wanting. They give in to the lures of false certainties; like the existentialist philosophers whom Camus criticizes, they commit “philosophical suicide” by killing off the potential in their creative works.

Dostoevsky, an early developer of Existential literary themes, and one of Camus’s heroes, ultimately fails this test by retreating to a belief in an eternal afterlife as a solace for the emptiness of earthly life. Dostoevsky permits his hero Kirilov to complete his battle against absurdity with a carefully chosen, political act of suicide; other characters aren’t as lucky and must cure themselves with reassuring beliefs about the afterlife.

As he reaches this verdict, Camus seems to shake his head in disappointment; he concludes that Dostoevsky betrays his characters by preventing some them from living out their absurd conclusions. Camus retains great respect for Dostoevsky’s descriptions of human lives burdened by absurdity, and he offers him partial credit: “It is not an absurd work that is involved here, but a work that propounds the absurd problem” (112). Camus also thinks that perhaps Dostoevsky doesn’t really run from absurdity but meets it halfway by conjecturing that life is both absurd and eternal.

Part 4, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” wraps up the main essay with its depiction of a man who, punished eternally by the gods, accepts and owns his horrifically absurd fate and comes to relish it. In this way, he defies the gods’ purpose and renders them impotent. Sisyphus thus becomes the exemplar for those who accept the absurdity of life.

Denying gods or rebelling against their power is a theme that recurs in Camus’s works. In each of Camus’s writing cycles—an essay, a novel, a play—a character from Greek mythology symbolizes the topic. The first cycle, on absurdity, is represented by Sisyphus, a king who betrayed a secret about Zeus to another god in exchange for a spring to sustain his city of Corinth. In Camus’s second cycle the topic is rebellion and the mythical sponsor is the god Prometheus: In the manner of Sisyphus, Prometheus betrays the Olympians and reveals one of their secrets to humanity—in this case, the ability to make fire. Both characters are punished everlastingly for revealing forbidden information. Deities don’t like it when people discover their pettiness.

Perhaps the last word on absurdity comes from the gods themselves. In the film Troy, the warrior Achilles comments, “The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.” (Troy. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, written by David Benioff, 2004.) Camus couldn’t have put it better.