Sisyphus has become Camus’s metaphor for twentieth-century man–for all those who persevere despite the knowledge that everybody is mortal. Sisyphus rolls his rock upward knowing that purpose, dignity, and happiness are the fruits of endeavor. He has chosen his cause (the rock) and he is committed to it. Despite all difficulties he pushes upward toward the summit, aware that when he reaches the top the rock will roll down into the valley and he will have to begin the ascent all over again (MS 193-98). Such is the inevitable labor of human beings and of their successive generations. Some individuals, however, reach higher peaks than others, and the Nobel prize was Camus’s reward for his efforts as it was Hemingway’s. Not all men are equally endowed although many are insufficiently rewarded. Still, it is the effort that counts and it is the struggle toward the heights that gives meaning to life in a world without purpose. The absurd is not an obstacle, it is a catalyst. We live in a world in which death is the arbiter of life: we create meaning, we invent ourselves, and we act out the dramas of our existence. For writers, the theater of language, be it comedy or tragedy, determines success or failure.
Although Hemingway does not develop his thinking as systematically as Camus does, his life and career illustrate many of the ideas that Camus explores in The Myth of Sisyphus. The leopard epigraph for The Snows of Kilimanjaro is Hemingway’s metaphor of the writer committed to his craft. Although the epigraph states that no one knows what the leopard was seeking at that altitude, Hemingway’s writings suggest that he knows exactly what the tropic presence of the leopard signifies. Indeed, there is a connection in Hemingway’s mind between hunting and writing. In Green Hills of Africa there is a clear link between hunting big game and literary success. The fourth and fifth dimensions to which he alludes represent the summit of writerly achievement because he is as hungry for artistic perfection as the leopard is for prey. It is only the symbolic altitude of Kilimanjaro (the House of God) or its sudden blizzards that can interfere with the sought-after prize. The skill it takes to shoot a kudu or, as in The Old Man and the Sea, land the biggest marlin is not unlike the craft of fiction: the bigger the prize, the better you appear to be, and your self-esteem goes up accordingly. In Hemingway’s mind the analogy between hunting and writing is evident, and it is not by chance, in Green Hills of Africa, that he juxtaposes hunting and achieving a fourth and fifth dimension, a form of writing that is “much more difficult than poetry” (GHA 27).
Ultimately, the leopard’s death and Hemingway’s death are reminiscent of the effort that Sisyphus puts into rolling his rock toward the summit. In order to survive the writer must write just as the leopard must catch its prey. We know the high premium that Hemingway placed on achievement. His personal and public dignity depended on recognition and success. Like Gustave Flaubert he believes that producing a work of Art is like climbing a high mountain. The artist ascends, persevering, even if it means dying in the snow, near the summit, “in the white pain of desire.” Flaubert also compares his writing style, prose particularly, to Sisyphus rolling his stone (C447). The irony in The Snows of Kilimanjaro is that Harry has gone to pot as a writer. He is nowhere near the summit and he dies on the plain because he did not take the necessary field precautions that would enable him to survive. He goes to Africa to work the fat off his soul, but his lack of attention to detail (mechanical failure of the truck, thorn scratch that turns gangrenous) eventually kills him. As Harry lies dying, reminiscing about the highlights of his past, Hemingway transforms Harry’s failure into his own success. Harry, like the leopard, may ascend to the House of God in death but Hemingway gets there in life, and it is this real and, at the same time, metaphorical achievement that allows Hemingway, the knowledgeable African hunter, to triumph as a writer. He knows what he is seeking at the higher elevations and how to get the prize.
Indeed, Hemingway’s life and work are a testimonial to his ability, endurance, and tenacity. Jake Barnes perseveres despite his impotence. Frederic Henry survives despite the war. Francis Macomber regains his courage. Robert Jordan remains committed to Maria and the cause for which he is fighting. The old man of the sea demonstrates that, despite his age and bad luck, he is still El Campeón. We could argue that Hemingway’s female protagonists are less fortunate or less admirable than their male counterparts, but the fact remains that selected personae embody praiseworthy characteristics: courage, nobility, skill, endurance, fidelity, and faith–traits that are manifest against all odds, even when a man ends up with nothing. In his life and in his work Hemingway had explored and come to terms with the three premises of the absurd (freedom, passion, and rebellion), he had endured as long as he could, and he was “fraid a nothing,” not even death. Like many of his characters, Hemingway knew what death was and, like them, he had done his share of killing. The old man of the sea’s determination to kill the marlin despite “his power and his beauty” echoes the tone in Green Hills of Africa where the highest satisfactions derive from the shooting of the biggest and most beautiful animals. Hemingway’s entire oeuvre is an ongoing dialogue with death, and he and his killers usurp the role of God (or nature) because, whenever they kill, they assert the power of man.
This Nietzschean striving for the Übermensch, when coupled with the idea that “man is a rope … stretched across an abyss,” manifests a human will that opposes the existential void. Life may be nada but the will to confront the nothings that dehumanize it is an important dimension of Hemingway’s code hero. Hemingway is fascinated by death and his work is one continuous dramatization of it. The corrida in The Sun Also Rises and in Death in the Afternoon stages death as spectacle, life as tragedy, and the matador–man the artist–as the mediator between the two. Hemingway also compares writing with the corrida. Courage, skill, and endurance are the attributes of the bullfighter as well as the artist, and the writer capable of bringing his life’s work to term manifests all three. Art, says André Malraux, is a revolt against fate because, after the writer’s death, only the voices of art remain–“the voices of silence” that speak through the work that survives.
Although death is an important leitmotif in Green Hills of Africa, the landscape is equally significant. Hemingway loved Africa and he felt at home there, “and where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go”. There was game, plenty of birds, and he liked the natives. “That, and writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing…. That and ski-ing”. The fact that Hemingway’s heightened sense of well-being depends in part on killing animals underscores the Nietzschean motif of the superman. But killing aside, Hemingway’s primal contact with nature is an essential part of the “moveable feast” that regulates his pleasures. The natural world is an important trope for Hemingway and Camus, and both authors use nature as an objective correlative: their landscapes situate characters not only in space but also in time where beliefs, attitudes, and values are defined.
Fishing, hunting, skiing, and boating occupy Hemingway and his protagonists in significant ways. To participate in these activities is to eschew the city, society, and the mundane in order to engage in pleasures that can only be fulfilled when in touch with mountains, hills, valleys, plains, rivers, and seas. Although not as consummate a sportsman as Hemingway (Camus was a star soccer player), Camus’s work is nonetheless marked by lyrical passages in which the sea, the sun, and the earth can rejuvenate a person because they engender meaningful contact not only with nature but also with the inner self.
Although the environment is an elemental force in the works of both writers, its corollary is death. Hemingway and Camus use the landscape and death contrapuntally in order to emphasize first one and then the other. Their themes oscillate between the pleasure principle and reality. However, the pleasures of nature and the specter of death are often conjoined, and this melding enriches their symbolic language with layers of ambivalence.
There is arguably less ambivalence in Camus’s writing than in Hemingway’s. Indeed, Camus’s categorical rejection of suicide is theoretically at odds with Hemingway’s death by suicide. Nonetheless, despite this fundamental difference, certain themes in their oeuvre are so similar as to belie the opposition. The “moveable feast” syndrome, using death as its backdrop, is an element they both share