A rebel against the absurdity of life

By Jug Suraiya

Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; i can’t be sure.” This is the compelling opening of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel, The Outsider , and they represent the gauntlet that the writer flung in the face of what he saw as the essential absurdity of human existence.

Born in Algiers in 1913, Camus moved to Paris in the period between the devastation of World War I and that of World War II, which fomented what TS Eliot called the ‘Death Wish’ of Western civilisation.

Camus sought to relay the foundations of a new way of thought and living to replace the physical and psychological ruins of two watershed episodes that had laid waste both to the consolation of religious belief and the reassuring rationales of philosophy.

Camus saw himself as an architect of a moral affirmation in the face of an uncaring universe. The problem that lay before him was the ethical counterpart of the physics paradox: What happens when an irresistible force encounters an immovable object?

For Camus, the irresistible force was humanity’s unquenchable thirst for meaning in an immovable scheme of things in which dissolution and death were the only inevitable outcomes; that is the absurdity of the human condition.

In The Myth of Sisyphus , published in the same year as The Outsider , Camus drew upon the Greek legend of Sisyphus who incurred the wrath of Zeus for twice cheating Thanatos, the god of death. The enraged Olympian condemned Sisyphus to eternal life in which he would roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again, forever and ever.Camus portrayed Sisyphus as the archetypal “absurdist hero” who, instead of longing for oblivion through suicide or seeking salvation by divine intercession, through affirming his life of torment turned the agony of existence into the joy of sheer being.

Camus concludes: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Camus rejected nihilism, the belief in believing nothing, as he did religious faith which mirage-like recedes into an unreachable horizon.
Camus’s key to the solution of the absurdist paradox, the search for meaning in a meaningless world, was revolt, an unconditional commitment to permanent rebellion against injustice in all forms, whether political, ideological, or the blindness of random fate.

Meursault, the protagonist of The Outsider , rebels against the platitudes of social conventions, opiates that dull consciousness into the acquiescence of conformity.

Branded an outcast by society for his seeming lack of human sensibility, as evidenced by the opening lines of the narrative, Meursault is sentenced to death for the subsequent killing, more by happenstance than by design, of a man who had assaulted his companion.

With an equanimity worthy of Sisyphus, Meursault contemplates his execution with calm acceptance, “I was happy then, and i am happy now.”

The Outsider of his own story , Camus affirmed his solidarity with all humanity by his reinterpretation of the self-centric Cartesian ‘i think, therefore i am’, as the universalism of ‘i revolt, therefore we exist.’
What better way to authenticate one’s own existence than by authentifying the existence of each and every one of us.