Camus and Hemingway: Suicide, Sisyphus, and the Leopard
Ben Stoltzfus, University of California, Riverside
Should a person commit suicide or not? To die or not to die, that is the question Albert Camus asks in The Myth of Sisyphus. His essay relates not only to Ernest Hemingway’s life, it also generates answers that even the leopard of Kilimanjaro might understand.
To begin with, Camus believes that the world is absurd, that we are born by chance, live by encounter, and die by accident. Although we crave happiness on earth and immortality after death, the disproportion between desire and fulfillment defines the absurd. An absurd world is a world without necessity, without purpose, and without essence. Whatever meaning it has, we ourselves have to provide it. Existentialists believe that, because there is no a priori morality, men’s choices and actions fill the void that was left by the disappearance of God. However, says Camus, man’s forlornness should not be construed as a source of despair. On the contrary, God’s death should be viewed not as tragedy but as a liberation, and it is this newly found freedom that gives men and women the strength to invent themselves. In an absurd world all choices are possible, even suicide.
In Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, Kirilov is obsessed with the idea of freedom and, in due course, he kills himself in order to prove that God does not exist. By philosophizing his suicide he believes he is liberating himself from the chains of God’s commandments. He dies in order to prove his freedom, and Camus views Kirilov’s reasoning as an important prelude to the absurd. Henceforth, says Camus, no one need duplicate Kirilov’s suicide.
It is ironic, therefore, that Hemingway, after leading a full life of writing, travel, and adventure, should have taken his own life, a gesture that some critics construe as weakness, cowardice, and a mortal sin. The flip side is that killing, oneself included, as a deliberate choice, requires the kind of strength and courage that only a seasoned professional can muster. Hemingway was a consummate hunter and he liked to kill. That, and his experience as a young man on the Italian front during World War I, had brought him face to face with death. He knew what death was, he had written extensively about it in Death in the Afternoon, a book on the corrida (the bullfight), also an extended meditation on death as a ritual performance that is both mythic and artistic. The bullfighter, says Hemingway, is an artist, and his performance is to be admired for its elegance, courage, and precision. It is not a bloodletting, as so many uninformed spectators allege, but a dramatic confrontation of life and death, a reenactment of the most elemental aspect of the human condition, namely, that death regulates life. The corrida, says Hemingway, has a message for all men: fear can be overcome, cowardice is odious, craft is everything, and, when allied with courage, the performance can ennoble life . Hemingway’s suicide has to be viewed in this context.
However, Camus says that it matters little whether we die at twenty or at fifty. Why not commit suicide right away and be done with it? And yet, although suicide is theoretically possible because in the context of the absurd there are no sanctions to proscribe it, Camus rejects it. And he does so because the idea of the absurd leads him to postulate three premises: freedom, passion, and rebellion. In the final analysis suicide is redundant because it destroys all future choices, it negates the individual’s emerging passion for life, and it contradicts a person’s nascent rebellion. Camus wants to exercise a person’s freedom, he realizes that he loves the world passionately, he feels free to create himself, and he is in revolt against all forces that debase human beings. Death in its various disguises dehumanizes, and suicide represents an alliance with the absurd that he is now rebelling against. Instead of concluding that the absurd leads to nihilism, Camus believes that it is an invitation to live. Freedom and passion color life with meaning, hope reappears on the horizon, and purpose is a mountain that invites ascent.
