Reading the opening pages of Albert Camus’ 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” you may be flattered to discover that, being alive, you’ve already made some good progress on the “one truly serious philosophical problem,” suicide — cheers! Still, it’s worth it to keep going, as this isn’t really an essay about suicide, at least as most of us encounter it; this is an essay about the “relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd.” The problem of the absurd begins with the insight that the universe is cold, meaningless, and indifferent. Further analysis reveals that the universe is only these things in the context of our relationship to it, as meaning isn’t something that exists materially, in matter; rather, it is something created by those thinking beings who encounter matter: it is we who make sense of things, and thus it is we who the universe is indifferent to. We let it talk, and it says nothing. Absurdity, then, is as much the universe’s silence as it is our desire to hear it speak: it “is the confrontation of this irrational [universe] and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” As far as the cold and chronically confrontational go, you could do a lot worse: our life unavoidably ending is enough to think about for all of its unavoidably limited duration, and the fact that we have all these other pains in the world, the things we choose, every single day, to inflict upon one another — the, in a word, “trouble” the suicidal have deemed “not worth enduring” — is just inefficient system design: with more time and energy, we could really be thinking about death, which is to say, of course, life.
Camus is often described as an “existentialist,” and though he rejected the label, in the colloquial sense of “having to do with being alive,” he’s at least raising some of their main concerns: death is one of those problems hard enough to solve that the only real solution is to stop considering it a problem, which is why, for a very long time, people have dealt with the absurdity of our mortality mainly by denying it, viz., by positing the existence of some sort of afterlife, whether in its religious form, where your non-matter soul goes to some sort of eternal good time/bad time situation after your time in matter gets its pass/fail grade, or in its secular form, where your achievements in life, and thus your life itself, are enshrined in a historical-canonical tradition people will continue to talk about for as long as there are people talking — bad news about both: the first isn’t real, and the second also isn’t real, though it is slightly more illusory.
Consider Sisyphus, that Greek guy, from the myths, who, Camus tells us, “Homer tells us . . . put Death in chains,” a man so legendarily crafty he actually cheated death twice, for which crimes the gods decided an eternal bad time situation — where he rolls a rock up a hill, and then the rock rolls back down the hill, so he has to roll it back up the hill, and then it rolls back down the hill, etc. — was appropriate. “There is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor,” says Camus, bringing Sisyphus out of his infinite hell and into Camus’ own times, in which many real humans were having the meaning-making projects of their lives obliterated, or at least hamstrung, by having to do a bunch of dumb bullshit, like fight in world wars, and work in factories so other people could go fight in world wars, and also do unrecognized domestic labor so other people could stay alive and go die in factory accidents and also world wars — this is why Sisyphus is “the absurd hero,” someone whose “whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing,” something which is surely true of all of us, but something that is, for all of us, just “the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.” If we want to experience the story of our life as that, it, like every story, needs an ending.
What makes this myth “tragic” is the same thing that makes our lives tragic: “its hero is conscious,” aware that, in the end, his existence is pointless. Please do remember, however, that pointlessness is something internal to us, and not a property of matter, so we can choose to imagine Sisyphus like Camus does: “superior to his fate . . . stronger than his rock.” That this “proletarian of the gods” is just like the “workman of today” only matters insofar as the worker can also turn all this dumb bullshit on its head, becoming one who also “knows himself to be the master of his days,” who can also assure himself that the “rock is still rolling,” and thus who can also “conclude[] that all is well,” that the universe is “neither sterile nor futile,” that each “atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself form a world” — in short, the worker can know “[t]he struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,” and if we, as Camus instructs us, “imagine Sisyphus happy,” it’s only so that when we go back to our own lives, we can know ourselves to be the same.
Sisyphus we can only imagine that way, though, because he’s dead. All that feel-good-about-toiling-futile-but-noble-style-in-our-cold-absurd-universe stuff is definitely available to us, as we still have a life left to live, but while our ability to make meaning in life is enabled by the condition of its not-yet-having-ended, hell’s forever, like literally forever — Sisyphus can’t die; he can’t even kill himself! Odds are your job, the life it enables, and the world that life’s a part of all sort of suck, but they can’t suck that much, as your life’s clearly full of enough meaning for you to still be here, alive, reading essays. Sisyphus thought he could outsmart death, twice, and for his sins, he got what he wanted, twice: the first time, he got it from the gods, who gave him his immortality on a permanent work visa, and the second time, he got it from Camus, who, in giving Sisyphus this new absurd afterlife, once again condemned him to eternity, that secular historical-canonical afterlife that is really no life at all: just like every other character trapped in an already completed narrative, Sisyphus is unable to ever change, stuck living out an observation Catherine Gallagher once made regarding all fictional characters, that “they are at once utterly finished and also necessarily incomplete,” that is, open to interpretation, but always living the exact same life every single time you read about them, again, and again, and again. The way in which a fictional character is “incomplete” isn’t that distinct from the way a real human is, in that, though we humans have more ways to communicate with each other than words, we never experience The Other in the same qualitative way we do ourselves, which is what makes them The Other; the way a fictional character is dead is also the way the dead are dead: they arrive to us “utterly finished,” unable to do anything but what they’ve already done. But fictional characters cannot live like we do because they have no unwritten future, and that is Sisyphus’ true punishment: to live death. It’s nice to imagine the workers of today feeling better once they’ve made their peace with rolling rocks up hills, but they’re not in actual hell, so they can revolt — a straightforward definition of consciousness is the ability to imagine the world otherwise, and a life sentence, whether that life is finite or infinite, is a way to incarcerate someone out of the ability to realize that otherness, and to make sure they know you’ve done so, in short, to deprive them of the very thing that makes them human. It sure can feel like nothing can ever change, but if you find yourself there, just think about the people for whom that is still true even when they don’t feel that way.
So, Bartleby: this is another literary guy you may have heard of, from Herman Melville’s 1856 story, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall-Street,” a character we still discuss today because he doesn’t want to do things: this is a guy who worked a lot — as his boss says, he once “seemed to gorge himself on my documents” — and then, suddenly, one day when he is asked to do things — examine a small paper, make some copies, compare some papers, share where he was born, share anything about his life, “be a little reasonable,” write, work, stop working, work, have an apartment, stay out of jail, eat, stay alive, not die — he can only, but very calmly, respond, “I would prefer not to.” As with all suicides, the people who encounter Bartleby want a reason for his actions that isn’t absurd, beginning with our narrator, his boss, a sympathetic man who is losing his mind trying to understand how Bartleby hasn’t lost his. In the narrator’s wake have followed any number of academics — professional and not — who find in Bartleby the perfect vessel for fantasies about their own time: surely, he is saying something about capitalism, in any and all of its stages, and/or/both/and maybe also desire?
I still have a bit of living to do before I can stop saying that I spent the majority of my life since puberty suicidal. The past couple of years, the periods of suicidality I have had have been brief, and I have not experienced them as something I’ve needed to solve immediately, more something like a common cold, something I just need to wait out with rest. During my recovery years, I often wondered how I would cope if someone I loved killed themself, and I ended up grieving alone, in part because of the concrete circumstances of my life, and in part because I know from spending the majority of my life since puberty suicidal how it feels to be sure your life will always be more trouble than it’s worth: I did not feel the many negative emotions that attend not understanding why someone would give up their own life, merely the single one everyone who loses someone that way also, regardless of their life, seems to feel: that of wishing they’d done more to help that person see they didn’t have to.
My having spent a lot of time suicidal is just one of the reasons I do not understand the vast majority of the people I meet, and them me, something I really don’t think matters at all: you don’t need to understand people to treat them with kindness and grace; that is, in fact, what makes it kindness and grace. A society in which Bartleby is free to be Bartleby is the society I am fighting to live in, one in which our material needs are provided for, and our right to inscrutable autonomy — provided we do not use it to harm one another — is respected. Many people I know abhor the existence of this inscrutability. That is what Bartleby is, after all: he is not merely a refusal (or, “negation”) of the world around him, though he is of course that, but a refusal that refuses to justify itself. Bartleby is, for his many analysts, the same thing fiction is in general: the nothing that can become everything — “ah,” we might say, like the narrator, “humanity!”
The communist Mao Zedong is often quoted as saying,
Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel.
Surely, this lines up with Marx’s own definition of communism:
the real movement that abolishes the present state of things.
Marxists almost never agree about anything, although they should be convinced of the need to concretely analyze concrete situations, which, depending what scale you think at, at least starting with your own, will, and should, mean thinking different things than your peers. Often, anti-communists ask communists to lay out the society they envision in positive terms, with rebukes like, “all you do is criticize, criticize, criticize,” and thus fail to see that there is a way to criticize in which the new emerges out of the concrete negation of the old, which is not the only way someone can criticize, as you will learn talking to many bad Marxists, but surely the only way something can emerge: matter can be neither created nor destroyed, I’ve heard, and as it’s sort of the only thing that’s real, it’s what we have to work with — everything else is in our heads, and the nice thing about the stuff in our heads is that we can change it.
It is also true, however, that our undeniably human ability to become otherwise is also the price we pay for the most profound types of hurt. Lately, I have been thinking quite a bit about a four-part novel by Elena Ferrante that was released in the 2010s in four parts, beginning with one entitled My Brilliant Friend. It is the story of a writer named Lenù and her oldest friend, Lila. This is Lenù’s story, in that she is the narrator, and for the thousand-some pages of this sublimely good novel, you will experience many things, among them, as many of its readers have said, a sublimely powerful portrait of “female friendship.” But this is Lenù’s story, and the way we experience her, as our narrator, is not the same way we experience Lila, who is The Other. Lenù struggles to let Lila have her inscrutable autonomy, and when she is not struggling to understand her friend, she is often using her friend to understand herself. Everyone does this, of course, and the fact that Lenù is a writer surely exacerbates it, but it’s not only writers who have had the story resonate. I definitely do this, and in discussing My Brilliant Friend with mine, it became alive for me that the work we have to do to recognize The Other’s humanity is not the kind of rock you can roll over a hill only once.
This has also meant thinking a lot about the inferno, specifically Dante’s, the final ring of which contains those who have committed what for Dante is the most serious sin: betrayal. Not pedophiles — I remember thinking, when I read that book in my high school English class — are we sure it’s not pedophiles? Also why are they trapped in ice? Well, I guess we learn from experience: at the end of Ferrante’s novel, in the epilogue, Lenù gets a letter from Lila, who she has not heard from in far too long, as Lila has disappeared; the letter contains something that indicates to Lenù that something important Lila had told her was in fact not true: I read this as a betrayal, the kind that the works of literature Lenù sometimes treats Lila as can never do, being, for all of the different ways you can change them with your powers of interpretation, frozen, the same words, every single time. It is, as far as I know, a uniquely human experience, and maybe that’s what Dante was thinking.
I have, at various points in my life, wondered if I will ever be betrayed by my oldest literary companion, someone I’ve never met, but know as Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr., whose 2009 novel Inherent Vice, his eighth, was the first art novel I ever read on my own, when I was 13, knowing nothing about him or the novel or The Novel besides the fact that that one’s cover made it look like something weed might be involved in, which appealed. This was an interesting moment of contingency, and while I cannot say it’s why I’m a writer, having never seen any of my other timelines, it is surely part of it. I have now read everything he’s ever written, most of it multiple times, which is why I do sometimes, thinking about this artist I’ve known for 17 years, still wonder what’s up with all the pedophilia: the subject gets its most explicit, most serious treatment in Gravity’s Rainbow, by far my favorite of his books, and one that has a misplaced reputation of difficulty: his first three books — V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow — don’t make a very compelling case for the positive, longterm mental health effects of trying to reduce seemingly unintelligible complexity into a single message you can “get,” which is of course how some people try to read him, ending up frustrated they don’t get whatever it is those other people who love him seem to be getting, and so fuck all those pretentious posers, some think, or maybe, more relatably, fuck me and my faulty intellectual capacities, but to be honest, I don’t understand either reaction, as I don’t think your experience of a work of art can be anything other than an experience, and I don’t understand how an experience could be anything other than something you bring your own beautifully unique complexity to, thus changing your experience of a work into something that is uniquely a blend of both you and it, something no one else could really “get,” even if you try to articulate it for them — just vibe out! Save the book report for when someone actually assigns it.
Gravity’s Rainbow is a book where a party featuring hashish hollandaise is interrupted by someone bringing a tank as their surprise plus one, a characteristically slapstick scene whose only discernible purpose in the narrative architecture of the book, as far as I can tell, is to get its protagonist — an American soldier named Tyrone Slothrop whose erections have the mysterious ability to predict the site of V2 rocket strikes — to acquire a zoot suit, something that you just have to imagine he’s got on for the next however many pages until an outfit change has him dressed like a rocket as he tries to rescue a healthy quantity of hashish from the Potsdam Conference — as the narrator says, however many pages after that, in the midst of a chimpanzee diversion, “[it] is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here.” This all sounds goofy and sublime-modernist-stoner-comedy enough, because it is, and once you’re fine reading longer sentences and dealing with shifting points-of-view and chronologies, really just surrendering your need to master the fictional worlds you encounter, you can get into the actual difficulty of the book, which is the way its thematic preoccupations with the messy fusion of capital accumulation, war, colonial violence, and sexual domination so often ends with people becoming pedophiles, or maybe just feeling free to be so publicly — well, we did all spend last year sitting with the Epstein files, so maybe we’ve learned from experience that even when everyone knows there’s an insane pedophile cabal running the world, it doesn’t do much about the fact that they’re still running the world.
A friend of mine once described the experience of reading Thomas Pynchon as that of encountering a man who had descended into the historical archives and emerged insane. I suppose this is how it goes for many a prophet, even the fictional ones, like the sentient lightbulb that appears in Gravity’s Rainbow, Byron the Bulb, whose 15-some page interlude features a failed lightbulb revolution and Byron’s retreat into sagelike impotence. This is just one of many self-reflexions I detect in Pynchon’s work, a man so committed to the idea of fiction, he decided to become one. Very few pictures of him exist, and very little about his life is known, as he is famously “reclusive,” although as Pynchon himself once said, having called into CNN after a reporter tracked him down in the 90s, “[r]ecluse is a code word generated by journalists . . . meaning ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters,’” which feels borne out by his cameos on The Simpsons, or him reportedly being the crossing guard at his kid’s school in Manhattan, or having written the liner notes for a band he learned of through the drummer, his accountant’s son.
He is an author we can only know through the idiosyncrasies and fixations he chooses to show us: pedophilia; interesting names (e.g., Reverend Cherrycoke, McClintic Sphere, Scott Oof); smoking weed; surfing; surf music; multiple verses of his own song lyrics; lots of foods; lewd limericks; unconscionable puns; an astoundingly impressive number of ways to partake in intra-white-people racism (e.g., “goombah grenade”); astrology; tarot; TV; movies; kaijus; a somewhat understandable fixation on erection comedy, undermined by an unintelligible fascination with the word hardon; the Herero genocide, which his first book, 1963’s V., helped bring into “the discourse;” the complexities of American race politics, and not always using the words you might want him to; the phrase “and so forth;” and so forth — he is an author so overwhelmingly idiosyncratic that many find that his humanity, whatever you make of it, obliterates that of his characters, the ones, James Wood, for example, describes as “flat,” characters made to “dance for a moment on stage” before Pynchon decides to “whisk[] them away” and introduce some other clown who will “vibrate vividly on the novelistic stage.” Wood says his characters “reveal themselves only in speech,” presumably because they are rarely prone to the sorts of contemplative thought so rampant in many a bourgeois novel, but he then goes on to say that Pynchon’s “novels are manic factories of plot,” presumably full of things that might speak louder than words? And can’t we humans like both bourgeois thinking and proletarian action, maybe some sort of dialectical synthesis of the two? Pynchon’s characters have always felt very real to me: they are often kind, a little-to-very spaced out, likewise funny, and generally funloving, which is me and most of my friends — no doubt, we should all be contemplating harder sometimes, but I don’t really think being silly precludes anyone’s claim to humanity.
I also typically find a lot of pathos in the Pynchonick, because for all their narrative indestructibility — their ability to traverse continents, survive wars, and endure violence of cartoonish proportions — the only thing that ever seems to hurt them is love, which is to say, the people they do: man or woman, the Pynchonick hero is often yearning for someone who is not really there, an ex-partner or an old flame that left them and disappeared somewhere — as happens to, for example, Benny Profane of V.; Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow; Zoyd Wheeler of Vineland, Doc Sportello of Inherent Vice, and, sort of, Maxine Tarnow of Bleeding Edge — or maybe they just died, as happened to the lovers of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 and Charles Mason in Mason & Dixon. Some of my friends have died too, but the ones that are still here pretty much all live for the same reason: as Pynchon famously put it: “They are in love. Fuck the war.”
Perhaps more than anything else, Pynchon loves an alternative: his novels are replete with places like Gravity’s Rainbow’s The Zone, alternative spaces, communities, histories, postal networks, and whatever else that can emerge in the wake of profound historical upheaval, alternatives that are often populated with various competing factions and groups, things like Gravity’s Rainbow’s aptly named The Counterforce. Many hyperbolic descriptions have attended Pynchon’s work over the years, and I will volunteer that I know of no author as deeply committed to the art of being unemployed: Pynchon himself worked as a technical writer for a few years, something which he evidently hated enough to feel the need to write at least one world-historical novel to avoid ever having to do again. Of the many characters mentioned in the previous paragraph, the ones that are employed tend to have jobs that are transparently narrative devices, jobs like being a private investigator, the job where you uncover plots.
Charles Mason is the narratively employed fictionalization of a guy who made a line with his buddy Dixon, which you may know from history and maps. The back third of Pynchon’s novel about them is essentially a sitcom interwoven with harrowing meditations on colonialism and its attempts to subordinate the world under the type of Reason that is profitable. There, he positions precolonial America as the alternative to whatever we’ve got now, and this is something Pynchon often does with other non-white social entities, particularly Black ones, making him surely a part of the broad lineage of white American writers identified by Toni Morrison in her work Playing in the Dark, who find in Blackness a projection site for all the quandaries of whiteness. One of the few essays Pynchon has published was 1966’s “A Journey Into the Mind of Watts,” where he offers the following diagnosis:
L.A.’s racial sickness is the co-existence of two very different cultures: one white and one black… The white culture is concerned with various forms of systematized folly–the economy of the area in fact depending on it–the black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites have mostly chosen–and can afford–to ignore. The two cultures do not understand each other, though white values are displayed without let-up on black people’s TV screens, and though the panoramic sense of black impoverishment is hard to miss from atop the Harbor Freeway, which so many whites must drive at least twice every working day. Somehow it occurs to very few of them to leave at the Imperial Highway exit for a change, go east instead of west only a few blocks, and take a look at Watts. A quick look. The simplest kind of beginning. But Watts is country which lies, psychologically, uncounted miles further than most whites seem at present willing to travel.
He goes on to say that
Watts lies impacted in the heart of this white fantasy. It is, by contrast, a pocket of bitter reality. The only illusion Watts ever allowed itself was to believe for a long time in the white version of what a Negro was supposed to be. But with the Muslim and civil-rights movements that went, too.
At a very high level, Gravity’s Rainbow can be read as a book about a clueless white man being whisked about the world by various forces who believe him to be the key to understanding everything; he literally falls to pieces as various other counterforces, including a group of revolutionary Hereros, emerge. I imagine that much of Pynchon’s writing comes out of the experience of the 60s, that brief glimmer of another world, crushed — this, at any rate, seems to be what animates Inherent Vice, what has always felt to me like his most sentimental novel.
Or maybe I’m just projecting: Inherent Vice is the novel I feel most sentimental about, and it’s my novels that have been in part animated by my experience as a witness-participant in Black rebellion: in the summer of 2020, we were a few months into COVID, and we had already seen how much of the world could be restructured on a dime, so long as the restructuring preserved a few key interests: capital could still accumulate, and its stewards, the police, could still murder indiscriminately. I was working as an editor of technical books at the time, and having gone remote, I was finally making good progress on a novel I had already been carrying in my head for the better part of three years; in that moment, though, I was looking at tweets, and one indicated to me that there was a spontaneous protest happening downtown to express how we all felt about the cops having indiscriminately murdered George Floyd. This protest was unlike any other I had been to, in that it was unplanned: one or two hundred people in the streets, none of whom I knew, moving from one place to another, in the general direction of the highway, where we were soon to find a line of police. I — a bookish white nerd — had no idea what was going to happen, something that ended up feeling like the dialectical synthesis of exhilarating and terrifying. What I learned from that experience, in which we simply dispersed, is that it is one thing to have read many canonical Marxist texts, and know in your brain, as I did then, that in the world of words, anything is possible — it is another thing entirely to feel that alive in your forearms.
“Let me repeat,” as Camus does, that “all this has been said over and over.” Novelists tend not to deliver any “messages” most people haven’t received elsewhere: life’s hard, find what matters, be kind, fuck the war, love, and so forth. It’s just that novels deliver them in the ways only novels can, which, when you’re in one of those pinches where you’ve run out of decade-long weeks of world-historical upheaval, might just be good enough, if you let it be. In college, I often went to one very generous professor’s office hours to be openly insane (or, “unmask”) about books, something he also seemed to enjoy; once, after I told him I was reading the only Pynchon novel I hadn’t read yet, his longest, Against the Day, I answered that professor’s question of how it was, with,
Well, you know, it’s more Pynchon,
to which he, laughing, replied,
Oh, so you’re a real freak,
which, yeah man (“gagged!”). Thinking about that interaction years later, I finally understood why Pynchon’s an author I always come back to, because even when I get nothing else out of reading him, I get to hang out in his worlds: me; the assorted fools; some evil assholes, making things hard for them; and our avuncular god, the Pynch, doing much the same, just with more love — that’s something art can do too, I guess, be that kind of joint.
I generally find works of music to be more uncomplicated hangs than novels, and when I was 16, I held the David Bowie song “Space Oddity” in reserve for when I wanted to feel really suicidal, something it could consistently do for me, though in a less embodied, if more widely available way than my first choice, my shower. It’s a song about an astronaut, Major Tom, who’s floating up there in space, music triumphantly soaring but gadgets failing, meaning, as Ground Control informs him, more or less implicitly, though, of course, he knows, he’s dying soon, and so thus already sort of dead — pretty much what it felt like. But if I thought myself Major Tom then, it was only because the life on the ground I wanted — the life of un-self-conscious kindness lived by Inherent Vice’s Doc Sportello, the confused, surprisingly industrious stoner who, at the end of the day, just wants to help his community of confused, sometimes less industrious stoners, and all the other people in his life he loves, even if he doesn’t know what to do with the fact that some of them badly hurt him — was a life I thought myself too suicidal to ever have: I thought I’d already learned from experience that I was a person unable to think about anything besides his own thinking, something I didn’t understand then to be a survival strategy, just further proof that I was irredeemably evil, and that I needed to die. I have learned from new experiences that I am often wrong about many things, especially my thinking, but my latest survival delusion, that of being, behind all the jokes, a Serious Woman who has earned her clarity and self-possession, a delusion I’ve clung to this past year, as I’ve tried to build a new life out of the mess of my past one, has also outlived its use: feeling generally broken and lost, I’ve found myself in a new sort of adolescence, no longer suicidal, but otherwise, not so far from that 16-year-old boy sitting parked outside the Half-Price Books on Lamar, sobbing to “Space Oddity” and sure he’s failed at something for doing so, which is fine: it’s my life; the only thing that makes it special to me is that it’s the only one I have to live.
I try not to let myself indulge in stupid fantasies, especially the transsexual kind, but lately, for the first time in almost a decade, I’ve let myself think about the wisdom I might impart to my dumb teenage self, given an impossible opportunity: would it have helped him to know that he was just a 30-year-old gay divorcée, with a lot more suicidal self-loathing and an unfortunate haircut? I doubt it. But fantasies are for the living, and when I imagine appearing in his life to sagely explain the symmetry of our suffering, it does help me to imagine him, not so implausibly, saying,
okay? and you’re the dipshit who decided to go to space!