The Absurd Hero

Sisyphus is more than a name in The Iliad, but not much more – “There is a city Ephyre in the heart of Argos, pasture land of horses, and there dwelt Sisyphus that was craftiest of men …” And that’s about it. In The Odyssey, he fares a little better, occupying several lines of verse, just enough for Odysseus to witness his torment in the Land of the Dead. Along with Tityos and Tantalus, who were also tormented in Hades for their faults, he is an early exemplar of the soon-to-be-popular proposition that everyone might suffer in the afterlife for his or her sins. (So why wait?). Tityos, Homer tells us, had raped Zeus’s mistress, Lētṓ, but Sisyphus and Tantalus are punished without word of their wrongs.

Camus picks up on the “humanity” of Sisyphus, borrowing from “other traditions” the description of Sisyphus’ return from Hades to chastise his wife for obeying his instructions, so contrary to human love, in casting his body into the middle of the public square, as well as the small matter of his refusal to go back to Hades once he had enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea. But it is his unspeakable punishment, “in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing,” which makes him – “you will have already grasped,” Camus says generously – “the absurd hero.”

In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus asks how a life that has no meaning can best be lived, and considers the possibility of suicide – the “one truly serious philosophical problem” – in the context of “an absurd sensitivity” with its infirmity, ignorance, irrationality, nostalgia, and conflation of truth and falsehood. Reason is not much help here, and religion is worse than useless, but not to worry: suicide is an act of bad faith, an attempt to simply a problem by avoiding it, and “even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.” And thank goodness for that.

Camus concludes his essay with the bold metaphor of Sisyphus, the absurd hero who has won himself an appalling penalty. It is tempting to say that Camus begins to craft the metaphor as follows: “The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaseless alcoholism.” But, given that his hero comprehends his fate – “If the myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious” – perhaps it would better begin, “The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaseless sobriety.”