While this post isn’t really a continuation of my recent looks at comedy, anger, and gratitude, I think it could fit well enough with them to be included in the discussion. Base-covering over!
I’ll admit, I’ve never been thrilled by Albert Camus. By the cover of my copy of The Stranger, sure, with its photograph of mod theater types in mime faces and striped hats and lots of eyeliner. But otherwise, there’s just something disconcerting, if not unadmirable, in his attempts to, for example, rid suicide “of its emotional content and know its logic and its integrity.”1 Yes, I respect his attempts to address and define and respond to absurdity, to acknowledge the ways in which we slave away at pointless tasks in order to keep ourselves alive, and to try and figure out how to beat life at its own cruel game of not giving you what you want or need, not even a convincing myth of meaning or purpose to sustain you. His demand, though, to respond to the irrational universe with a rebellious scorn “devoid of hope”2—flipping the cosmos the bird by refusing to kill oneself when faced with an irredeemably meaningless reality—has the harsh something of one of those tough-guy personas that would sneer at the suggestion that you could get respectably through life without embracing any form of belligerence. He’d probably criticize your restaurant or reading choices, too, as pitiful.
My distaste could just have something to do with the tenor of the era and of many of the luminaries who made their way into the public sphere along with Camus. It may be due to the simple coincidence of their shared time on this earth that the philosopher’s take on the absurd boils down for me to his contemporary Dylan Thomas’s demand not to accept one’s inevitable death, and instead to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”3 At some point, that rebellion and rage feel not like a principled means of dealing with the “confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world,” but just a sad, if somehow also stony, tantrum.4 Yes, a solid chunk of the twentieth century was terrible—and yes, Camus, at least, faced up to that fact by striving for a “clear vision” that often led to risky political commitments, including participation in the Resistance during World War II.5 It’s unfair of me, then, essentially to dismiss his thoughts as bullish bombast.
But all of his understandable seriousness (how else to react, of course, in the face of genocide and war?) doesn’t seem to have room for laughter of any kind, especially not at himself, but also not at those small ways in which the absurd manifests itself—the dumb thing we said on a date, the tripping over nothing in a room packed with important people, the moments where we can do nothing but be overtaken by a blessed fit of giggles in a lecture hall. Thinking about the absurd through such serious, offended eyes probably doesn’t allow a person to recognize how the most life-giving, life-validating moments are the ones in which you fail, and fail with grand stupidity, thanks to happenstance or your own clumsiness—to the irrationality of the world.
What a relief, then, to have found Thomas Nagel taking issue with the grand master’s very serious ideas, recognizing and yet unoffended by the everyday “conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality… as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.”6 These things happen, Nagel says, and it’s not because the universe is devoid of a transcendent being, or is out to get us, or provides no key or guide to where meaning lies or what it is. And nor is it that our failure or refusal to beat against our invisible cages in grand protest signals our not taking life or its injustices seriously. By the mere virtue of our being (self-)conscious creatures and having to keep ourselves alive by the decisions we make, he says, “We take ourselves seriously whether we lead serious lives or not,” whether we have or feel like trying to find an ultimately good answer for why we do the things we do, or are interested in the things we find interesting, or acknowledge the situation with an ironic smirk and then go about the business of surviving.7 We know, if we “step back” and recognize how futile in the grand scheme of things are most (or all) of the things that we do, we’ll still keep on doing them, since we can’t do otherwise: “Consequently the absurdity of our situation derives not from a collision between our expectations and the world, but from a collision within ourselves.”8
It's something close to this understanding of absurdity that I see in Kjersti Skomsvold’s Monsterhuman, an autobiographical account of more than a decade spent getting through debilitating bouts of chronic fatigue syndrome while also growing into adulthood and becoming a writer. But Oprah-esque tale of apple-cheeked victory this is not; it is, in fact, frequently hilarious, one of those rare books that had me laughing out loud.
Yes, Skomsvold describes how her seventeen-year-old self suddenly went from skiing and soccer-playing and running about to being flattened on a couch or bed, forced to try and rest and stay calm when she was unable even to get up and walk. Relationships grow more difficult and sometimes fail; the sense of having no future at all is a recurring threat. But while recuperating in a nursing home, one of her fellow residents suggests that Skomsvold write—and over the course of the next few years, first on Post-It notes and then all the way through to publication and a return to school, that’s what she does, learning how to live with her body and the ways in which it betrays her.
The book is neither self-glorifying tale of triumph nor plea for pity—but instead, has the reader somehow feeling the full range of it all, doing what a good book should do: soldering a connection with a stranger who feels like she’s welcoming you into her life simply to share. And sharing means being privy to the unglamorous moments, the embarrassing or disgusting moments. Moments from which the reader doesn’t turn away—not because of the fascination of seeing, from your safe spot, someone’s freakish life crash and burn, but because you’re laughing with that poor person, and laughing in recognition not of the particular ways in which a human being can be humiliated, but of the general way in which humiliation befalls us all. The book works, and works as more than a confessional or glimpse into an illness, because of its laughter that recognizes how absurdly life can derail just about everything and everyone. Without that laughter, there’s no authentic invitation, and no possibility of eliciting anything other than pity or exasperation, maybe shuddering admiration. In other words, we might just be delving right into to the beauties and consolations of comedy.
Witness Skomsvold having to explain to a journalist why her bottom lip is ridden with blisters. It’s nothing more than the result of having had a cavity filled—and then ignoring the dentist’s orders to hold off from eating for a while:
I ate more than I have for a long time, sitting there outside of the lecture hall. Half of my face was paralyzed and I sat there eating… nodding at passersby as I tried to read poems…. When I walked to the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror before class, I saw the blood running own over my chin, from my chewed-up lip. I had been sitting there, munching on myself, smiling falsely to people while I sat there eating my own face.9
There’s more, though, than well-delivered accounts of blunders. Along with and inseparable from the laughs is an open recognition of, if never loud insistence upon, our mortality, and the potentially unjust ways in which we’re forced to confront it. From the unexpected death of a friend or the knowledge that Skomsvold’s thirsty great-grandfather met his end when reaching for the can of lye instead of water—not to mention the disappointments involved in one’s own body or others’ reactions to it—there’s no shying away here from the ways in which the universe can hand you your fate with apparent indifference or hostility. But none of these situations, or existence in general, is approached as either inherently meaningless or meaningful; there’s neither a why-me railing against the universe, nor bitterness at having to spend the better part of one’s youth in bed. There’s disappointment or anger at how people treat each other, certainly—but also a striving to use that anger without turning heartless or resentful, as evidenced in a discussion about two writers: “Thomas Bernhard hated with love. [Elfriede] Jelinek hates with hate. I want to hate with love…. I want to be just as courageous as Jelinek. Though, words like cowardly and courageous don’t mean anything really. A human is a human, sometimes a hero, sometimes a coward, and in both cases incapable of thinking.”10
Camus would surely have been dissatisfied with Skomsvold’s assertions about the incapacity to think, and even more with her mere desire to get well—instead of spitting at the empty universe while doing so, or maybe even refusing to try and get better out of sheer spite. But there’s also no positive-psychological cheerleading going on here. The protagonist does talk herself into walking to the mailbox, or going out with friends, even while recognizing the sort of self-delusion it involves. If getting better can be achieved by using stupid mantras, mantras that she’ll later get sick of and then be embarrassed to remember writing down, Skomsvold’s still not ashamed by the struggle, and is still, even by her brother’s amazed account, not bitter. There’s no shaking of fists—just a determination, even beyond the illness and into new, adult-level relationships, that difficult situations and people will come your way, that you’ll make an ass out of yourself in handling all of them, and that the hard work of living into who you really want to be is the only work to do. And all the time, you keep at it, even with the recognition that “Every kind of determination” is not, as Camus would have it, hopeless—but that it’s ultimately “pointless” all the same.11
Favoring irony over rebellion as a way of dealing with our lot, Nagel ended up seeing Camus’s insistence that we meet an absurd world with “defiance or scorn” as “romantic and self-pitying. Our absurdity,” Nagel said,
warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance. At the risk of falling into romanticism by a different route, I would argue that absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics…. it results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation.12
I get the sense that Skomsvold, or at least the protagonist representing her in this book, might agree. That seeing absurdity as something shameful, as an injustice to be met with scornful rebellion, isn’t the way to go. It’s instead recognizing how owning up to the ways in which we’re caught up and out by our inevitable failures and slip-ups and limitations in general might actually be the, or an, unparalleled source of connection. Each of us is here for the briefest of times, and each of us will get tripped up and disappointed. But maybe the point, even if we have to declare it as one that we create out of nothing that can ultimately be justified by any transcendent source, is to come together, even support each other, over that fact. Not that we embrace it as the new romantic cause against which Nagel cautioned; not that we try to foster situations in which we end up looking or feeling like idiots, whether alone or together—but rather that we see each other’s common humanity in those goofy or disconcerting or downright disturbing and often unresolved or badly handled instances, and hence, feel and maybe even actually end up less apart from the world, maybe even less alone. Less prone to erect or maintain more barriers that give us something else to be afraid of or rail about and against, when we’ve got plenty already to deal with. Or as Skomsvold asserts, maybe even getting to the point of recognizing that “In the end, all of those things that we fear turn into something to laugh about.”13
Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, transl. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 17.
Camus, 19.
Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” available from poets.org at https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night.
Camus, 10.
Camus, 8.
Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” The Journal of Philosophy 68.20: 718. Available from https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Absurd%20-%20Thomas%20Nagel.pdf. For a more detailed comparison between Camus and Nagel, check out Casey Scott, “Life is Absurd! Exploring Albert Camus’ Rebellious Philosophy,” The Collector, 9 August 2021, https://www.thecollector.com/albert-camus-rebellious-philosophy/.
Nagel, 719.
Step back: Nagel, 719, passim. Collision within ourselves: Nagel, 722.
Kjersti Skomsvold, Monsterhuman, transl. Becky L. Crook (Victoria, TX/McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), 295–96.
Skomsvold, 364.
Skomsvold, 261. I did grab this book out of my to-be-read pile partly because I wanted to see how one member of the post-Tor Ulven generation of Norwegian writers would emotionally approach chronic illness, as opposed to Ulven’s general pessimism—and if the Wikipedia page that cites a Norwegian article I can’t read much of is correct, Ulven’s own physical ailments apparently contributed to his suicide. I imagine Ulven would have had some choice words had Camus attempted a mental health intervention or rousing speech about the grandeur of rebellion.
Nagel, 726–27.
Skomsvold, 448.
Thank you, Katy. Well done.
Good words, Katy. Thanks.